CONSTRUCTION

CREATIVE CONSTRUCTION A new kind of innovation for your city: An evaluation of Playable City Lagos 14
Similarly those participants near the beginning of their career were still clear about what they
would achieve during the workshop. Desiree is an engineer, who has recently started working
at CcHUB as technical lead for their youth engagement programmes. Via email she said ahead
of the workshop that:
I’m quite keen about the power of IoT and technology to improve the quality
of life; however, this will require proper application and an understanding
of local context. Playable City will help kickstart that process of identifying
ways technology can be applied in a practical manner to make Lagos more
interactive as a city.”
Desiree Craig
Prompts during the application process helped skew towards people that prefer to
work in this way - with their own goals in mind and those who want to engage with
an abstract idea like Playable City. The application form focus on the participants’
own goals for the programme, rather than how they fit a pre-existing set of goals
was helpful. Similarly it asked for their understanding of the concept of a playable
city.
THE WORKSHOP AS TIME OUT
Ju, Simon and Jere Ikongio during the workshop.
Photographer: Logo Oluwamuyiwa
Clare Reddington reflected afterwards:
“Maybe someone is attracted to these
kinds of things because they are at a
crossroads.”
This was true for UK and Nigerian
participants. Ju Row Farr from the
UK brought some of the wisdom
Clare mentioned above, but she was
also looking for new connections in a
region and culture that Blast Theory
hadn’t worked in before.
Simon Johnson saw this as some time
out from the day-to-day of his work
producing games:
I am not trying to get something
out of this for my practice [ie
a game for my portfolio], but
I want to work in a different
way, with people with different
backgrounds and skills.”
Simon Johnson