Board games can be a fun and interactive way to raise awareness for social and/or environmental issues. Students from TU Delft were assigned the task to design such a board game as part of the NWO project Inclusive Wise Waste Cities.
On October the 28th, six MSc students from TU Delft presented their board game “What a waste” during the final day of the course Game Design Project (SEN9235) taught by Dr. Geertje Bekebrede and Dr. Maria Freese. Quint Lafleur, Tom Kempenaar, Olivier Pieksma, Benthe Spruijt, Puck Merceij, and Oscar Nowak formed a team to develop an engaging game that is easy and fun to play.
About the game
The players adopt the role of companies to realize various construction projects like bridges, road networks, and buildings in a city. Those projects come with certain financial returns but the players will have a limited number of rounds to simultaneously think about how to remove waste generated during the lifetime of the projects and which pile up at the center of the boardgame The players can opt to deal collectively with the waste and can become more sustainable by investing in one or more of the 10 different R principles that stem from the waste hierarchy framework (such as the principles of Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle, and Recover). In every round, event cards come into play introducing shocks and uncertainties. Even though the game is limited to the perspective of the private sector and has several simplifications of reality, its purpose is to raise awareness of circular economy strategies by using the waste hierarchy principles, and to allow players to experience some of the challenges of circular and inclusive considerations when managing urban and construction waste.
Gamification as a teaching tool
The game was tested for its robustness by all students of that course, and by members of the Inclusive Wise Waste Cities research team. The session ended with a debrief about the overall experience and improvement possibilities of the game. This course highlighted how gamification can be a powerful and fun way to convey important messages about the complexity and impact of strategic decisions through the provision of an actor-centered perspective. We congratulate the MSc students with completing this course, and we wish them success with their follow up studies and careers. Hopefully, “What a Waste” will be played in the future by stakeholders who are active in the construction waste management sector.
Filippos K. Zisopoulos
Postdoctoral Researcher
- Email address
- zisopoulos@rsm.nl
Filippos has a background on the resource-use efficient design of industrial food production chains (PhD from Wageningen University and Research), on communication and valorization activities on climate change mitigation and adaptation (former member of the Secretariat of the Joint Programming Initiative on Agriculture, Food Security & Climate Change), and more recently, on impact analysis of humanitarian aid projects (former member of the non-governmental organization Movement on the Ground).
Within the Inclusive Wise Waste Cities project he will be working together with his colleagues and project partners to explore how urban waste management systems can become more inclusive, sustainable, and resilient. His work will focus on developing a theoretical framework to map the “inclusive wise-waste system”. The framework will be translated into a dynamic model to study different governance systems and the consequences of various policy interventions.
