Manchester School of Architecture is leading a new, innovative research network as part of the major UKRI research project, ‘Landscape Decisions: Towards a new framework for using land assets’. This research aims to understand the value of the landscapes created around infrastructure projects in post-war Britain. Together with new and existing partners from universities, industry, government and the cultural sector, through a series of meetings and events, the network is developing guidelines to inform assessments of, and future decision-making about, landscapes of this type.

To communicate this research to a wide audience, the AHRC-funded ‘Cooling Down’ project brings together researchers and game designers working with final-year MSA students in creating games that allow for a playful and immersive exploration of the work. Ultimately through the conversations that these games generate we seek to gather feedback from players about their thoughts and perceptions of landscapes, their use and their misuse from social and environmental perspectives.

Over the course of twelve weeks, our undergraduate students worked with game designer Matteo Menapace and games researcher Dr Paul Wake to create games for young people that use infrastructure and landscape as a tool for learning. Created as part of the final year unit ‘Landscapes of Infrastructure’, the design process drew on, and in turn contributed to, critical readings and discussions in seminars and lectures –synthesising secondary sources into new research contexts. Using game design as research method, the process situates the student-as-researcher, inviting students to design games around their own research questions now reimagined in terms of game mechanics, win conditions and learning outcomes.

During the twelve-week unit our students produced five prototype boardgames, releasing them on the online platform Tabletopia. Of these, two were selected for further development. The first, Connection, a game exploring the competing demands (and opportunities for collaboration) of those working to develop the UK’s power and transport links was further developed by students working on the MSA-Live project (further details can be found on their website here). The second, New Town Power, a tile-laying game exploring the transport and power requirements of developing towns was further developed by two of its designers, Natalia Gryskowska and Rob McCarthy, with the brief of making a game playable both online and in person. Prototypes of these two games will be play-tested at the ESRC-Funded Festival of Social Science in November 2021 ahead of their formal launch at the Bluedot festival in 2022.