Designs sought to make Bristol a ‘Playable City’

The £30 000 Playable City Award is seeking submissions to be installed in Bristol to ‘challenge the screen-based clichés of a smart city’.

The Hello Lamp Post! project, by Pan Studio, winner of the 2013 Playable City Award
The Hello Lamp Post! project, by Pan Studio, winner of the 2013 Playable City Award

The Playable City Award was launched last year by Bristol arts venue Watershed.

Last year’s winning project was Pan Studio’s Hello Lamp Post! Scheme, which saw people ‘communicate’ with street furniture by texting a unique code found on the objects.

Hello Lamp Post! has this week been nominated for the Design Museum’s Designs of the Year prize.

Applications for the second Playable City Award are open to individuals or teams from any discipline or country ‘as long as they can demonstrate creative use of technology and a history of delivering high-quality, innovative practice’.

The winning idea will be installed in Bristol during the Making the City Playable conference in September, and will potentially tour to other cities around the world.

The deadline for applications is 11 April, and entries will be judged by a panel including Google Creative Labs director Tom Uglow. The shortlist will be announced on 28 April.

Uglow says, ‘Playable City encourages us to engage and play with these new, invisible, magical possibilities which were previously only for computer geeks; the confidence and comfort to play with digital culture in urban spaces is indicative of our growing comfort with technology.’

For more information and to apply, visit www.watershed.co.uk.

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