Este artículo estudia las implicaciones y potencialidades de las prácticas lúdicas y los formatos de juego, entendidos como herramientas docentes innovadoras en arquitectura, urbanismo y, en general, el diseño. Hace una breve introducción a los pioneros de los juegos serios y el estado del arte en lo que diversos autores denominan 'el juego como metodología de diseño". A continuación, presenta Archispiel, un formato de proyecto que emplea el juego como metodología fundamental. Diseñado por los autores en 2015, fue empleado por primera vez en el contexto docente en el taller Magaluf Reset. Basado en juegos de estrategia y juegos de guerra tradicionales diseñados a partir de los años 50 del siglo pasado, combina la negociación estratégica con el uso del azar para producir efectos inesperados en el transcurso del juego. Por lo tanto, más que proporcionar respuestas a un estado de la cuestión previamente establecido, sus resultados son de manera literal el resultado de una lógica de diseño especulativa y abierta. La experiencia descrita muestra el modo en que el diseño fundamentado en el juego ofrece una amplia gama de posibilidades de exploración fuera de las posibilidades de las prácticas de proyecto tradicionales. This paper focuses on the implications and potentialities of playful practices and game formats as innovative teaching methods in architecture, urban planning and, more generally, design. It provides a very brief account of serious games pioneers and the current state of the art of what the authors call ‘design through play’. It then presents one game-based format, Archispiel, designed by the authors in 2015, along with a case study of its use in a classroom context, Magaluf Reset. The exercise, drawing on traditional war games and diplomacy games designed from the 1950s onwards, combines strategic negotiation with the use of chance to produce unexpected effects. Consequently, rather than solutions answering to a predefined brief, the results are quite literally the outcome of an exploratory and open-ended design logic. The experience shows how design through play offers a rich array of explorative possibilities not afforded by conventional design practices.

This paper explores the capacities of design to interrogate the socio-spatial context in order to foreground conflict, dissent and dispute as creative practices to fuel urban transformation. In today’s urban habitat, spaces and actions do not mesh seamlessly. The city is characterised by a disjunction between the physicality of the urban fabric as a materialisation of ideologies and the relationality of contested supremacies and entropic dynamics that inhabit it. Consequently, the practices of contemporary transformative city-making need to be reinvented through temporality and impermanence, accounting for disorder and embracing instability. In that sense, antagonism is a key element to harness in critical design practices aimed at promoting urban diversity. In this paper we study how incorporating antagonism in design practices can trigger processes of urban reformulation by constituting liminal spaces of opportunity where democratisation emerges as a spatiotemporal practice. Two related case studies carried out in 2020 in the Raval neighbourhood of Barcelona (Subjective Cartographies: A Mirror of Diversity and Infrastructures for Public Space Interaction), are presented to explore how design can support dissidence and plurality, whether through identification and visualisation or by catalysing them as situated practices of active citizenship. In both case studies, design fosters de-hierarchisation and trans-linearity in the city, reclaiming the right to direct action in collective urban spaces. In this sense, this paper explores how design contributes to activating multiple processes of emancipated citizenship, harnessing conflict and constructive dissent as situated spatiotemporal practices to promote diversity. Facilitating the proliferation of counter-hegemonic notions of cosmopolitics, territory, domesticity and publicness, the design practices revisited in this paper operate between politics, space and affect in order to promote intersubjective relations in public spaces, using the material, temporal and affective dimensions of design to co-create diverse and resilient urban habitats.

The chapter explores disruptive uses of serious games to achieve radical urban visions through the presentation and critical discussion of three recent case studies developed in graduate and postgraduate university courses. The chapter addresses the underpinnings of game-based design practices and discusses their untapped potential to spark imagination and bring about new urban visions. The focus is on subverting the expectations of the aims, methods, and results of spatial design projects in the context of higher educational institutions. Most importantly, games and play are used to radically address pressing technical, societal, and environmental topics in a disruptive way, generating new urban visions that push the limits of what is considered probable, desirable, and even imaginable.

This article investigates some of the implications of intimate design practices by presenting two academic projects carried out within the context of an uncertain present. It argues that design practices have the capacity to foster intimacy and affect through the lens of the politics of care. Drawing on the notion of affective bodies, the authors claim that design can explore new paths to reinvent the everyday, focusing on recent crisis-ridden contexts. The article examines how intimate practices that reformulate everyday politics can reclaim temporality, active citizenship and radical affectivity as infrastructural needs in contemporary urban habitats.  The two case studies date from March 2020 through December 2021 under the climate of crisis brought about by the sudden outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Western Europe and the ongoing Mediterranean refugee crisis. Given the escalation of the blurring between the private and public spheres, the personal and the political, it is especially relevant to explore intimacy as a means of enacting politically empowered action through design. Both case studies aim to temporarily interrupt conventional uses of collective urban spaces in order to generate pockets of resistance that explore the subliminal potentials of urban spaces and allow us to imagine, and even experience, different ways of living through an updated lens of care. These irruptions of intersubjective appropriations of urban spaces not only have an emblematic impact, but also a cumulative effect by generating a growing network of affective bodies in action. This emergent affective network offers relevant opportunities for the transformation of crisis-ridden urban contexts through dynamic interactions between sociality and spatiality.