Stad op het Spel

DDW Experience

During Dutch Design Week, you’ll have your first chance to experience a working prototype of ‘Stad op het Spel’ (City at Stake). In around 15 minutes, you’ll take the wheel and make decisions about the city and society of tomorrow. You’ll find yourself in a possible future for the Netherlands in 2050, where a resident reveals how today’s choices can affect everyday life.

As the project is still a work in progress, we’ll be testing how this experience works in practice at the DDW. We therefore warmly invite you to share your feedback and insights with us and help us refine the next version.

Importance of Futuring

Many decisions about the city have consequences that only become visible years later. Yet we often make them based on today’s reality: within a single sector, a single term of office and under pressure from urgent challenges. ‘Stad op het Spel’ helps policy teams to make long-term choices concrete, discussable and human.

We do not predict what 2050 will be like. We make a possible future imaginable. So that teams can have better discussions today about values, consequences and choices that transcend individual sectors.

Purpose and Process

Stad op het Spel uses gaming to facilitate better discussions about the long term. It makes values, dilemmas and the potential consequences of choices visible and open to discussion. To achieve this, we combine speculative design, behavioural insights, storytelling and interactive technology. In this way, a distant and abstract future becomes tangible and human.

The content is based on scientifically underpinned future scenarios from, amongst others, the Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving (PBL).

Stad op het Spel is being developed as part of the Innovation Impact Challenge (Immersive experiences in urban development), set up by CIIIC and RVO.