Manuela Maier-Hummel, Annika Kühn, and Rico Herzog
The article describes a serious game prototype to convey knowledge about rising sea levels and sinking cities in an effective learning environment. It responds to the question how an immaterial collection of traditional stories, news reports, and fictional legends can be transformed to interactively and playfully make intergenerational and cross-cultural knowledge of future climate change scenarios as well as one’s own connections within the historical, social, and ecological system tangible. In collaboration with Hamburg’s City Science Lab students from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts conceptualised and developed a playable prototype, testing alternatives for climate adaptation narratives. Based on research data the serious game prototype involves players as co-creators in the creation and archiving process through the integration of LLM technology. Using a reflective case study of an interdisciplinary educational process, the project The project represents how technology-savvy designers and design-affine computer scientists approach real-world problems to break down super-complex systemic dependencies, aiming to integrate marginalised groups into the design process, foster intercultural dialogue, and thus make a topic accessible to other target groups.
Keywords: interdisciplinarity, systems-oriented design, co-creation, interconnectedness