Mind Games

This paper describes the preliminary stages and the theoretical and methodological inspiration for the design of UrbanCraft, a gamified activity based on Kevin Lynch's mental maps and aiming at enhancing youth participation and inclusion in urban co-design and governance. This activity draws on previous local experiences on participation and social inclusion, held in the Southern Italian city of Palermo, in an attempt to mix urban studies, serious games and artificial intelligence methodologies. In this experiment, we designed a gamified activity conceived for nine- to twelve-year-old primary and secondary school children, due to our previous cooperation with several primary and secondary s…