The goal of this project is to create a game-based app to help understand people, define their needs, their priorities and their motivations to design during participatory design processes so that they negotiate for better cities supported by inclusive processes. Urban Empact looks to use this tool for different stages of an urban development project investigative, informative and feedback. 

Urban Empact uses a value-driven methodology and game theory as the core theoretical framework behind this game-driven app. Typically such methodologies are only accessible through workshops with an expert who is familiar with it. Urban Empact wants to increase the accessibility of this knowledge through the combination of technology and illustrative iconography. In this way we create a tool that helps bring parties together to develop a mutually valued outcome. In the context of the physical environment, these are (communities of) citizens, private companies, knowledge institutions and public organisations that form an ecosystem to solve societal problems.

This project seeks to promote innovation through citizen participation and co-creation. The development of the game that stimulates cooperation and co-creation in multi-stakeholder processes is ideally suited to this. This perspective requires an integral design of health, vitality and appropriate care based on the actual needs of the citizen and citizen collectives, fitting the context of the citizen(s) in neighbourhood, district, region, work and school. Focus areas are a healthier lifestyle in a healthier living and working environment (including underlying vitality factors such as poverty, loneliness, opportunity, health skills, etc), participating in society to the best of one's ability, coherent services and support and specific and personalised attention and interventions. The game is used to better articulate the needs of stakeholders, in this case citizens, individually and collectively. In this way, the stakeholders from different disciplines can, through co-creation, jointly develop a vision and a future image of a world that meets these needs.

At this stage of the project, Urban Empact is conducting a technical and economic feasibility with the support of the MIT Feasibility grant to study the possibility of an app based on a game-based process that stimulates cooperation and co-creation in multi-stakeholder processes.