Smart City or Smart Citizen: collaborative prototyping with urbacraft

2-day workshop with urbacraft The City Crafting System™ in 1971 - Design Space. Participants were able to design, build, and animate their own city with urbacraft, the new open source toy designed specifically to make urban spaces and structures. It’s a building set with the hackability of digital games and the physicality of traditional toys. We’ll build a whole city together, from inside out – then we’ll make immersive stop motion videos telling stories of life in that city. With urbacraft, you build structures with plastic bits, then add to them façades representing different architectures and styles, kits of street furniture and lights, trees and landscaping, toy cars and people and stories and anything you want to bring them to life. You can even make your own pieces! Bios Husband and wife team Ayssar Arida and Sabine de Maussion are the co-founders of urbacraft City Crafting System a toy startup created in 2014 in Beirut. Twitter/instagram: @urbacraft Ayssar is an urbatect, writer, and design entrepreneur. He runs URBATECTURE urban design thinking from Beirut and London, consulting on culture, education, urbanism and design. His research focuses on the dialogue between popular culture, scientific paradigms, and city making, first introduced in his book Quantum City. Twitter: @ayssar Sabine is a PhD candidate in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths College in London and a lecturer in the Masters of Curating and Art Criticism at USJ Beirut. Previously director of the Arts Department at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, International Relations Officer at Le CENTQUATRE/Paris, and Education and Learning Programmes Officer at the Centre Pompidou/Paris.