Cristina Ampatzidou | University of Groningen (original) (raw)
Papers by Cristina Ampatzidou
AMSTERDAM CREATIVE INDUSTRIES NETWORK resulted from a cooperation between One Architecture and Th... more AMSTERDAM CREATIVE INDUSTRIES NETWORK resulted from a cooperation between One Architecture and The Mobile City Foundation. The project investigates the opportunities of digital media technologies for the empowerment of citizens and other stakeholders in a democratic process of citymaking. It also explores the shift in roles of and relationships between governments, (design) professionals and citizens in this process. The first contours for this project were laid out by One Architecture and The Mobile City during the Metropool NL workshop organized by the Deltametropool Society in 2012, resulting in the publication Eindhoven, Hackable World City. This was followed by an 'embedded researcher' project hosted at the University of Amsterdam and One Architecture and funded by the Creative Industries Research Centre Amsterdam, with contributions from Utrecht University. In 2014, funding was received from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for both a KIEM-exploration through Utrecht University and a Creative Industries research project hosted at
IGI Global eBooks, Oct 7, 2022
Theintegrationoflearninggoalswithgamemechanicsinseriousgamesusedinurbanandspatial planningprocess... more Theintegrationoflearninggoalswithgamemechanicsinseriousgamesusedinurbanandspatial planningprocesseshasthepotentialtoenablegamedesignersandplannerstocreategameswith narrativestightlyalignedtoparticularprocessesandleadtoincreasedlearningoutcomes.Thisstudy presentstheresultsfromtestingEnergySafari,aseriousgamefortheenergytransitionintheprovince of Groningen, and empirically associates specific game mechanics with learning events, derived fromplayers'reports.Theresearchisbasedontheanalysisofpost-playquestionnaires.Play-testing EnergySafariillustratesthatdifferentlearningeventscanbetriggeredbythesamegamemechanics, anobservationwhichcanbeappliedinseriousgamedesigntofacilitateplayerswithdifferentlearning needsandstyles.Inaddition,playtestingtoevaluatethelearningperformanceofseriousgames shouldbeintegratedinthegamedesignprocess.However,toachievelastinglearningandactionable knowledge,seriousgamesshouldbeusedcomplementarilywithothercivicparticipationmethods.
a) University Groningen, Department of Planning & Environment, 9747AD Groningen, The Netherlands ... more a) University Groningen, Department of Planning & Environment, 9747AD Groningen, The Netherlands b) University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Research Group Playful Interactive Environments, 4323 Hagenberg, Austria c) Hasselt University, Architectuur en Kunst, 3590 Dipenbeek, Belgium d) Green City Lab Vienna, 1010 Vienna, Austria e) Vienna University of Technology, Department of Spatial Planning, Vienna, Austria
Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2022 - Volume 2
Visualizing the Street, 2018
From user-generated images of streets to professional architectural renderings, and from digital ... more From user-generated images of streets to professional architectural renderings, and from digital maps and drone footages to representations of invisible digital ecologies, this collection of essays analyses the emergent practices of visualizing the street. Today, advancements in digital technologies of the image have given rise to the production and dissemination of imagery of streets and urban realities in multiple forms. The ubiquitous presence of digital visualizations has in turn created new forms of urban practice and modes of spatial encounter. Everyone who carries a smartphone not only plays an increasingly significant role in the production, editing and circulation of images of the street, but also relies on those images to experience urban worlds and to navigate in them. Such entangled forms of image-making and image-sharing have constructed new imaginaries of the street and have had a significant impact on the ways in which contemporary and future streets are understood, i...
Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2022 - Volume 2
Urban Planning
Games have become established tools within participatory urban planning practice that provide saf... more Games have become established tools within participatory urban planning practice that provide safe spaces for collective actions such as deliberation, negotiation of conflicting agendas, scenario testing, and collaborative worldbuilding. While a body of literature on the effectiveness of games to address complex urban planning issues is emerging, significantly less literature addresses the design and development process of serious games with a possible space in its own right within urban planning practice. Our study investigates long term iterative processes of designing a game for visioning urban futures, specifically, how design iterations connect to the application of games in practice by accommodating or responding to emerging needs, goals, and relationships. We approach this topic through the case study of the Sustainability Futures Game, a game designed by the Helsinki-based creative agency Hellon to support business leaders, sustainability specialists, and city officials to i...
Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group, 2021
Creative practices have a role in mediating and supporting concrete, meaningful actions towards s... more Creative practices have a role in mediating and supporting concrete, meaningful actions towards sustainability transformations. With this in mind: What are the possibilities and limits of the tools and resources that contemporary creative practices are using to reconceive and redesign forms of interaction between different disciplines, audiences and cultures for sustainability transformations? This contribution presents preliminary findings from a transdisciplinary workshop where the participants were invited to share their experiences of designing or using “tools and resources for feral ways of knowing and transformation” within creative practice. While the concept of ‘feral’ remained open to a wide range of different interpretations, participants used the term in three main ways: to foreground embodied, situated, bottom-up, ways of working with organic material and more-than-human issues that require relinquishing control; to refer to reappropriating existing tools and processes i...
Creativity and Cognition
We discuss three cases of transformative creative practice that aim to address large-scale societ... more We discuss three cases of transformative creative practice that aim to address large-scale societal issues related to the climate emergency by taking a series of interconnected, small-scale actions. Drawing on our first-hand perspectives, we reflect on how the cases address such issues by proliferating across different social contexts and supporting creative engagements of diverse stakeholders. We offer this empirical reflection at a time of rapid social and ecological change that has affected all life on the planet. Eco-social challenges and structural inequalities caused by shifts in global economic, political and technological power require new approaches and transformative actions to stabilize and restore ecosystems on which life depends. Our research shows that creative practice in art and design has a critical role to play in these processes of transformation. By discussing the opportunities and challenges encountered by our three cases within their transformative efforts and analyzing how they proliferate across diverse scales, we aim to expand the emerging scholarship on the transformative potential of creative practice.
Serious games and gaming are increasingly considered as the magic bullet for improved stakeholder... more Serious games and gaming are increasingly considered as the magic bullet for improved stakeholder involvement and citizen engagement in urban planning and governance. They are also discussed as means to instigate learning and capacity building and to raise the awareness of citizens and stakeholders about various urban topics. These learning processes can unfold in various different formats, such as social or game-based learning. This chapter investigates if playing the serious game prototype ‘Mobility Safari’ supports such processes. Mobility Safari is a serious-game prototype developed for the City of Vienna. The game is targeting Vienna’s ambition to become a smart city. One focal point of this ambition concerns the change towards a more sustainable mobility system. Our analysis illustrates that the serious game indeed evokes learning processes during the gameplay and the debriefing, covering a broad range of learning activities and social interaction. Incomplete rule-sets and un-...
This paper takes a look at the relationship between informational space and territory. It questio... more This paper takes a look at the relationship between informational space and territory. It questions the common dichotomy that positions virtual space in opposition to physical space. It focuses on the different roles modern urban actors play in defining a new understanding of space as an inseparable composition of both the virtual and the physical realm. On the individual level, it looks at the emergence of a new type of citizen whose ludic attitude dynamically adapts the course of his responses to the virtual, real-time inputs that influence his presence in the physical environment. On the collective level, it analyses unintended, swarm-like synchronisations, and the role new media play in redefining the urban commons.
Visualizing the Street, 2018
The post-2008 austerity measures imposed on Greece made public space in the city of Athens the pr... more The post-2008 austerity measures imposed on Greece made public space in the city of Athens the prime target of economic development and city marketing. These processes are based on aesthetic strategies of 'cleaning up' and imposing a certain visual order while disposing signs of deprivation and exclusion in the streets. Referencing the works of Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière and illustrating a series of cases, we demonstrate how this exclusionary 'police order' of neoliberal consensus confirms and reinforces the borders between the visible and invisible, acceptable and unacceptable. This is, however, contested by a more democratic aesthetics of redistribution, based on difference, which emerges as soon as the implemented order meets the world of complexity, boundaries and resistance.
The Hackable City, 2018
Serious games are tools that can instigate civic learning through the social interaction among pl... more Serious games are tools that can instigate civic learning through the social interaction among players who exchange information, negotiate and deliberate during gameplay. Energy Safari is a serious board game developed to make citizens familiar with the energy transition in the province of Groningen, the Netherlands and how it translates in local and regional policies. This chapter analyses how players have collectively exploited the ambiguities in the rule set of the game to define their own rules, regarding project selection, partnerships, knowledge exchange and attitude towards the local government. These ad hoc agreements encouraged players to reflect and relate in-game situations to their real-life experiences with energy transition, leading to civic learning. In doing so, they "bend the logic" of current assumptions for the energy transition and demonstrate possibilities for positioning emergent gameplay within the design and negotiation processes of actual hackable urban and regional policymaking.
Serious games are tools that can instigate civic learning through the social interaction among pl... more Serious games are tools that can instigate civic learning through the social interaction among players who exchange information, negotiate and deliberate during gameplay. Energy Safari is a serious board game developed to make citizens familiar with the energy transition in the province of Groningen, the Netherlands and how it translates in local and regional policies. This chapter analyses how players have collectively exploited the ambiguities in the rule set of the game to define their own rules, regarding project selection, partnerships, knowledge exchange and attitude towards the local government. These ad hoc agreements encouraged players to reflect and relate in-game situations to their real-life experiences with energy transition, leading to civic learning. In doing so, they “bend the logic” of current assumptions for the energy transition and demonstrate possibilities for positioning emergent gameplay within the design and negotiation processes of actual hackable urban and ...
Interaction Design and Architecture(s), 2017
Spatial planning projects can be conceived as processes of collective learning. Planners have bee... more Spatial planning projects can be conceived as processes of collective learning. Planners have been looking at games and playful approaches to support these processes. Considering that planning projects are long and complex, we propose to not reason for single, full-fledged and all-encompassing games, but instead work with strings of, so-called, serious mini-games that each addresses a specific learning goal, guided by a collective learning model. This paper conceptualizes a toolbox to support the development and contextualization of such strings of serious mini-games.
Urgent publishing pertains both to timeliness and relevance. What strategies are available to pub... more Urgent publishing pertains both to timeliness and relevance. What strategies are available to publishers in the cultural and research domains to conceive, produce, and position their contents in an urgent way? Revolving around the key notions of relations, trust, and remediation, Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing presents methods and prototypes that counter the contemporary speedy information sphere in new and different ways. It develops a situated account of hybrid publishing, where authors, editors, publishers, designers, and readers operate together.
AMSTERDAM CREATIVE INDUSTRIES NETWORK resulted from a cooperation between One Architecture and Th... more AMSTERDAM CREATIVE INDUSTRIES NETWORK resulted from a cooperation between One Architecture and The Mobile City Foundation. The project investigates the opportunities of digital media technologies for the empowerment of citizens and other stakeholders in a democratic process of citymaking. It also explores the shift in roles of and relationships between governments, (design) professionals and citizens in this process. The first contours for this project were laid out by One Architecture and The Mobile City during the Metropool NL workshop organized by the Deltametropool Society in 2012, resulting in the publication Eindhoven, Hackable World City. This was followed by an 'embedded researcher' project hosted at the University of Amsterdam and One Architecture and funded by the Creative Industries Research Centre Amsterdam, with contributions from Utrecht University. In 2014, funding was received from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) for both a KIEM-exploration through Utrecht University and a Creative Industries research project hosted at
IGI Global eBooks, Oct 7, 2022
Theintegrationoflearninggoalswithgamemechanicsinseriousgamesusedinurbanandspatial planningprocess... more Theintegrationoflearninggoalswithgamemechanicsinseriousgamesusedinurbanandspatial planningprocesseshasthepotentialtoenablegamedesignersandplannerstocreategameswith narrativestightlyalignedtoparticularprocessesandleadtoincreasedlearningoutcomes.Thisstudy presentstheresultsfromtestingEnergySafari,aseriousgamefortheenergytransitionintheprovince of Groningen, and empirically associates specific game mechanics with learning events, derived fromplayers'reports.Theresearchisbasedontheanalysisofpost-playquestionnaires.Play-testing EnergySafariillustratesthatdifferentlearningeventscanbetriggeredbythesamegamemechanics, anobservationwhichcanbeappliedinseriousgamedesigntofacilitateplayerswithdifferentlearning needsandstyles.Inaddition,playtestingtoevaluatethelearningperformanceofseriousgames shouldbeintegratedinthegamedesignprocess.However,toachievelastinglearningandactionable knowledge,seriousgamesshouldbeusedcomplementarilywithothercivicparticipationmethods.
a) University Groningen, Department of Planning & Environment, 9747AD Groningen, The Netherlands ... more a) University Groningen, Department of Planning & Environment, 9747AD Groningen, The Netherlands b) University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria, Research Group Playful Interactive Environments, 4323 Hagenberg, Austria c) Hasselt University, Architectuur en Kunst, 3590 Dipenbeek, Belgium d) Green City Lab Vienna, 1010 Vienna, Austria e) Vienna University of Technology, Department of Spatial Planning, Vienna, Austria
Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2022 - Volume 2
Visualizing the Street, 2018
From user-generated images of streets to professional architectural renderings, and from digital ... more From user-generated images of streets to professional architectural renderings, and from digital maps and drone footages to representations of invisible digital ecologies, this collection of essays analyses the emergent practices of visualizing the street. Today, advancements in digital technologies of the image have given rise to the production and dissemination of imagery of streets and urban realities in multiple forms. The ubiquitous presence of digital visualizations has in turn created new forms of urban practice and modes of spatial encounter. Everyone who carries a smartphone not only plays an increasingly significant role in the production, editing and circulation of images of the street, but also relies on those images to experience urban worlds and to navigate in them. Such entangled forms of image-making and image-sharing have constructed new imaginaries of the street and have had a significant impact on the ways in which contemporary and future streets are understood, i...
Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2022 - Volume 2
Urban Planning
Games have become established tools within participatory urban planning practice that provide saf... more Games have become established tools within participatory urban planning practice that provide safe spaces for collective actions such as deliberation, negotiation of conflicting agendas, scenario testing, and collaborative worldbuilding. While a body of literature on the effectiveness of games to address complex urban planning issues is emerging, significantly less literature addresses the design and development process of serious games with a possible space in its own right within urban planning practice. Our study investigates long term iterative processes of designing a game for visioning urban futures, specifically, how design iterations connect to the application of games in practice by accommodating or responding to emerging needs, goals, and relationships. We approach this topic through the case study of the Sustainability Futures Game, a game designed by the Helsinki-based creative agency Hellon to support business leaders, sustainability specialists, and city officials to i...
Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group, 2021
Creative practices have a role in mediating and supporting concrete, meaningful actions towards s... more Creative practices have a role in mediating and supporting concrete, meaningful actions towards sustainability transformations. With this in mind: What are the possibilities and limits of the tools and resources that contemporary creative practices are using to reconceive and redesign forms of interaction between different disciplines, audiences and cultures for sustainability transformations? This contribution presents preliminary findings from a transdisciplinary workshop where the participants were invited to share their experiences of designing or using “tools and resources for feral ways of knowing and transformation” within creative practice. While the concept of ‘feral’ remained open to a wide range of different interpretations, participants used the term in three main ways: to foreground embodied, situated, bottom-up, ways of working with organic material and more-than-human issues that require relinquishing control; to refer to reappropriating existing tools and processes i...
Creativity and Cognition
We discuss three cases of transformative creative practice that aim to address large-scale societ... more We discuss three cases of transformative creative practice that aim to address large-scale societal issues related to the climate emergency by taking a series of interconnected, small-scale actions. Drawing on our first-hand perspectives, we reflect on how the cases address such issues by proliferating across different social contexts and supporting creative engagements of diverse stakeholders. We offer this empirical reflection at a time of rapid social and ecological change that has affected all life on the planet. Eco-social challenges and structural inequalities caused by shifts in global economic, political and technological power require new approaches and transformative actions to stabilize and restore ecosystems on which life depends. Our research shows that creative practice in art and design has a critical role to play in these processes of transformation. By discussing the opportunities and challenges encountered by our three cases within their transformative efforts and analyzing how they proliferate across diverse scales, we aim to expand the emerging scholarship on the transformative potential of creative practice.
Serious games and gaming are increasingly considered as the magic bullet for improved stakeholder... more Serious games and gaming are increasingly considered as the magic bullet for improved stakeholder involvement and citizen engagement in urban planning and governance. They are also discussed as means to instigate learning and capacity building and to raise the awareness of citizens and stakeholders about various urban topics. These learning processes can unfold in various different formats, such as social or game-based learning. This chapter investigates if playing the serious game prototype ‘Mobility Safari’ supports such processes. Mobility Safari is a serious-game prototype developed for the City of Vienna. The game is targeting Vienna’s ambition to become a smart city. One focal point of this ambition concerns the change towards a more sustainable mobility system. Our analysis illustrates that the serious game indeed evokes learning processes during the gameplay and the debriefing, covering a broad range of learning activities and social interaction. Incomplete rule-sets and un-...
This paper takes a look at the relationship between informational space and territory. It questio... more This paper takes a look at the relationship between informational space and territory. It questions the common dichotomy that positions virtual space in opposition to physical space. It focuses on the different roles modern urban actors play in defining a new understanding of space as an inseparable composition of both the virtual and the physical realm. On the individual level, it looks at the emergence of a new type of citizen whose ludic attitude dynamically adapts the course of his responses to the virtual, real-time inputs that influence his presence in the physical environment. On the collective level, it analyses unintended, swarm-like synchronisations, and the role new media play in redefining the urban commons.
Visualizing the Street, 2018
The post-2008 austerity measures imposed on Greece made public space in the city of Athens the pr... more The post-2008 austerity measures imposed on Greece made public space in the city of Athens the prime target of economic development and city marketing. These processes are based on aesthetic strategies of 'cleaning up' and imposing a certain visual order while disposing signs of deprivation and exclusion in the streets. Referencing the works of Chantal Mouffe and Jacques Rancière and illustrating a series of cases, we demonstrate how this exclusionary 'police order' of neoliberal consensus confirms and reinforces the borders between the visible and invisible, acceptable and unacceptable. This is, however, contested by a more democratic aesthetics of redistribution, based on difference, which emerges as soon as the implemented order meets the world of complexity, boundaries and resistance.
The Hackable City, 2018
Serious games are tools that can instigate civic learning through the social interaction among pl... more Serious games are tools that can instigate civic learning through the social interaction among players who exchange information, negotiate and deliberate during gameplay. Energy Safari is a serious board game developed to make citizens familiar with the energy transition in the province of Groningen, the Netherlands and how it translates in local and regional policies. This chapter analyses how players have collectively exploited the ambiguities in the rule set of the game to define their own rules, regarding project selection, partnerships, knowledge exchange and attitude towards the local government. These ad hoc agreements encouraged players to reflect and relate in-game situations to their real-life experiences with energy transition, leading to civic learning. In doing so, they "bend the logic" of current assumptions for the energy transition and demonstrate possibilities for positioning emergent gameplay within the design and negotiation processes of actual hackable urban and regional policymaking.
Serious games are tools that can instigate civic learning through the social interaction among pl... more Serious games are tools that can instigate civic learning through the social interaction among players who exchange information, negotiate and deliberate during gameplay. Energy Safari is a serious board game developed to make citizens familiar with the energy transition in the province of Groningen, the Netherlands and how it translates in local and regional policies. This chapter analyses how players have collectively exploited the ambiguities in the rule set of the game to define their own rules, regarding project selection, partnerships, knowledge exchange and attitude towards the local government. These ad hoc agreements encouraged players to reflect and relate in-game situations to their real-life experiences with energy transition, leading to civic learning. In doing so, they “bend the logic” of current assumptions for the energy transition and demonstrate possibilities for positioning emergent gameplay within the design and negotiation processes of actual hackable urban and ...
Interaction Design and Architecture(s), 2017
Spatial planning projects can be conceived as processes of collective learning. Planners have bee... more Spatial planning projects can be conceived as processes of collective learning. Planners have been looking at games and playful approaches to support these processes. Considering that planning projects are long and complex, we propose to not reason for single, full-fledged and all-encompassing games, but instead work with strings of, so-called, serious mini-games that each addresses a specific learning goal, guided by a collective learning model. This paper conceptualizes a toolbox to support the development and contextualization of such strings of serious mini-games.
Urgent publishing pertains both to timeliness and relevance. What strategies are available to pub... more Urgent publishing pertains both to timeliness and relevance. What strategies are available to publishers in the cultural and research domains to conceive, produce, and position their contents in an urgent way? Revolving around the key notions of relations, trust, and remediation, Here and Now? Explorations in Urgent Publishing presents methods and prototypes that counter the contemporary speedy information sphere in new and different ways. It develops a situated account of hybrid publishing, where authors, editors, publishers, designers, and readers operate together.