A co-creation toolkit to facilitate meaningful dialogue, align perspectives and make better design decisions together with users.
In architecture and planning, design processes increasingly involve users, clients and other stakeholders.
However, the tools and language used to think and communicate design are not accessible to everyone involved.
As a result, collaboration becomes limited. Ideas are shared, but not always understood, questioned or developed collectively.
Arplaytecture: the toolkit for co-creation is a generative set of methods and tools designed to support brainstorming in the fuzzy front end of architecture and planning.
It helps bridge the communication gap between architects, users and stakeholders, enabling them to co-design for experience — including from a child’s perspective.
Through playful prompts and structured interactions, it creates a common language that allows all participants to actively contribute to the design process.
The toolkit can be used to facilitate co-creation sessions with children, clients, design teams and other stakeholders, as well as to support architecture students in their creative process.
It combines three elements that can work together or independently:
Disruptive Arplaycards, Arplaycards and Arplaywords.
Disruption plays a key role in creativity within architecture and design processes. As described by Leegard, there is a close link between disruption and creativity, as it pushes exploration beyond its expected limits. By trying out what was not initially intended, new connections emerge and our understanding of actions and reactions expands.
In this way, Arplaytecture disruptive cards act as a trigger for uncovering latent experiential connections within the design process. These connections, often hidden or implicit, can then be used as inspiration for design, supporting more exploratory, inclusive and creative co-creation in architecture.
