Interior Design Year 2 students have responded to the idea that game play makes and breaks rules and challenges conventions to propose new realities. In Semester 1, they began to develop games where participants act out a series of scenarios that reflect ordinary life, a tiny part of it, or fantasy. They also provided creative rationales for their games, communicating situation and context, and considered risks and rewards. They developed terminology to describe the game narratives; thought about the scale (e.g. card, board, street, virtual game); and reflected on the interplay between artefacts, mechanics and world-building that games and gaming can offer for spatially engaging with the world. This semester, they’ve been working on more fully realising their proposed games, discussing directions, and testing and demonstrating their games in studio. Let’s play…

Interior Design Year 3 students have used play as a lens to investigate vernacular dwelling spaces, particularly tenement housing, in partnership with their course mates at GSA Singapore, who have been looking at Housing and Development Board (HDB) apartment blocks. After all, ‘home’ is a created space impacted by geography, events and politics. They’ve considered shaping factors like design heritage, design-overdistance, social impact, identity, and personalisation. They’ve also explored aspects like inside-out dialectic, patterns of spatial occupation, aesthetics, symbolism, and functional objects. And they’ve augmented interior design strategies with approaches borrowed from other fields and disciplines. In Semester 1, students made image and text portfolios that creatively relate to these habitable spaces. In Semester 2, they’ve developed these materials and inspirations into artefacts – for example, models, audio, video, manifestos, and prints.