‘Spector - the sustainability inspector’: Participatory teaching, learning and evaluation game for architects, architecture students and pupils

Abstract

Architects, whether they are researchers, practitioners or teachers need better and improved tools to enable them communicate more effectively, change power relationships, co-construct knowledge and engage in real life problems. It is this that stimulated us to develop our own tool in the form of a game to contribute to the debate. Architects should be able to use their creative potential to design innovative tools for evaluating architectural design, and its sustainable aspects. By using such tools they may also be able to put themselves in a teaching role and create a learning experience for participants. Our experience from testing the game internationally in two primary and one secondary school with pupils made us believe that games need serious attention and consideration as a useful alternative to traditional teaching and research tools.

Keywords

• games
• design
• teaching and research in architecture
• participatory evaluation
• sustainable schools