Open Citizens is a programme of activity by Ludic Rooms exploring how a playful approach to creative technologies in public space might drive new conversations around citizenship in the 21st century.

We take the approach that everyone can inform and develop creative ideas using technology, if given the right tools and the invitation. We have developed a speculative design process, with our own specially created playing cards to provide context and stimulate ideas. We make and remake ideas, using familiar materials and work with participants to refine concepts to the point that they can be produced as a working prototype. 

Throughout 2017, we delivered our largest Open Citizens programme to date, engaging a community of creators, making work that sparks the imagination of local people.  We were delighted to be awarded the West Midlands Tech Award for ‘Innovation in Arts and Culture’ for this project!

How can challenges of the urban environment be made visible to its inhabitants? How can we ‘nudge’ behaviour and use data to solve problems? In this collaborative project, we invited 30 Year 11 secondary school students and 20 undergraduate students to consider this whilst playing with, identifying, and solving problems within their own communities.

This multipartner project aimed to explore how STEM subjects can contribute to young people becoming more active future custodians of their city and to examine how access to open manufacturing techniques and open public data might inspire social change.

By looking in detail at an aspect of urban life, we hoped to encourage young people to not only think critically about the social infrastructure that surrounds them but more importantly, how they can be empowered to facilitate change.

Supported by Think Higher and FabLab Coventry.

Commissioned by Bristol Green Capital 2015 as part of their Neighbourhood Arts Programme, inviting people to see “junk” in a fresh way by tapping into the shared experiences of play across different generations and cultures. It creates new invitations, pretexts, tools and spaces for social interaction, by starting with the very personal & then connecting up with neighbours and neighbourhoods. The project will work with lead local residents on a journey of social archaeology to rediscover and repurpose the playable gems hidden among the dusty piles of forgotten “junk” lurking in people’s attics, garages and sheds, shining a light on the latent social and cultural potential of these objects through the lens of collaborative play. These playable artefacts- from rusty bike wheels & old sledges to bent hoola-hoops, dusty console controllers and forgotten Furbies will be reborn through story-telling and active play.

A performative projection-mapped visual poem made with young women outside mainstream education, produced with the incredible support of poet/MC Samira Arhin Acquaah and dance artist Dave McKenna of Being Frank Physical Theatre. Commissioned by the Core at Corby Cube as part of their Priority Project, supported by Mighty Creatives. Presented for the first time at the Core’s ‘Youth Arts Slam’, July 3rd 2015.

Wear Your Wheels is a fun and creative challenge for individuals and teams, families, co-workers, friends and communities. Work together to craft a wearable cardboard creation. Create something in the style of your favourite wheeled-wonder or dream up your own novel contraption.

A time-trial race like no other, competitors don their CardCar creations and run a fixed course. This is not an engineering competition, you carry the vehicle, rather than the other way around. Feel free to add wheels – a CardCar would probably look odd without them – but they don’t need to function. Your CardCar cannot touch the ground at any point along the race.

A lunchtime play session, commissioned by Watershed for the ‘Making Cities Playable Conference’ in 2014.

Our brief: make something “big, outside, with chalk”.

How can a simple piece of chalk unleash the possibility and freedom of play? We challenged conference-goers to create and partake in their own little ‘dusty acts of defiance’. A collaborative commission with the simply wonderful Splash & Ripple.

A very 21st Century event, held at the Lunt Roman Fort in Coventry, aimed at helping to breathe new life into the historic Fort.

Ludi Lunt (roughly translated from Latin: ‘public games at the Lunt’) was a hackathon-style event taking place over the weekend of Sat 6th and Sun 7th September. The event’s aim was to bring together creative people from around the UK to devise ways to improve the visitor experience, reveal more of the site’s fascinating past and breathe new life into this cultural gem, helping to re-establish the Lunt as a major Roman visitor attraction.

The Paper Planes project has been created to provide up to 30 gifted and talented students in Y9 an engaging and challenging bridge into GCSE Science study. Developed with Shireland Collegiate Academy, the project uses practical design skills alongside digital media, robotics, software programming and games design to introduce a range of subject areas with a particular focus on the study of Physics.