Pupils from The Piggott School in Reading, England, have won the Design Museum's Design Ventura competition with a card game that encourages children to learn about colours in their surroundings.

The Colour Countdown game came out on top in the competition, which invites secondary school students aged 13 to 16 to develop a product that can be sold in the Design Museum's gift shop.

This year's brief, set by south London textile designer Kangan Arora, called for responses to the theme of colour and community, challenging students to consider "the importance of community practices, supporting and learning from one another".

The game devised by The Piggott School pupils is based on classic card games I Spy and Uno. It aims to encourage children to put down their devices and engage with the world around them to promote positive mental health.

The playing cards feature coloured cellophane windows that can be overlapped to create a blend of colours, which players then have to search out in their environment.

"You can play anywhere at all," explained the students in their pitch to a judging panel that included Arora and Dezeen's editorial director Max Fraser. "You draw cards of different colours – red, blue, orange, green etc. – and you have to look around and find objects in that colour."

The cellophane is made from wood pulp and the cards use FSC-certified paper to lower the product's environmental footprint.

Also included in this year's judging panel were the Design Museum's senior buying manager Preena Patel and Christoph Woermann, chief marketing officer for Deutsche Bank's Corporate Bank division.

"The winning design was chosen as it responded clearly to the brief in a way which was creative, fun and appealing to a range of audiences," said the judges. "We didn't want to put the product down and we knew that customers in the Design Museum would feel the same."

Launched in 2010 by the Design Museum in partnership with Deutsche Bank, the Design Ventura contest aims to reinforce the importance of early design education and fill gaps in the current design and technology curriculum.

The contest offers pupils at UK state secondary schools the chance to respond to a real-world brief, supporting the development of skills and experiences that help them understand how to bring ideas to life.

This year's winning project by The Piggott School will now be developed with a professional agency before being manufactured and sold in the Design Museum shop, with money raised from the sales going to a charity of the pupil's choosing.

Previous winners include a portable knife designed to prevent "avocado hand" – an increasingly common injury where people cut themselves while trying to de-stone an avocado.

The post Schoolchildren merge Uno and I Spy in award-winning card game appeared first on Dezeen.

Dezeen School Shows: a video game informed by the Harry Potter books is included in Dezeen's latest school show by students at the American University in Dubai.

Also included is a game that takes cues from the seven deadly sins and one that is based on the changing seasons.

American University in Dubai

Institution: American University in Dubai
School: The Center for Research, Innovation and Design (CRID), School of Architecture, Art, and Design (SAAD)
Course: DDFT 473 – Virtual Environments
Tutors: Dr Georges Kachaamy

School statement:

"The Center for Research, Innovation and Design (CRID) holds the distinction of being the first in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region that is Rhino Certified Center, an Authorised VR Sketch Training Center and Gravity Sketch Certified Center.

"Furthermore, the CRID has earned the unique position of making the American University in Dubai (AUD) the first and only university in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) to establish an academic alliance with Unreal Engine (UE) through the innovative application of Twinmotion.

"Leveraging these prestigious collaborations, the DDFT 473 – Virtual Environments course introduces a cutting-edge virtual reality setup that immerses students in the creation and design of virtual spaces.

"The course – curated and conducted by Dr Georges Kachaamy, a renowned VR instructor and visionary in future and virtual environments – offers an unparalleled educational experience.

"In celebration of the partnership with UE, the course culminates in a project titled ''Gamifitecture' The Virtual Space of Playfulness'."

"This project challenges students to design and gamify a virtual environment, drawing inspiration from existing video games.

"This unique approach encourages students to conceive projects that are exclusively experienced within a virtual reality context, transcending traditional physical world limitations.

"The innovative, pedagogical approach of the course has undeniably empowered students to venture into new territories of design thinking and skill acquisition.

"Such forward-thinking education equips our students with the competencies needed to excel in an increasingly competitive market, as evidenced by the remarkable quality and creativity of their project work.

"The CRID remains committed to pushing the boundaries of design education, preparing our students to be leaders in the evolving landscape of design and technology."

 Seven Deadly Realms by  Shahab Pasandeh

"The project concept is an immersive journey through the narrative landscape of the God of War game franchise, reimagined through the lens of the seven deadly sins: pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth.

"Each of the seven main realms within the virtual environment is meticulously crafted to embody one of these sins, leveraging a rich palette of colours, thematic elements and spatial designs directly inspired by the game's aesthetic and lore.

"This immersive experience is not only a testament to the creative potential of virtual environments but also serves as a profound exploration of themes and narratives that are seldom visualised in such a vivid and engaging way.

"Through this project, users are encouraged to confront and reflect upon the complexities of human emotions and behaviours in a context that transcends the boundaries of traditional gaming and storytelling."

Student: Shahab Pasandeh

Awake? by Dana Kharsa

"Drawing inspiration from Mind Path to Thalamus, this virtual reality concept transports the player into a surreal dreamscape, besieged by portals that usher them through vivid representations of the four seasons.

"Despite numerous attempts to flee, the player finds themselves ensnared in a recurring nightmare.

"The central question looms: can they ever awaken from this cyclic torment?"

Student: Dana Kharsa
Course: DDFT 473 – Virtual Environments

Chamber of Secrets by Mehak Minocha

"This project is inspired by the game Hogwarts Legacy.

"The game is based on the famous book series Harry Potter, a fantasy world that every individual wishes to be a part of.

"Hogwarts Legacy is an immersive, open-world action role-playing game set in a world first introduced in the Harry Potter books.

"Different books inspired the spaces, and each space increases in intensity with increasing levels.

"The virtual exhibition enables visitors to experience the different realms of the wizarding world."

Student: Mehak Minocha

Tetrascape by Yasmine Khalife

"Tetrascape, a virtual space inspired by the classic game Tetris, serves as a metaphor for life's journey.

"Navigating through the various Tetris blocks represents life's diverse experiences.

"Reaching the final destination symbolises achieving happiness – however, similar to Tetris, completed lines collapse and fall when the blocks finally fit.

"The achievement of a goal is followed by an unexpected fall, highlighting life's uncertainties and the need to adapt to changes."

Student: Yasmine Khalife

Toggestopia by Sameya Masroof Ahmed

"The project drew inspiration from the captivating game Togges, a delightful 3D puzzle-platformer.

"In this engaging adventure, players navigate through seven vibrant levels, stacking adorable living blocks and solving puzzles across various cosmic landscapes to safeguard the galaxy from the looming threats of the void.

"The game's diverse environments, including underwater, snowy and vertical settings, influenced the transitions in this project.

"Infused with interactivity and cheerfulness, the project culminates in a satisfying 'Eureka' moment, reminiscent of the joyous discovery of a globe."

Student: Sameya Masroof Ahmed

Eternity by Tara Chopra

"This project is inspired by the game Etherborn and is made up of five spaces representing the five levels of the game.

"The way the viewer moves through the spaces is inspired by Etherborn's gameplay, which involves ascending a massive, twisting tree after which the gamer reaches 'the end of the world'.

"Similarly, in 'Eternity', the user would ascend through five different spaces starting at the origin in 'genesis' and reaching the very top, the 'nebula'.

"The project takes the viewer through the calm yet chaotic, and ever-changing 'tree of life'."

Student: Tara Chopra

Paralysis by Christelle Hanna

"The project consists of five spaces – the lair, eruption, jagged, chimes, and REM – all of which are inspired by the game Little Nightmares.

"The idea of chaos is incorporated to achieve a dark and gloomy atmosphere and is emphasised by designing the spaces in an uncoordinated way while also making them irregularly large to match how small the viewer should be.

"The intensity of the scattered elements changes depending on the colour choices, matching with the game itself."

Student: Christelle Hanna

Chromatopia by Dana Otoom

"Chromatopia immerses you in a kaleidoscopic journey inspired by the game Manifold Gardens.

"Gravity shifts dynamically as you traverse each stage, transforming the essence of every space.

"Explore vibrant environments where perception bends, colours dance and architectural marvels defy conventional laws.

"In Chromatopia, the journey is a symphony of gravity-defying exploration, where each twist and turn reveal new dimensions of wonder and awe."

Student: Dana Otoom

Partnership content

This school show is a partnership between Dezeen and the American University in Dubai. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.

The post Eight virtual design projects by the American University in Dubai appeared first on Dezeen.

This month's Dezeen In Depth newsletter explores how life-simulation game The Sims has stayed current amid changing interior-design trends and features Michelle Ogundehin's annual trends report.

Life-simulation game The Sims has succeeded in keeping up with ever-changing interior and design trends. Dezeen's Jane Englefield interviewed the creators of the legendary video game to discover how they consistently stay on the cutting edge of evolving styles.

December's Dezeen in Depth also featured an interview with former Ferrari designer Lowie Vermeersch and an opinion piece from Michelle Ogundehin on this year's trends.

Dezeen In Depth

Dezeen In Depth is sent on the last Friday of every month and delves deeper into the major stories shaping architecture and design. Each edition includes an original feature article on a key topic or trend, an interview with a prominent industry figure and an opinion piece from a leading critic. Read the latest edition of Dezeen In Depth or subscribe here.

You can also subscribe to our other newsletters; Dezeen Agenda is sent every Tuesday containing a selection of the most important news highlights from the week, Dezeen Debate is sent every Thursday featuring a selection of the best reader comments and most talked-about stories and Dezeen Daily is our daily bulletin that contains every story published in the preceding 24 hours on Dezeen.

The post Dezeen In Depth explores how The Sims stays current in design and architecture trends appeared first on Dezeen.

The Sims has been allowing players to act out their architecture and interior design fantasies for more than two decades. Jane Englefield finds out how the makers of the iconic life-simulation video game keep up with shifting trends.

"People laugh when I mention playing The Sims, but it was hugely significant in terms of spatial planning and was a key part of how and why I have ended up in the line of interior design work that I have," interiors stylist and editor Rory Robertson told Dezeen.

"The Sims offered people the opportunity to get a feel for design," he reflected. "You could be as extravagant and outrageous, or as briefed and restricted as you liked."

Created in 2000 by American game designer Will Wright, The Sims is a video game where players make human characters – or "sims" – and build their virtual houses and lives from scratch, catering to their needs and desires.

With four iterations of the main game and dozens of themed expansion packs focussing on topics such as university, parenthood and cottage living, The Sims is one of the best-selling video-game franchises of all time.

"It's really accessible"

Architecture and interior design has been a major part of The Sims experience from the very beginning.

Having previously created the city-building game SimCity in 1989 – which itself has been credited with inspiring a generation of urban planners – Wright was originally motivated to develop The Sims after losing his home in the Oakland firestorm of 1991 in California.

In fact, early designs were for an architecture game, with the shift to focus on people a relatively late addition to the concept, according to one of the game's first art directors, Charles London.

Design remained a core part of the offering, however, and the interface features tools that allow players to instantly build structures and decorate and furnish them from an extensive inventory of items.

"It's really accessible, so I think a lot of people get into it without even realising that they're playing with architecture and playing with space," said video-games expert and historian Holly Nielsen.

"While it was like catnip for design budding minds, it was also just a wonderful opportunity for procrastination and frivolity for people who aren't particularly confident or tuned in to interiors or architecture," echoed Robertson.

Since the original The Sims, a broad set of options has been available for players to suit their tastes and imaginations.

Possibilities have ranged from minimalist bungalows filled with neutral furniture to more outlandish dwellings, such as castles defined by Dalmatian-print wallpaper or hot tubs parked in the middle of multiple living rooms.

"We'll take any source"

The team behind these possibilities described how they ensure that the architecture and interior design options stay feeling fresh and contemporary with each new game in the series.

"Since we're a game about real life, anytime we step outside our door we have inspiration by just looking at what's in our immediate environment," game designer Jessica Croft told Dezeen.

Art director Mike O'Connor added that he and his team scour the real world and the web for up-to-date references.

"We'll take any source," he said. "We're looking for patterns. If we start to see round furniture, or bouclé, or whatever the trend is, [we ask] has it already gone?"

"The internet doesn't scrub old ideas. So you know, it's seeing if there's a trend, is it sticking, does it apply to what we're doing now?"

Furniture and appliances within the game are regularly revised over time to reflect cultural and technological progression in the real world, Croft explained.

"In Sims 2 [released in 2004] I would not be surprised if there was a landline phone – and there definitely isn't a landline phone in my own house, or Sims 4," she said.

"Even things like VR [virtual reality] didn't really exist back in The Sims 2 days, so things like VR consoles, computers – we just added dual-monitor computers, and LEDs are now in most households," she continued.

That in turn sees the team take a surprisingly deep dive into how interiors are changing, O'Connor acknowledged.

"Over the life of this game, you see an evolution," he said. "Electronics are probably the biggest category [of change]. Even just how people use TVs, how they place them, has changed."

The idea, says Croft, is to ensure that The Sims players feel a close connection to the world they are building for their sims.

"The most fun thing for me is being able to allow players to craft stories that are relatable to them," she said. "So, looking for opportunities to make players feel seen."

"An element of freedom and fantasy-building"

But, as Nielsen points out, there is an additional aspect to the game's architecture and design possibilities that is central to its appeal.

"In one sense, it's reflective of society, but in another way, it's aspirational," she said.

"There's an element of freedom and fantasy-building to playing The Sims," she continued. "Homeownership is a thing that a lot of us will not get to do."

As in real life, everything you build or buy in The Sims has a cost.

However, unlike in real life, punching "motherlode" into The Sims cheat-code bar will immediately add a healthy 50,000 simoleons to your sim's bank account, putting that luxury sofa easily within reach.

That possibility remains central to Robertson's nostalgia for playing The Sims as a young would-be interior designer.

"Once you double-clicked The Sims graphic on your Microsoft desktop, a multi-roomed mansion cost nothing to design," he said.

This aspirational element has become an increasingly large part of The Sims' commercial model over the years.

The Sims 4, as an example, is accompanied by 19 purchasable "Stuff Packs" that expand the options of items available to buy, including "Perfect Patio", "Cool Kitchen" and one based on the products of Milan fashion label Moschino.

And the latest of the more extensive expansion packs is For Rent, which allows players to build rental houses where some sims are landlords and others are tenants.

Within the game, landlords encounter various true-to-life issues, including the potential for toxic mould build-up in their properties – although, unlike in the real world, the mould feature can be toggled on and off.

Inclusivity has also become an increasing focus of The Sims, with integral features now including options to choose sims' sexual orientation, for instance.

For Nielsen, that traces back to a significant foundational element of the game's widespread appeal – as well as being one of the reasons it has had such strong interior-design influence.

"It didn't feel like it was aiming for anyone," she explained. "One of the things that people bring up a lot is that it has a very female player base."

"For me, it was a big turning point – it was getting to create the spaces but also play around with the people inside them. It felt like a socially acceptable way to play dollhouses."

The images are courtesy of Electronic Arts.

Dezeen In Depth
If you enjoy reading Dezeen's interviews, opinions and features, subscribe to Dezeen In Depth. Sent on the last Friday of each month, this newsletter provides a single place to read about the design and architecture stories behind the headlines.

The post "The Sims is a key part of why I ended up in interior design" appeared first on Dezeen.

Designer Giles Tettey Nartey has presented a communal bench as part of a POOR Collective exhibition at the London Design Festival, with an intricately carved surface that doubles as a game board.

Interplay was designed for two people to straddle while facing the centre, where neat rows of holes called "houses" are hollowed out of the black-stained ash wood.

These are needed to play the West African strategy game of Oware, taught to Tettey Nartey by his grandparents when he lived in Ghana as a child.

The designer created Interplay as part of his postgraduate research at London's Bartlett School of Architecture, where he is exploring African craft cultures and how they work to embed rituals into objects.

"This piece specifically is looking at the traditional West African typology of a bench-bed, which was created typically by the Senufo people from Mali and the Ivory Coast," Tettey Nartey explained.

"What Interplay is trying to do is reimagine it as a place for communal interaction and convivial play."

Oware is played by moving 48 seeds around two parallel rows of six holes, with each player aiming to capture more pieces than their opponent.

In this case, the seeds take the form of small brass pebbles and the holes serve both a practical and decorative function, forming part of a larger topography of patterns carved into the surface of the seat.

"I wanted the piece to feel like it had been sculpted by a multitude of interactions, each leaving behind traces of their presence," Tettey Nartey told Dezeen.

"The bench's design draws inspiration from the rich tradition of African skin marking, akin to the practice of scarification," he continued.

"It uses these moments of engraved and carved marks as a way of firstly referencing the piece as an extension of the African skin but also a piece imbued with cultural significance and meaning."

At the London Design Festival, Interplay is on display as part of a group exhibition by POOR Collective – a social enterprise focused on involving young people in the design of their communities, which took home London's emerging design medal this year.

The show also featured a duo of tables created by Em Lemaître-Downton and the V&A's emerging designer Andu Masebo as part of a six-week mentorship program organised by POOR Collective.

Oware – also known as Ayo in Yoruba-speaking parts of Nigeria – has been reimagined by a number of designers in recent months.

Yinka Ilori sold a colourful pink-and-red version of the game at this Christmas pop-up last year, while fashion designer Ozwald Boateng created a high-end board with marble feet as part of his recent collaboration with Poltrona Frau.

The photography is by Andy Stagg.

Interplay was on show as part of the Powershift exhibition at the Brompton Design District from 16 to 24 September. See our London Design Festival 2023 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks that took place throughout the week.

The post Giles Tettey Nartey reimagines traditional West African bench as giant game of Oware appeared first on Dezeen.

Body care brand Billie has developed a limited-edition board game that explores the contradictory expectations and demands placed on women in a patriarchal society.

No Worries If Not mixes elements of popular board games like The Game of Life and Snakes and Ladders with a hyper-vivid colour scheme to reflect the satirical tone of the game.

Although presented as fun and optimistic, Billie devised the game to be rigged against the player, who is faced with impossible double standards and pointless solutions such as over-apologising, people-pleasing and overthinking.

The mechanics of No Worries If Not are based on interviews with groups of women about the pressures and challenges they face in their lives.

"We found a lot of shared experiences, but some of the most salient consistencies were around the contradictions and extraordinary expectations women specifically are held to," Billie co-founder Georgina Gooley told Dezeen.

"We considered a number of ways we might shed light on this but kept coming back to the idea that existing as a woman in today's world can ultimately feel a bit like you're playing a rigged game that you can't win. So we decided to turn it into one."

Gooley says that the first step in developing the game was to work out its mechanics, as it needed to be both "creatively compelling but also strategically sound in order for it to be functional".

"We test-played quite a few games to see what we liked and took inspiration from a few different places," she explained.

"Then we partnered with a set of game strategists to put the pieces together," she added. "Collectively we mapped out the general framework including gameplay, components and goal."

The game works similarly to a traditional board game in that each player starts with a token, which they can move across the board after rolling the dice.

Along the way, they encounter a number of "pitfalls" such as The Wage Gap, Smile More Street, Self Doubt Spiral and Fertility Forest. Throughout the game, players also pick up cards, which arbitrarily set them back or move them around the board.

The aim is to reach the final destination called No One's Man Land without getting knocked off the main path, although Gooley says the game itself is designed to be pretty much "unwinnable".

"We hope that by pointing out the absurd and contradictory cycles of judgment women face in everyday life, this board game helps women feel a bit more empowered to tune out external measures of their worth," she said.

Other game designs that combine play with social critique include LifeCredit, which envisions a dystopian future ruled by a social credit system, and the Minecraft library built by Reporters Without Borders, which provides gamers with "a safe haven for press freedom".

The post "Unwinnable" board game No Worries If Not explores sexist double standards appeared first on Dezeen.

Game developer Pat Naoum has launched a video game with backgrounds, creatures and scenery entirely painted by hand, which took seven years to complete.

Available on Nintendo Switch and Steam for Windows and Mac, The Master's Pupil is a 12-level puzzle-adventure game that explores a painterly world through the eyes of French artist Claude Monet.

Naoum painted every background and element seen in the game with acrylic paints on paper before scanning them with a high-resolution film negative scanner.

"The paintings themselves are quite small, the green vines only about five millimetres high, so I used very small brushes along with a wet palette," Naoum told Dezeen. "They were so small, they kept being fuzzy when I used a camera, but the scanner captured more detail than I could even see."

The expressive brushstrokes and handmade quality of the game aims to set it apart from other digital games, which are typically rendered with digital tools.

"I think it creates a sense of realism to the game," said Naoum. "It's not at all 'realistic graphics', but it feels tangible and real, and quite different from a lot of digital styles."

Players complete puzzles based on exploring space and colour mixing, experienced from the perspective of "the eyes and life of master artist Claude Monet".

Examples of Monet's artworks are uncovered as backdrops and scenes to explore throughout the game.

"Monet had such an interesting life, and he had cataracts later in life, so he was a perfect fit for the game's setting and story," said Naoum.

"I would love for people to experience Monet's artwork in a different way," he continued. "It's one thing to look at his images on a screen or reprinted on an umbrella, but to run through them, to help build some of them and to look at them in a unique way is wonderful."

The Master's Pupil is the first game Naoum developed and took him seven years to complete. He began creating the game while working full-time before receiving a grant from Screen Australia, which allowed him to dedicate all his time to completing it.

According to Naoum, learning to code was the biggest obstacle when creating the game.

"The first three years were learning to code, coming up with the story and designs, and establishing a vertical slice," he said.

"I'm such a visual person – paint on a page makes sense, but writing code to effect something abstract was very alien to me."

Other video games that have been published on Dezeen include a retro-style game released by Louis Vuitton and a selection of video games that use architecture to heighten the player experience, which feature in the Videogame Atlas book.

The images are by Pat Naoum.

The post The Master's Pupil is a hand-painted video game informed by Monet's artworks appeared first on Dezeen.

VDF products fair: Italian design brand Teckell has created an outdoor foosball table made from crystal and chrome.

Teckell's Cristallino foosball table features a playing field formed of white Corian and teams of players coated in black or white epoxy.

Weather-proof steel is used for the telescopic bars, and chromes brass features on the feet, handles and joints of the outdoor foosball game. Adjustable feet allow the game to go ahead even on uneven surfaces.

"Calcio Balilla – foosball – is a portrait of Italian memories," said Teckell. "Its concept takes shape in sport bars where soccer fans used to meet to celebrate their local team's victories on the field."

"This beloved game of the people has been transformed into a luxury item without losing its pure essence, being reinvented by Teckell as a coveted work of Italian art. Luxury is a game to play, no matter where."

Product: Teckell Cristallino
Brand: Teckell
Contact address: experience@teckell.com

About VDF products fair: the VDF products fair offers an affordable launchpad for new products during Virtual Design Festival. For more details email vdf@dezeen.com.

The post Cristallino by Teckell is an outdoor foosball table made from crystal appeared first on Dezeen.

VDF products fair: Italian brand Teckell has created T1.3 Wood, a traditional pool table with the "contemporary twist" of crystal legs.

Teckell has combined Canaletto walnut wood accents and worsted wool playing surfaces with angled crystal legs and a playing field made of tempered glass.

"Featuring traditional style with a contemporary twist, the T1.3 Teckell is the perfect choice for a traditional game room with a modern flair," said Teckell.

"Behind every table is the work of an Italian traditional carpentry workshop that also embraces 21st-century technologies. Artisans work with age-old precious woods as well as today’s cutting-edge materials," added the brand.

"Old and new come together to give a fresh spin to each long-lasting, eco-friendly table."

Product: T1.3 Wood
Brand: Teckell
Contact address: experience@teckell.com

About VDF products fair: the VDF products fair offers an affordable launchpad for new products during Virtual Design Festival. For more details email vdf@dezeen.com.

The post T1.3 Wood by Teckell is a pool table made from crystal and walnut wood appeared first on Dezeen.

Software engineer and US presidential candidate Akiva Leffert has designed a set of IKEA-themed tarot cards that tell your future using assembly manual illustrations.

New York-based Leffert chose various graphic designs from IKEA furniture-assembly manuals and repurposed them to fit the meaning of certain cards in traditional tarot decks.

Instead of the usual four suits of wands, cups, swords, and chalices, the IKEA tarot is divided into four brand-themed suits including sofas, lamps, dowels, and Allen keys.

The Llovers card, for example, depicts a couple who are about to assemble a piece of furniture – a playful reinterpretation of the traditional tarot card of The Lovers, with an extra L in the title to invoke the Swedish language.

"IKEA assembly manuals are already meant to be iconic and cross-cultural and so I felt like they'd done a lot of the ground work you need for a tarot deck," Leffert told Dezeen.

The Töwr tarot card, which typically depicts a solid tower on fire after being struck by lightning, has been redesigned in IKEA-style as a bookcase that is toppling over due to the weight of someone who is trying to climb it.

Other cards feature products such as IKEA's Luriga hedgehog night light, under the "lamps" suit, or an image of an L-shaped sofa being assembled.

On the back of each card is IKEA's characteristic blue and yellow colours represented in the form of two ovals to emulate the company logo.

"People go to IKEA at times of life changes – starting college, moving in, breaking up, having a baby – it's just rife with metaphors," said the creator.

"When you see an IKEA couch, you're not just seeing a couch, you're seeing a memory, a part of your life that evokes certain feelings, and what they sell there is for such basic human needs: light, comfort, a place to rest, Swedish meatballs," he added.

Leffert is selling set of the tarot cards on online retailer Etsy for $25 – or £20.23.

"Ikea is a place of transition, a journey, a source of light and comfort, but also strife. Ikea contains the universe," reads the creator's description of the cards on Etsy.

"Harness that power to understand your own life with these cleanly designed IKEA-themed tarot cards," it reads. "They'll go great sitting on your BILLY bookcase or on the table next to your MALM bed-frame."

In addition to software engineering and designing on the side, Leffert, who previously worked in Silicon Valley, is also running for president.

His campaign focuses on three main issues of the climate crisis, breaking up large tech-companies and a policy that supports immigrants.

While IKEA itself wasn't involved in the making of these tarot cards, the Swedish furniture giant isn't adverse to similar tongue-in-cheek products.

Earlier this year the company released its own playful version of the Kåma Sutra, billed as the "ultimate guide to bedroom satisfaction".

The online guide swapped sex positions for interior arrangements, proposing bedroom layouts such as Lotus Flower and Doggy Style.

The post Tarot cards predict your future in the form of IKEA infographics appeared first on Dezeen.

Digital designer Diana Ganea's LifeCredit video game imagines a dystopian future where social status is determined by a corporate credit-system that rewards or punishes citizens.

Set in the year 2050, the LifeCredit game sees players take on the character of an office worker who faces complications as they try to change their job.

This process requires undergoing a social-credit review, through a system run by an imagined private UK company.

The game is loosely based on China's social-ranking system, which was first announced back in 2014. This accumulation of data is primarily done through surveillance monitoring and government-hired "information collectors".

Currently, the system is only implemented in parts of the country but there are plans for it to be enforced on a nation-wide scale by 2020. It makes it possible for citizens to be rewarded or punished depending on their actions through point allocation, similar to a financial credit score.

Ganea's game gives players the chance to experience what it feels like to be involuntarily subject to social scoring. It also taps into recent disquiet about corporations using individual's data as a revenue stream.

"I think it is important to highlight that corporations are gathering information on people unknowing of the fact of it being collected daily," said Ganea.

"What will be the future use of it? Can laws and regulations really protect the citizen, or do the citizens need to be more aware?" she asked.

"What will happen if we were subject to a social scoring system? Will we be able to maintain the rights and freedoms we enjoy today?" added the designer.

Ganea avoided using textures and colours in the design of the game to make its world seem unreal and artificially constructed.

This white, neutral backdrop is also how she imagines interior design might look in the future – "seamless and continuous" with no obvious contrasts between doors, walls and tables.

The game designer took cues from the interactive Black Mirror: Bandersnatch film – a feature-length version of the dystopian TV show – with a choose-your-own-adventure type of plot where the viewer can dictate which direction the storyline takes.

Her LifeCredit game is based on a questionnaire that is disguised as part of the "social credit review" that takes place in the film.

"It is meant to appear as if the questionnaire gives you a chance to change the outcome of the story, but it doesn't change anything, which is the whole point of this game," Ganea explained.

While the game slightly differs from the function of a choose-your-own-adventure game, it is built using the same interactive tools. Flowcharts were used to give the scriptwriters, animators and game designers an overview of the different outcomes of each scene.

"Through collaboration with the artistic duo Javier Ruiz and Federico Pozuelo, we created a world that only holds one ending but has a range of possibilities for the course of actions," she added.

"When interacting with the 'host' and the props within the office space, it might feel that you have control over the outcome or ending, but this is not the case," said Ganea.

The only outcome of the game sees the player's social-credit score decrease to the point where they can no longer afford to keep their current job placement.

According to the designer, this is to demonstrate the effects of these systems, and how they could potentially affect everyday life.

London-based designer Keiichi Matsuda also created a dystopian future workplace, which is dominated by augmented reality in order to keep up with the growing obsession with productivity.

Called Merger, the four-minute presents an accountant who is competing with the algorithms that have taken over business and pushed many humans. The worker has optimised her environment with gesture-controlled augmented reality interfaces that allow her to be "on call" for her clients at all times.

The post LifeCredit computer game envisions a dystopian future ruled by a social credit system appeared first on Dezeen.

Louis Vuitton has released a retro-style video game called Endless Runner, which was inspired by Virgil Abloh's Autumn Winter 2019 show for the brand.

The visuals for the game were inspired by 1980s graphics and revisits the New York streetscape set that was built as part of Abloh's vision for the show earlier this year.

The game sees the player control a third-person figure that runs against a parallax scrolling background built up of streetlights, shop fronts and brick walls. The small, orange glowing figure has to dodge obstacles typical of New York such as bins, traffic cones and phone boxes and can retrieve elements of the Louis Vuitton monogram to increase their score.

To coincide with the release of the collection in stores, the game is available on Louis Vuitton's website.

Read more about video games ›

The post Explore New York with Virgil Abloh and Louis Vuitton's retro video game Endless Runner appeared first on Dezeen.

Italian fashion brand Miu Miu has collaborated with creative agency M/M Paris to design a stool punched with holes that users can endlessly customise with a series of coloured pegs.

Sturdy and stackable, the M/Matching Colorstool is a three-legged seat made of linden wood, with 300 systematically distributed holes across its surfaces.

Described as "a board game without rules", users can playfully fill in the stool's holes with differently coloured wooden pegs that resemble oversized matchsticks, to create their own personalised patterns.

Taking its design cues from brutalist architecture, the stool shares the same basic, blocky form as the seats that fashion editors sat on to watch the Miu Miu Fall Winter 2018 runway show.

The show saw playful sixties-inspired garments paired with high quiffs, flicked eyeliner and buckled belts, with the same pops of colour that can be seen on the stools' pegs.

The M/Matching Colourstool made its debut at an installation during this year's Milan design week, which took place from 9 to 14 April.

Held in the city's Teatro Gerolamo, the installation aimed to reflect the "theatrical potential" of the stool, which can "perform fantasies and distort reality".

"This edition of the stool is a manipulative entity, like a board game without rules," said Miu Miu. "It will playfully transform to illuminate the personality of its owner, its circumstances and usage, while becoming its own colourful character."

"M/M Paris approaches objects as real-life symbols and combinatory elements that are part of a wider program of signs," the brand added.

"They have designed an object with the ability to morph, so that it can be altered daily to express a palette of emotions."

Just 300 of the limited edition stools were produced, and were on sale in Miu Miu's flagship store on Via Sant'Andrea in Milan with a window display entirely dedicated to the project.

Elsewhere in the city, French architect Arthur Mamou-Mani collaborated with fashion brand COS to construct an installation from 700 bioplastic bricks in the courtyard of a 16th-century palazzo for the annual design week.

The post Miu Miu's M/Matching Colorstool is a "board game without rules" appeared first on Dezeen.

German start-up Holoride has designed a virtual-reality experience for the backseats of taxis, for passengers in autonomous vehicles or for kids on long car trips.

Holoride's games and visualisations provide entertainment that's specifically tailored to passengers, incorporating the car's real-time movements, such as acceleration and steering.

The resulting experiences are not only immersive, they help to combat motion sickness by syncing what the passenger sees with what they feel.

"People often can't enjoy transit time, because watching a movie or reading makes them feel uncomfortable," said Holoride. "Time is a precious thing, but most of it feels wasted when you are on the road."

"We believe that a precious thing should be enjoyed. No matter how far you go, a ride should make you happy, maybe even smarter or more productive."

Holoride is part of a subset of VR known as mixed-reality, or XR, because it mixes the virtual and real worlds, without entering the terrain of augmented reality.

A video promoting the concept shows the user slipping on a headset to access experiences including driving the streets of a brightly coloured cartoon city, soaring through a Jurassic landscape as a pterodactyl and shooting missiles from a careening space fighter.

When the car stops at a pedestrian crossing in real life, the passenger, in VR, gets to play a whack-a-mole-type game with the birds that waddle across it.

When the car drives along a winding road, the passenger accordingly veers and dips through forests or through space. Holoride says it is "turning vehicles into moving theme parks".

The company's content is playable through standard XR headsets, and it will soon be making a software-development kit available to creators who want to design for the platform.

Currently its technology draws on map, navigation, localisation and vehicle data, but Holoride sees this range of inputs expanding with the growth of smart cities. Other nearby cars are a potential future source of data.

While there are already plenty of use cases for the technology — from Ubers to family road trips — this could explode with the arrival of self-driving cars, which effectively eliminate drivers and make everyone a potential VR-engulfed passenger.

Holoride demonstrated its product last week at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, where it was one of the most popular items exhibited.

The start-up was founded last year by entrepreneur Nils Wollny, VR specialist Marcus Kühne and engineer Daniel Profendiner, all former or current employees of Audi who licensed the technology from the auto maker after initially developing it there.

Among other recent developments in XR is Varjo, a headset with human-eye resolution.

The post Holoride creates carsickness-battling VR experience for self-driving-car passengers appeared first on Dezeen.

An abstract chess set made from recycled materials by Marco Campardo and Lorenzo Mason is among five objects commissioned by the Ace Hotel for the fourth edition of Ready Made Go.

The objects, which will be integrated permanently into the interiors of the hotel, were shown in the Ready Made Go exhibition in the lobby of the Ace Hotel in Shoreditch during the London Design Festival.

For the fourth year designers were commissioned by the hotel team, alongside Ready Made Go curator and Modern Design Review editor Laura Houseley, to create objects and furniture.

The project begins with a wish list of objects from the hotel, which can range from basic items such as door handles to more outlandish ideas such as a climbing wall. Houseley is tasked with matching up the items with the London-based studios who are best suited to designing them.

"Trying to match an object with somebody who is already working with a particular material or method is part of the challenge," Houseley told Dezeen.

"Each year we have designers who are well known and some who are very much not. I hope Ready Made Go gives a good overview of what is going on in design in London at the moment."

Following on from last year's Ready Made Go 3 collection, where each of the objects were made from recycled materials, sustainable surface material specialists Alusid returned to Ready Made Go.

This time Alusid worked with Marco Campardo and Lorenzo Mason of M-L-XL, to create a games table in cast Silicastone – a material made from fused recycled glass and ceramics.

The table features a unique white-to-black gradient surface inspired by the black-and-white checkered pattern of the traditional chessboard, and comes with a series of matching oversized chess and draught pieces made in the same material.

"Our ethos is rooted in our attention to modes of production and local resources, and we are particularly interested in making as a form of knowledge-production," said Campardo and Mason.

"That is why our work explores the use of different materials and traditional craftsmanship, bringing those forms of knowledge to life in the contemporary context."

Designed for use in the hotel's Hoi Polloi restaurant, London-based design brand Minimalux contributed a minimalist two-tier cake stand made from polished quartz and hand finished brass.

"In general it is always very nice to be given a brief... it can be challenging and open new, perhaps surprising, channels of thought that otherwise wouldn't have arisen," commented Minimalux founders Mark Holmes and Tamara Caspersz.

"The result is a design that we're proud of."

Swiss-born, London-based Laetitia de Allegri's sturdy tableware is cut from sheets of blue-powder-coated stainless steel, which are then welded together.

Named Secant, after the geometry that inspired it, the collection features straight lines that cut perfect curves in two or more parts. "The aim for me was to create pieces that are practical, yet elegant and carry a story," said de Allegri.

Secant includes a cutlery/napkin holder, bread basket, caddy, and large and small trays, all of which will be used in the hotel for special events on the seventh floor.

Recent Kingston School of Art graduates Will Drye and Dom Postlethwaite of industrial design studio WD-DP created a set of wall hooks made using the simple process of tube pinching.

Tubular steel, with a 19 millimetre diameter, is bent and partially flattened to allow the hooks to sit flush to the wall, while the back is fitted with a wooden block that prevents the hangers from scratching the wall surface.

"By celebrating these off-the-shelf materials and common processes, we aimed for the object to place a higher value on industrial materials and simplicity of manufacture," said the duo.

The collection of items was completed by co-founder of craft studio Forest + Found Abigail Boot, who has made a bedspread called Raised Ground using a natural homemade dye.

The unique taupe-coloured dye was made by Booth using clay that she sourced from the foundation of a nearby building in east London.

For the first time, this year's Ready Made Go showcase also includes a retrospective exhibition in the hotel's lobby. Gathered together in a single display for the first time, the retrospective takes a look back at all 18 products that have been created for the Ace Hotel across the project's three previous editions.

"All of the pieces are still in use and I love that they are always here," explained Houseley. "When we commission the designers we are very clear that the items have to have longevity."

"The door handle by Philippe Malouin is one of my favourites. It's made from an industrial Allen Key and it's the most perfect shape and size," continued Houseley.

"For me that is the spirit of the project – a really awkward brief with really tough constraints that requires a solution with ingenuity that doesn't require spending a lot of money."

Other exhibitions at London Design Festival, which ran from 15 to 23 September, include an exhibition of furniture by emerging Uruguayan design studios at Aram Gallery, and another of work by Japanese master metalworkers at Japan House.

The post Abstract chess set and blue tableware created for London's Ace Hotel appeared first on Dezeen.

A new exhibition at the V&A in London explores the designs of video games of the past decade. In a Dezeen exclusive, curator Marie Foulston picks out five of the most groundbreaking examples and reveals the stories behind them.

Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt opened at the V&A earlier this month and continues until 24 February 2019.

The exhibition sets out to reveal the cutting-edge technology and craft behind today's video games. According to curator Marie Foulston, who is also co-founder of game collective Wild Rumpus, we have recently experienced a radical period in video game history.

Technological advances, from the widespread use of social media to the rise of open-source making, has led to a range of pioneering approaches to gaming. The results include the emergence of esports stadium events and worldwide player communities.

Foulston talks through her five top picks from the show below:

Journey

"Journey is a visually lavish online multiplayer game with a difference. Thatgamecompany, an independent design studio, aspired to create game that would evoke a range of emotional experiences they felt were rarely present in games, those of empathy, love and awe. Players travel through a vast desert landscape, meeting with other online players anonymously on their way.

"The game was initially released digitally via the PlayStation Network, and launched to widespread critical acclaim and commercial success, receiving numerous Game of the Year accolades in 2012.

"Journey stands as a landmark work fully embodying the ambition and hopefulness of the early 2010s, a period in games filled with optimism about the creativity of a new wave of independent designers and the potential offered by digital distribution."

Building MegaObjects in Minecraft


"In 2010, YouTube user Halkun uploaded a video entitled Building MegaObjects in Minecraft. 'Hi there everybody' he says, ‘this is Halkun and I'm going to demonstrate to you how I really don't play Minecraft like other people.' The in-game camera then pans round to reveal a 1:1 scale replica of the Starship Enterprise.

"Back in 2010, Halkun's way of playing within the newly-released Minecraft was not simply hugely impressive, but by his own admission incredibly unexpected. In contrast, today we speak of Minecraft as 'the Lego of videogames' as much a game as a tool. The openness of Minecraft, its lack of parameters or goals, has led to many creative uses, such as huge feats of construction, engineering, storytelling or game design.

"This video stands not only as a critical moment in the evolution of the way we 'play' Minecraft, but one which highlights how vital the rise of social video platforms such as YouTube were in building the success of Minecraft."

Twine

"Originally released in 2009, Twine is a tool that enables the creation of interactive fiction and text-based games. Using a visual drag and drop interface, it doesn't require any experience of programming.

"Whilst Twine games might at first appear deceptively simple, the freedom and flexibility the platform affords has given rise to some of the most experimental and forward-thinking games in recent years. If you're not familiar with Twine games, then a few recommendations from some truly iconic contemporary designers include Queers in Love at the End of the World by Anna Anthropy, Even Cowgirls Bleed by Christine Love and With Those We Love Alive by Porpentine.

"Twine sits alongside Unity, Ren'Py and GameMaker Studio as tools which in the past few decades have helped lower the barriers to making games through their accessibility and relative ease of use. However, it is perhaps Twine which stands out as one of the most radical.

Line Wobbler

"Creator Robin Baumgarten was inspired to create Line Wobbler after watching a viral YouTube cat video in which a cat wakes up his owner every morning by flicking a spring like doorstop. Like the video that inspired it, it is a mischievous and playful video game.

"The game consists of a single strip of programmable LED lights that act as the game's screen. It is played using a giant spring-shaped controller that players wobble back and forth to guide their 'character' through a series of 'dungeons' and traverse obstacles.

"The game is part of a growing alt.ctrl scene which has seen game designers develop new forms of interaction, exploring the physical potential of videogames. They create games which reach beyond the screen to create physical and playful works of spectacle and performance."

بونج

"Pronounced 'boonj', بونج is a recreation of the classic game Pong undertaken by computer scientist and game designer Ramsey Nasser. What makes this version so unique is that Nasser created it using alb, spelled قلب, a programming language he developed which uses the Arabic alphabet.

"Nasser's work highlights the language barriers present within digital design, where all major programming languages are based on the Latin alphabet. Sadly, Nasser acknowledges that alb is not feasible for use on a wider scale, as its simply is not compatible with today's digital infrastructures.

"Whilst the past 15 years of videogame design is often held up as a period of democratisation, paving the way for new voices and new ideas, we still have a very long way to go before we can consider the medium truly diverse. Boonj stands as just one reminder of the many barriers to access that still persist for some, often in unseen ways."

The post V&A curator Marie Foulston describes five pioneering designs in Videogames exhibition appeared first on Dezeen.

French illustrator Jean Jullien has collaborated with start-up Yolky Games to design a card game that will feature a series of playful dog drawings.

Called Dodgy Dogs, the game will feature an assortment of different breeds of dogs that are each misbehaving – chewing, stealing, humping and escaping.

Players of the game will take it in turns to lay a card down on the table that must match either the breed, or the behaviour, of the dog on the previous card. The winning player is the person that gets rid of their cards the fastest.

"Dodgy Dogs is a playful approach to the honest and comical world of man's best friends," said Yolky Games.

There are currently 15 dogs in the collection, including a basset hound, bull terrier, chow chow, bloodhound, sharpei and whippet. Each character is drawn by Jullien, who previously redrew Dezeen's logo, in his signature style.

"Jean Julien has meticulously illustrated each card with his distinctive black brush strokes, light-heartedly drawn characters and distinguished hued simplicity," said the brand.

"Its modest simplicity mirrors not only Jean's approach to his body of work but also the simple joys of life."

Yolky Games reached out to Jullien after seeing his picture book Under Dogs, which features a series of satirical vignettes of dogs getting into trouble.

A list of dog breeds was then confirmed and sent over to the illustrator, who is based in London.

"The entire concept of this project plays around the idea simplicity, so the rules follow that thread. At the start of the game, you are dealt a hand of Dodgy Dogs. They will be one of four different sizes, and they will all be performing one of twelve different bad behaviours," explained Yolky Games.

"The first player places one of their dogs down on the table. The player to their left must then match either the size, or the behaviour of that dog, and place theirs on top. If they can't, they have to pick up cards from the stockpile until they can place one down. And so it goes."

There will also be special cards like the Dog Whisperer, which allows a player to play any dog they like, and a Wild Card, which makes every player swap cards.

Jullien, who graduated from the Royal College of Art in 2010, rose to prominence with his Peace for Paris illustration, created in response to the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, which became a shared symbol of unity in the aftermath.

More recent work sees the illustrator tell the story of furniture brand Emeco in an animation short and turn faces into plates for Case Studyo.

The post Jean Jullien illustrates card game with playful dogs appeared first on Dezeen.

Not heading to Milan design week this year? Fear not, Dezeen's latest competition offers all readers missing out the chance to win a Fuorisalone-themed board game.

This competition is now closed. Congratulations to the winners, which are Eleanore Kiely from York Harbor, USA, Lauren Sherman-Boemker from Denver, USA, Annabel Greaves from Telford, UK, Kimberley Ryan from Huddersfield, UK, and Jo Boyd from Suffolk, UK.

See more competitions with great prizes currently on Dezeen ›

To celebrate its 15th anniversary, Fuorisalone – the official guide to Milan design week – has launched a game that sees players visit different design districts, from Brera to 5VIE, as they move around the board.

Designed for two to four players, the game asks participants to collect different location cards from different events. Each of the cards represents a different design object and are worth different points.

There are 68 key design locations on the map, including La Triennale di Milano, Spazio Rossana Orlandi and popular drinking spot Bar Basso.

A timetable divides the design week schedule into the morning, afternoon and evening. For each time slot, there are four events taking place at the same time in different locations.

Players have to plan their moves to be able to attend the best events – thus receiving the higher scoring cards.

The winner is the player who best moves around the city, finding the most important places and events according to the time of the day, just as it happens in real life.

Christian Confalonieri, co-founder of Studiolabo and of Fuorisalone's website, said he hopes the game can also work as an educational tool – teaching players about Milan's key events and locations.

"Our objective was to create a truly original game, not just a gadget for the event, but something that could evoke the atmosphere of Fuorisalone, simple and easy to play with by anyone and at any time, also those who don't know anything about Fuorisalone," he said.

"Board games are becoming very popular and a project for a board game is a fully-fledged design project, much more complex than it might seem, at which a team of game designers, graphic designers and experts in usability, marketing and communication all worked hand in hand for months."

Milan design week is taking place this year from 17 to 22 April. Dezeen's pick of the best exhibitions includes a celebration of a "modern Norway", and a faceted mirror structure set inside a historic palazzo.

Five winners will each win a Fuorisalone board game, which is also available to buy from the Fuorisalone website.

Competition closes 15 May 2018. The winners will be selected at random and notified by email, and their names will be published at the top of this page.

The post Competition: win a Milan design week board game appeared first on Dezeen.

Bjarke Ingels' firm has unveiled a duplicate version of its website that mimics 1980s video game Arkanoid (+ game).

BIG teamed up with digital programmers Ruby Studio to create Arkinoid – a website that takes its cues from the arcade game released by game developer Taito in 1986.

The original game invited users to move a digital platform from side to side, with either a joystick or control pad. At the same time, a virtual ball would be bouncing around the screen destroying bricks.

The aim was to keep the ball from dropping off the screen.

In BIG's version, the bricks are replaced with the tiled icons that the firm creates to represent each of its projects. These tiles are arranged differently for each level.

The subtle change in name is a play on the Danish word for architecture, "arkitektur".

"Arkinoid brings back the good old nostalgia by reinterpreting the famous classic Arkanoid, BIG style!" said the firm.

"The BIG version lets you destroy our website icons," it added. "The icons are reconfigured in different ways depending on the level, and each level gets more complex and harder to complete, kind of like architecture!"

The game is available to play online at arkinoid.big.dk. At time of publishing the top score was 9,223,372,036,854,775,807.

BIG has developed a reputation for bringing an element of fun into its architecture, and founder Bjarke Ingels previously said that architecture could be more like computer game Minecraft.

The firm, which has offices in New York and Copenhagen, has recently completed a cloud-like pavilion, an "unzipped wall" Serpentine Gallery Pavilion and a triangular tower block.

Other projects underway include a power station with a ski-on roof, a Lego visitor centre and a Google HQ that will be built by robots.

The post BIG transforms its website into a classic 1980s arcade game appeared first on Dezeen.

Graduate shows 2016: these simple, wooden blocks designed by Royal College of Art graduate Václav Mlynář's contain a door to a hidden world that can only be unlocked by an iPad (+ movie).

A student of the MA Design Products course, Mlynář designed the Koski game as a way for children to combine physical and digital play.

Kids connect the building blocks in real life to create a structure that a virtual character can run through, climb over or jump off.

The blocks are captured on screen by way of the iPad's camera, while the accompanying app, using object recognition technology, augments the structure with additional details, like trees, ladders and waterfalls.

To alter the path of the game's spindly limbed blue protagonist, the players must alter the blocks in front of them rather than touching the screen.

They can also alter the game by adding tokens of various colours – each representing different objects, features and behaviours – to the board.

Through this mechanism, they can lead their character to complete quests, solve problems, resolve mazes and build complex worlds.

Mlynář joins the ranks of game developers like Sensible Object, which is also combining physical and digital technology in its output.

Mlynář designed Koski as one game initially, but he sees the potential for the technology to be expanded into a platform for multiple games with different rules and environments.

His wooden blocks look simple but feature sphere magnets in their joints, which means they will always roll into place to connect to another block, and never repel it.

As a result of being magnetised, the blocks can be connected at height and form a relatively stable structure.

Koski was on display at the ShowRCA 2016 exhibition, held at the Royal College of Art's Kensington campus from 26 June to 3 July 2016.

Dezeen was media partner for the event, which also showcased wearable sex toys, a tool to transform the human voice into instruments and a set of "cute" kitchen appliances.

The post Václav Mlynár combines physical and digital play in Koski board game appeared first on Dezeen.

Future Makers: advances in digital tools are enabling independent game developers to move into hardware as well as software, says Alex Fleetwood of start-up Sensible Object, which is developing a new hybrid game called Fabulous Beasts (+ movie).

"Small, independent game developers have been working in software for a long time," Fleetwood says in the movie, which was filmed at Sensible Object's London studio. "Over the last five years it is starting to become possible in hardware electronics as well."

Fleetwood founded Sensible Object last year with the aim of developing games that combine the physical interaction of traditional board games with digital gameplay.

"We're a design studio making games that combine physical and digital play," he explains. "I think it is a really exciting time to be investigating this relationship between games and hardware."

The start-up's first game, which Fleetwood hopes to launch via crowdfunding platform Kickstarter next year, is called Fabulous Beasts.

Players take turns to build a tower by balancing plastic blocks on top of each other. Each physical piece they play has an impact on the digital part of the game, which is playable on a mobile device connected via Bluetooth.

"The tower rests on a smart sensing platform, which translates every piece into an equivalent in the connected digital world," Fleetwood explains. "As players build the tower it becomes more elaborate and complex and consequently the digital world they are creating becomes higher scoring. The aim of the game is to get the highest score before the tower falls down."

The basic pieces in the game, which are each identified via an embedded RFID (radio-frequency identification) chip, consist of different animals. Players are able to augment and evolve these animals in the digital game by playing other pieces on top of them.

"A bear and an eagle might be combined into a hybrid called a 'beagle'," Fleetwood explains. "Or an octopus might migrate onto land and become a 'rocktopus'."

Sensible Object iterated various hardware prototypes for Fabulous Beasts as they refined the mechanics of the game, before settling on the current design.

Fleetwood says that this was only possible because of the wide range of affordable and accessible digital tools that have become available to independent designers over the last five years.

"We now have a set of tools at our disposal that allow us to design, prototype and scale very rapidly," he says. "On the one had we have electronics prototyping tools like Arduino, on the other we can create and test pieces using a 3D printer and then of course there is a linking software layer that hinges the rest of that together."

Sensible Object's product designer Tim Burrell-Saward uses a combination of Autodesk 3ds Max and Fusion 360 software to design and refine the pieces.

Subscribe to Dezeen's YouTube channel for the latest architecture and design movies

"Tim uses 3ds Max to do the surface modelling and then he's translating that into Fusion 360 to do the solid modelling," Fleetwood explains. "We come up with an idea for the piece, we print it out, we can then integrate it into the game and play with it very quickly."

Future Makers is a collaboration between Dezeen and Autodesk exploring how designers are harnessing new digital tools and advanced manufacturing technology to pioneer the future of making things. You can watch all the movies in the series as we publish them on our YouTube playlist:

The post Indie developer Sensible Object merges physical and digital gameplay with Fabulous Beasts appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: the Game Developers Conference is refreshingly free of the superstar egos and the luxury brands that dominate architecture biennales and furniture fairs – and much more significant for the future of design, says Kieran Long.

The most important design event in the world is one you've probably never heard of, or, if you have, one you've almost certainly never attended. You can keep the Venice Architecture Biennale or the Milan Furniture Fair, Tokyo Designers' Week or Design Indaba.

GDC, the Game Developers Conference, which happened in San Francisco the week before last, is where 26,000 video game designers get together to talk about the state of their art. And in their generosity, diversity, and technical sophistication, the talks there show gaming to be a discipline from which the rest of design can learn a great deal.

The most striking thing of all was spending a week in a design community where personality and image play very little part. Imagine architecture or furniture design, but without the big, swinging egos of the superstars. Game designers' work has much bigger audiences than either of the above, but you won't find much posturing or manifesto-writing here.

San Francisco becomes a crossroads, for a week every year, for a design field with no real centre. There aren't any particular cities, or even countries, that monopolise the production of video games. A team can be distributed across the world, in nondescript places, or in a few hubs (Montreal, Stockholm, Austin) that emerge because a large, global studio is based there, spawning other, younger ones over the years.

The conference itself is a true industry event. There's a show floor with sales people flogging their latest wares, from eye-tracking interfaces to virtual reality headsets or the latest iteration of a game engine. But the focus of GDC is a packed talks programme, with 20-30 parallel lectures going on all day, every day, while the conference is open.

These talks range from industry veterans telling the story of how a classic game from the past was conceived and designed, to instructional talks of hair-raising specificity and technical depth. In that category, I passed on the opportunity to learn about how to design better barnets in Augmented Hair in Deus Ex Universe projects: TressFX 3.0. But I did stop by several astonishing talks, perhaps best of which was Do Artists Dream of Electric Sheep, given by Grant Duncan, the art director of Hello Games, based in Guildford, England.

Duncan spoke modestly but brilliantly on No Man's Sky, one of the most anticipated games in development today, explaining step by step the tools they have built that will generate an explorable universe of 18 quintillion unique planets each with unique landscape, flora and fauna.

No Man's Sky by Hello Games 

Duncan, and his colleagues at Hello, should be numbered amongst Britain's most exciting young designers. First of all, and unlike their architectural colleagues, they've found a genuinely beautiful use for parametric design: creating infinite combinations of geology, geography, ecology, animal and plant life to make a believable dramatic setting for a game. Despite its machine-generated nature, the visual language that results is nonetheless totally coherent, and clearly inspired by the illustrators Duncan professes his love for, like Ralph McQuarrie and Chris Foss.

Most game designers don't talk much about their influences, or if they do it's not very convincing. Duncan is an exception, reclaiming artists whose science fiction idiom has been out of fashion for decades, and deriving surprising and compelling design directions from their neglected work. Most obviously inspired by these artists' technicolor universes was the idea of designing a video game set in space without using the colour black, something that Hello Games are on their way to achieving.

Almost as compelling was Jane Ng, lead artist of Campo Santo, a San Francisco studio working on a game set in the Wyoming wilderness. Firewatch is a strange proposition whose protagonist is an overweight, lonely, middle-aged man with a job watching out for wildfires in a national park. The flat colour, cartoonish landscape was partly conceived by Olly Moss, the British graphic artist who has moved from film posters into game design. Ng's account of how she translated that graphic style into a dynamic, 3D landscape, complete with heartbreaking sunsets, showed a straightforward joy in this kind of collaboration – the technical mastery that allows a graphic vision to become a fully realised world.

Firewatch by Campo Santo

Both these examples are from "independent" studios, small teams of less than a dozen people dedicated to a single project for years at a time. And if there is anywhere in gaming where there is some evidence of a star system, it is amongst these independent, artistically motivated groups. But compared to what the rest of design is used to, it's modest in the extreme.

Asking a few industry veterans why this was, the most common answer was that the games industry is just not used to taking itself that seriously. The lack of ego is related to the fact that there's still a sense, even within the profession, of games being a lower artform than others.

I went to GDC precisely because video games seem to me an unignorable field of design and popular culture. But you don't find a braying, overconfident group of people with no need for the rest of culture. Despite the astonishing financial and cultural success of many games, there's a reticence about seeing game design as related to the rest of design history.

Some of the debates within games can look naive from the point of view of disciplines with centuries-old discourses built around them. Everything seems to be at stake all the time: from the inclusion of ethnic minorities and women in the ranks of designers or as characters in games themselves, to the economics of the industry or how gaming can lose its reliance on beefcake protagonists setting the world to rights with the help of firearms.

But this is not naivety, it's a discipline with a heightened sense of itself and its own discourse. Yes, the misogynist attacks of the Gamergate "campaign" cast a depressing light on the culture of games fans, but it has provoked a debate in public about such issues.

Last year I attended compelling conference sessions covering such topics as how to depict believable love stories (gay, straight and between different species of alien) in games, and how to avoid creating a culture of harassment at industry parties. This year there were many similar sessions. Which other design field is so ready to discuss these things at the top table?

Perhaps, after all, I'm just relieved to attend an event where we escape the overweening luxury brands that dominate design festivals. At GDC you might get a can of Monster energy drink or a free packet of chocolate-covered bacon handed to you by a hopeful marketer (this actually happened), but there's not much more romancing than that. Just good conversation about design with committed people in a beautiful city. And my work doesn't get much better than that.

Main image courtesy of Game Developers Conference.

Kieran Long is keeper of the design, architecture and digital department of the Victoria & Albert Museum. He presents Restoration Home and the series The £100,000 House for the BBC.

The post "The most important design event in the world is one you've probably never heard of" appeared first on Dezeen.

Opinion: in a desperate grab to attract the attention of children reared on digital devices, board game manufacturers have forgotten that interaction design matters more than brand extensions, says Alexandra Lange.

I went online recently to buy my favourite board game: Othello. Or should I say re-buy? My grandmother still has the set on which I learned to play, stacked on a high shelf with Candyland and Hungry Ant, bingo, a baby animal memory game, and the little-known word-game Probe.

My family's smaller travel set, a hinged green plastic box that flipped open, has been lost. Sold, perhaps, with our minivan, along with action figures stuck beneath the floor mats. Othello, with its baize gridded board, black-and-white pieces, Helvetica logo, and roll-top storage slots would seem to have timeless design. Mass-market yet elegant, each element had a purpose and all of these came together in a tidy package nice enough to leave out on the coffee table.

Of course, they'd messed it up. New Othello has a blue plastic board with curved, muscular edges, as if Old Othello had started drinking protein shakes. New Othello has shrunken chips and a board that flexes as you play. New Othello abandons the old, ominous-yet-exciting tagline "A minute to learn… a lifetime to master" for "Simple, fast-flipping fun!" New Othello sees itself in competition with sports. Old Othello didn't have to beg for your attention.

New Othello has a lot of Amazon reviews suggesting you try to find a vintage set. Which I did, on Etsy, for about the same cost. It wasn't the first time, either. Over my seven-plus years as a parent, I've bought airports, sewing patterns and plastic plates (the latter, designed by Massimo Vignelli for Heller, also sport a Helvetica logo) all on Etsy or Ebay.

It's not just nostalgia that I seek, though I did buy my daughter the Fisher Price A-frame dollhouse I never had, but games and toys where design serves as a platform for play – not suggesting narratives, not imposing gender norms, not rushing to capitalise on the latest fad.

Games that have withstood the fads of fashion and television should look like it: generic, sturdy, and most of all clear. The basics of interaction design are there in anything you have to explain to a three-year-old: anything unnecessary you simply skip over or leave out, a sort of mental swipe. I never realised how good my childhood was – design-wise, at least – until I got a look at the products aimed at today's youth.

Othello and I are approximately the same age, so it was bought new for my cousins and me. The version of my youth was designed by Goro Hasegawa in Japan in 1971, and distributed in the United States by Gabriel and then Pressman. Based on a late 19th-century game still sold as Reversi, Hasegawa's version became a cult hit in Japan and beyond.

A November 1976 issue of Time magazine noted: "Today Othello is a national pastime played by some 25 million Japanese — and a full-blown fad replete with towels, tie clasps, and key chains, all emblazoned with the distinctive Othello emblem." According to Time the design was suggested by Hasegawa's father, a Shakespearean scholar, who thought the battle between black and white in the game had parallels to the "dramatic reversals" of the Moor's play.

Othello and Reversi are also both simplified versions of the even-more-ancient game of Go, traditionally played with black and white stones on a gridded wood board. Scaled down in size, with a simplified rulebook, Othello became a game that levelled the playing field between children and adults, and could be completed in a short, focused burst. For the parent, it is a welcome relief from the doldrums of Candyland and Snakes and Ladders (known in the US as Chutes and Ladders) – games that also require no reading but consequently require very little strategy.

But Othello isn't the only classic game that's undergone an unnecessary and play-inhibiting transformation. Snakes and Ladders has a long history, recently chronicled by Doug Bierend at Re:form who writes that the game originally included moral lessons – land on a square with a bad choice and you were sent sliding back down a nasty snake – although those "choices" were made by arbitrary rolls of the dice.

The snakes were eliminated for the US edition produced in the 1940s by Milton Bradley, whose vast game holdings also included Barrel of Monkeys, Battleship, Connect Four, LIFE and Operation. Renamed as Chutes and Ladders, the lessons became softer and simpler. In today's US version, published by Hasbro, you slide down a chute for colouring on the wall, climb a ladder for taking out the trash.

Fair enough, but the chutes, ladders, and children have been made so large that there's no room on a rectangle for your playing piece. When I tried to play with my children, we got confused about how to occupy the space of the board. The redesign seemed to have been intended for the appearance of fun – all those bouncing, big-head children – rather than the performance of it.

Hasbro also introduced identity politics into the playing pieces. The 1950s version of the game I used to play had coloured pegs in red, yellow, blue and green. It's now populated by a set of four illustrated children, carefully balanced for race and gender. This introduces a completely unnecessary specificity – my daughter kept searching for the girl who looked like her (who didn't exist) when she could have just picked red.

The older version of the game suggested a fluid narrative, where you became the child, good or bad, whose space you happened to occupy. Now there's a conflict: are you the black-haired girl of your playing piece, or the baseball-hat boy on the board?

Worse still is what's happened to Candyland. Some versions have kept the coloured gingerbread men as playing pieces, but others have moved toward kawaii, giving kids a choice between "a melting ice cream cone, a screaming gumdrop, a gingerbread girl, or a marshmallow with bloodshot eyes," as the Peachie Speechie blog put it. The benevolent candy rulers have also become increasingly detailed and voluptuous lords and princesses, with tight superhero-style costumes, high heels and short skirts – Bratz in the sugar shop.

There's a Disney Princess Candyland edition that eliminates boy playing pieces entirely, despite the fact that your goal is now to "Be the first Disney Princess to dance at the ball!" As philosophers of the romantic comedy have long argued, the prince – played by one of the generic brown-haired Chrises now popular in Hollywood – is hardly the point. We know the name of the actresses in the new live-action Cinderella (Lily, Cate, Helena) but I'll never learn who plays Prince Charming.

Brand extensions have come to many a board game – a move that looks like a last gasp at relevance. Clue, which I also played in its 1980s sans-serif, English country mansion iteration, now includes a garage with a sportscar on its house plan board, and has a range of tie-in editions, from Firefly to Harry Potter to The Simpsons.

Monopoly (a game I've never been able to sit through) has been Frozen. Vintage Clue emphasised the colour names given to the players, from yellow Colonel Mustard to blue Mrs. Peacock, but that small bit of wordplay now seems lost along with (for many) the game's origins in Agatha Christie. The board now has the aesthetic of a video game, which is probably the point. All these 3D games feel their market pinched by the digital realm – and yet, despite the graphic wonders of truly digital games like Monument Valley, Othello apps are no more elegant than that blue board.

Families like ours turn back to board games to get the children looking at something besides a screen, strategising out loud and with physical blocks, discs, or gingerbread men rather than the Minecraft ones. If it is nostalgia, it is nostalgia for a type of interaction rather than a specific game or toy. The pleasure of tucking those Fisher Price Little People into their bunks, of stacking the Heller plates into a rainbow, of drawing the Neapolitan card and leapfrogging over your brother to Ice Cream Floats.

As toys get bloated and plastics thinned, as games get sloppily illustrated or brand extended to absurdity, those interactions become less satisfying. It's harder to find the fun, because there are so many big heads and ill-fitting pieces to ignore. It's nice that we can re-buy the past so easily, that Etsy serves as an alternate-reality Amazon marketplace, until you stop to think of all the tricked-out and pumped-up games in the real marketplace, ready to confuse, frustrate and break.

Alexandra Lange is a New York-based architecture and design critic. She was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard's Graduate School of Design for academic year 2013-2014 and is the author of Writing About Architecture: Mastering the Language of Buildings and Cities as well as the e-book The Dot-Com City: Silicon Valley Urbanism. 

The post "Games that have withstood the fads of fashion and television should look like it" appeared first on Dezeen.

A graduate from the Bartlett School of Architecture has turned the iconic Barbican Estate in London into the setting for a proposed augmented-reality video game (+ movie).

Edward Mascarenhas created the game Barbecana during his studies with the Bartlett's Unit 24, which focused on using the moving image to create and understand architectural environments, under the theme "collision".

The project proposes creating a fully immersive video game environment that would be overlaid onto real buildings and spaces around the estate, using augmented-reality technology. This would allow multiple players to roam the real Barbican's elevated walkways and corridors to collect virtual architectural elements.

With the pieces they collect, the players would then compete to build bridges, battling to create the longest and tallest structures.

"The area directly surrounding the Barbican itself has these elevated walkways that are heavily underused for a central London location," Mascarenhas told Dezeen.

"It is a very unique space which is completely under-valued and is suited to be re-appropriated without physically transforming it."

"This is the essence of the project, the ability for augmented reality to be more then a simple graphical overlay, to speculate on how such technologies could be used to radically transform the atmosphere of the built environment without physically altering the space," he said.

As well as offering a fun experience, the game is designed as a commentary on the current relationship between design and construction in London, "highlighting the current games played by construction industries", said Mascarenhas.

He created a video mock-up of the game using 3D modelling programs Rhinoceros and 3DS Max. The computer generated environments were merged with real-life footage of the Barbican using the programme Boujou, with other visual effects produced using Adobe After Effects.

The full augmented-reality version of Barbecana is still just a concept, although Mascarenhas has developed a simplified version for a board game.

"A set of rules has been fully developed but the kit of parts used to play the game is only slightly developed," he said.

"The augmented reality technology needed to play does exist but is not developed enough to produce the same level of immersion seen in the video. Ideally the game would be developed further to include many more architectural packs to play with as well, so in a sense this is a proposal but also a playable proposal."

The project complemented Mascarenhas' written thesis, which examined the relationship between architecture and play.

"As well as studying the effects games like Grand Theft Auto V have on the discourse of a modern metropolis like Los Angeles, this took the form of a written parody of the famous Reyner Banham Loves LA, where Professor Reyner Banham acted out an edited cultural representative tour of the city," explained Mascarenhas.

The post Barbecana by Edward Mascarenhas turns the Barbican into a video game appeared first on Dezeen.

Milan 2010: Eindhoven collective La Bolleur will construct a mini golf course in Zona Tortona in Milan this April.

The nine-hole course will be constructed from wood and include a clubhouse with bar.

The project was first shown in October during Dutch Design Week 2009. These photographs show the course installed at La Bolleur's headquarters in Eindhoven.

See all our stories about Milan 2010 in our special category.

The text below is from La Bolleur:

This spring Zona Tortona will literally be the playground of the guys from La Bolleur for five days since they decided to bring their Mini Golf Club abroad! During the Milan Design Week you'll find their space at Via Vogehra 11 in Milan, Italy. Make sure that your practise is up to Par!

It has been 5 years since Timon van der Hijden, Zowie Jannink and Steie van Vugt decided to change the scene at La Bolleur - a former brothel in the city of Eindhoven.

They literally transformed this inglorious lounge and made it their own by undertaking major creative projects which the city of Eindhoven never experienced before.

La Bolleur revived and instantly became a very honourable cultural meeting place where people could get together. The atmosphere was set by establishing a fully operating (pop up) restaurant for two years in a row, plus a legendary comedy night with Hollands' leading comedians.

As well as the many performances by musicians and DJ's, numerous movie nights and exhibitions before this re-established lounge was demolished.

In the meantime La Bolleur had become a multidisciplinary collective with a fun sense of self esteem and with five new members; Cris Bartels, Bram Burger, Ivo J. Daniëls, Mark van Gennip and Frank Winnubst. A new location presented itself rather quickly in the form of an abandoned farmhouse in the city centre of Eindhoven that was renamed - of course - La Bolleur.

It comes as no surprise that this collective with their 'hands-on' mentality, appeared on many events all over the Netherlands and even exhibited at the 'Salone del Mobile' in Milan.

There, they were also responsible for the infamous unannounced party in an empty pool where thousands of people were present.

Today La Bolleur is more visible than ever, especially after winning a Dutch Design Award in 2009 for their excellent method of communicating their brand. La Bolleur presented itself as a mini golf club; with a self constructed nine hole course and a clubhouse with bar.

With a theme like mini golf, which appeals to many people La Bolleur proved again that they can also serve a more broad and diverse audience and even create events that perhaps seemed out of their league.

The post Mini Golf Club by La Bolleur appeared first on Dezeen.