AdHoc Architects

During the summer of 2011, I worked on a project concept for the Best Scene in Town challenge with Jonathan Baldwin, Alex Gekker, and Hirumi Nanayakkara. From the official contest site: ‘Best Scene in Town’ is a mobile design challenge that explores how we can interact with the city through our mobile phones. In ‘Best Scene in Town’ student teams enter a series of hands-on creative sessions to design, develop and ultimately pilot their mobile concepts for a live audience with the 7scenes platform.

My team ended up winning the competion and we were flown to Amsterdam to present and pilot our concept. Below is a description of our roject, but make sure to take a look at the full proposal on the BSIT website and our final implementation website.


Concept

Weave PICNIC’s theme of Urban Futures and pop-up / ad-hoc city microcosms and social market bazaars into a physical social networking application via 7scenes & Twitter, stimulated by social gaming mechanics (set collections, micro-missions, building structure together).

Based on PICNIC’s tagline of “What Are You Bringing?” we want to materialize the skills and resources each person brings to PICNIC using 7scenes. With 7scenes, players create ad-hoc “picnics” with each other at NSDM Wharf to collect and trade skills with other players into their virtual picnic basket. This interaction is designed for times in between lectures/events or for after hours networking opportunities.

Players are assigned to pre-existing teams and must work together to collect resources, in the form of playing cards, to build a city together. Teams can gift rivalrous, resources to other teams’ players they interact with, as a sign of a good will or trade amongst others. While the Urban Futures PICNIC is building a real-world, temporary physical city, the BSIT game will be building an Urban Futures social and online city, by compiling all ad hoc interactions into an organized city structure with an overarching game ending.

Video walkthrough

AdHoc Architects from HN on Vimeo.