Instructions for in-person and online attendance at the end.
Games, Play and Sustainable Governance is a 60-minute hybrid research talk occurring at Tampere University on September 25th 17:00 Finnish time. It brings together two experts who use games with governmental institutions: one from Sweden and one from Singapore. These experts will explore how games are useful tools for enabling governmental institutions both by supporting flexible relationships to their past and successful imaginaries with their future.
Speakers and talks
Shawn Chua is the Practice Lead for Serious Games and Applied Simulations at CAST (Civil Service College Applied Simulations and Training) in the Civil Service College of Singapore, where he designs and facilitates gameful interventions for the Singapore Public Service. His work sits at the intersection of futures studies, game studies, and adult learning theory. He holds a Master of Arts in Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU.
Talk Description: Public institutions are built to learn, but they also tend to over learn past lessons. What begins as competence can sediment into a reflex that outlives the world that shaped them it. Sustainable governance, in this context, requires the capacity to unlearn, such the institution becomes more permeable to its own revisions as it adapts to novel problem landscapes. This talk explores how CAST (Civil Service College Applied Simulations and Training) uses gameful methods to facilitate unlearning in the Singapore Public Service through the disorienting dilemmas of preposterous futures, role estrangement, and ungovernable consequences.
Ylva Björnberg works in strategic foresight across place development, health and working life. She specialises in artistic methods for experiential learning and games for transformation. Through Tillsammans, she co-develops game-based approaches to shared learning and collaboration around the future of places. Her background includes Visit Sweden, and she has worked with organisations including the Swedish Institute, Svenska Möten, Swedavia, Vinnova and Formas. Ylva’s work spans research, futures thinking and lived experience, driven by curiosity about what enables people to think and act differently together.
Talk description: Tillsammans: Playing a Place’s Future — How do we develop a place when no one alone determines its future? Tillsammans is a research based, large-scale, game-based approach to place development where stakeholders explore ten years of a shared future through roleplay and negotiation. Ylva Björnberg presents the method and a regional project using games to support collaboration between municipal and regional levels. The talk explores how game design can encourage shared responsibility, reveal interdependencies and allow participants to test decisions together. What does it take for experiences at the gaming table to change how we collaborate beyond it?
How to attend
In-person participants: Please be at the Pinni B floor 0 lobby (one floor below the main lobby; the talk will be next to room B0019).
Online participants: Join via Zoom
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The event is part of the project “Games and… Research Talk Series” supported by the DigiSus Community Impact funding.
Picture: Jenni Toivonen / Tampere University