The Design Game

Walking to school on Wednesday

The day of the design game. Everyone was split up into eight groups, which would be combined into four the next day. One facilitator from the Oregon studio, with approximately four to five UOB students per team. The aim: take a fresh sheet of trace paper, laid over a base map of developable area, and given the goals for your particular team, draw buildings and roads in as fast as possible.

A group of students hard at work playing the design game

My team, team #8, was one of two tasked with developing a plan for maximum development of the campus, with special requirements such as planning for a taxi turn-around on campus and moving all student housing off campus. Though instruction was for the design game to consist of very quick turns without explanations of an individual’s moves, my group (and it seems like many others) often felt the need to discuss everyone’s moves in depth. Facilitation was a crazy and new experience for me, especially with the added haze of a language barrier between me and the UOB attendees.

Major strokes forward often had to wait until Mark or Barry would swing by, judge our progress too slow, and make a series of quick foundational additions to our plans. This ended up working out well enough. By the end of the day we had created a plan alternative that was quite nice: large teacher housing apartments near Boulevard Leon Mba on the east side, an interesting series of small quads in the middle of the school grounds, and a grand stair of some kind linking the new front of the library with the center of campus. A couple of these would even make it into Alternative 4 on Thursday.