City Kit @ Platform 21 @ Dutch Design Foundation

Playing the game City Kit, you adapt a digital version of your local surroundings according to your desires. In a switch from changes in the neighbourhood that are beyond your control, City Kit makes you the architect, urban planner, environmental expert or designer. City Kit is currently shown with a presentation and demo version and soon you will be able to play and experience the game at Platform 21 during Checking Reality.

Exhibition City Kit @ Checking Reality, Dutch Design Foundation Premsela, Platform 21, Amsterdam, 18 May-27 August 2008
Publication @ Curatorial Cooking, Dutch Design Foundation Premsela, Platform 21, Amsterdam, 18 May 2008
Lecture Participatory Design @ Club Real #4, Dutch Design Foundation Premsela, Platform 21, Amsterdam, 27 August 2008

City
Kit

Exhibition
When they play the City Kit game, residents can adapt and improve their local physical environment by building a digital version of their neighborhood.
This urban game revolves around city planning, redevelopment and building processes. Using modular building components that can be moved around and fixed in certain places in the environment, users can build micro-stages, exhibition decks, floating bars and theatres, WCs, swimming pools and other recreational facilities that make living in the neighborhood more fun.
City Kit is an open-source medium in which participants can add elements and share their designs. An online platform in the form of a website allows residents to actively take part in the game. All it takes is a simple click of the mouse to interactively test your own virtual version of City Kit. City Kit of the Day is a contest under way on the website. Residents and game users can design their own objects and facilities; the winner gets a chance to actually carry out his or her idea.

On the website, the user can also pinpoint exactly where a digital object would be located in the analogue world. This can be done using a mobile phone, RFID or a GPS system. Making small modifications to the personal, physical environment in digital space changes the experience of living in the real world. This is the goal of City Kit: to help you to revalue your local surroundings and incorporate the new, imaginative layers created in City Kit’s virtual world.

Publication
From 2006-2009 Platform21 functioned as an incubator for a new to be built design museum in Amsterdam. This unique period of learning by doing and exploring alternative exhibition formats, has delivered a more inclusive and democratic approach in showcasing design. Curatorial Cooking will share with you the best of Platform21 in an open D.I.Y. way. Giving exclusive insights in what works and what works not and encourages you to further develop projects like Platform21 = Repairing, Platform21 = Hacking IKEA or Me and My Character. The book also features a poetic image essay by artist Koen Hauser as well as inspirational project proposals by Aart van Bezooyen, Arne Hendriks, Cynthia Hathaway, Dewi Pinatih, Dinie Besems, Erik Wong, Guy Keulemans, Heleen Klopper, Hybrid Space Lab, Maite Abella Grau, Marco Bevolo, Nancy Nowacek, Nox Architects, Robert Stadler, Sang-kyu Kim, Scott Burnham, Sergio Davilla, Shane Waltener, Ted Noten, Van Bergen Kolpa Architecten and Yuri Suzuki.

Paperback, 204 pages, 150 illustrations.

Publishers: Artez Press, Premsela, Dutch Platform for Design and Fashion, and d’Jonge Hond Publishers.

Lecture
Hybrid Space Lab (Frans Vogelaar and Elizabeth Sikiardi) of whom Vogelaar explores the future and meaning of Hybrid Space, while Sikiardi gives her vision on the future of virtuality based on the statement ‘Beyond the You-topia’.
‘Hybrid Space’ consists of a collaboration of architects, urbanists, designers and media artists with soft- and hardware engineers. Together they develop projects for combined analog and digital urban, architectural, design and media spaces. In this way creating a new multidisciplinary field combining all new possibilities the virtual world has to offer.

 Jules Cocke is co-founder and director of Squint/Opera, often awarded architectural film studio, which films are so beautifully convincing, you sometimes wonder if the future might not be a bit disappointing once you get there. He tells about his profession in which visualizing a possible future is central.

Rinus van den Berg works as an Architectural & Industrial designer at the DSM Material Science Center. Van den Berg sketches the future and new applications of the 3D printer during Club Real.

Why are virtual spaces and presentations always so anaemic? That is the question central to the column Eric Kluitenberg, media specialist connected to culture and politics center De Balie, writes for Club Real #4.

How virtual is our future?
At this last Club Real evening five personal visions on the reality of a real virtual future.

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