CITY KIT is a combined urban-computer game to upgrade your neighborhood.
The CITY KIT project was developed for the Hong Kong Social Housing Authority with as a target group young people that are familiar with computer games but hardly play outside.
Exhibition & Publication Dream Society @ Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul, South Korea, 20 April-26 May 2013
City
Kit
City Kit is a combined urban-computer game to upgrade your neighborhood. The City Kit project was developed for the Hong Kong Social Housing Authority with as a target group young people that are familiar with computer games but hardly play outside.
This hybrid game revolves around city planning and urban redevelopment. City Kit turns the residents into the āmakersā of the city, providing thus a bridge between the users of the urban environment and the experts – the architects and the urban planners.
Playing the City Kit game, the residents can adapt and improve their local physical environment by building a digital version of their neighborhood. 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, 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: A ārealā object, an analog version of the proposed City Kit element, will be built at the chosen location.
On the website, the user can also pinpoint exactly where a digital object should be located in the analogue world. This can be done using a mobile phone.
The goal of City Kit is to help you revalue your local surroundings and incorporate the new, imaginative layers created in City Kitās virtual world. Making small modifications to the personal, physical environment in digital space changes the experience of living in the real world.
DIY
Pavilion
Outcome of the City Kit project was the DIY Pavilion, first presented at the waterfront promenade of Hong Kong within the framework of the Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-city Biennial of Urbanism and Architecture 2009-2010 and later set up at the Hong Kong Jockey Club Creative Arts Centre and at the Kwai Tsing Theatre in Hong Kong.
Following the City Kit concept, users can co-create their design of the pavilion. The pavilion’s architecture is based on an architectural design principle with a flexible structure that can adapt to site and program requirements, to different content, context and spatial situations. The structure of the pavilion architectural design principle makes it possible to involve the users in the design, building and transformation of the pavilion.
The pavilion consists of triangular plywood plates sown together with the help of cable binders. It is a flexible mobile structure to be easily disassembled, transported, reassembled and sown together again, adjusting to the size of the site and the local requirements.
Videos on urban issues were projected on the triangular crystalline structure of the pavilionās interior as the pavilion travelled to the different locations for community education.
Simple
City
Both projects, CITY KIT as well as the DIY Pavilion, were recently presented within the framework of the SIMPLE CITY installation by Hybrid Space Lab at the MAKK Museum of Applied Arts Cologne from May to August 2012 and at the first issue of plan – Architecture Biennial Cologne (plan – Architektur Biennale Kƶln in German) in September 2012.
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