‘Da-ka’ City: Gamification of Café-Hopping
Team
Name: JIA MIN + WONG
Nationality: MALAYSIA
Institution / Company: RDC ARCHITECTS
Name: CHAER SHEAN + LEE
Nationality: MALAYSIA
Institution / Company: KLO PLUS STUDIO
Name: YI KAI + WONG
Nationality: MALAYSIA
Institution / Company: ESCAPE STUDIO – PEARSON COLLEGE
-EDITORIAL PICK of Videogame Architecture: 2 Drawings Competition
‘Da-ka’ City is a Cafe-Hopping Trail that explores the recent cafe boom in Johor Bahru, Malaysia. These freshly-built cafes coincidentally share the overplayed aesthetic features: the exposed brickwall, cement floor, and Edison bulbs. Shaped by the easily-accessible Pinterest and Instagram images that result in cookie-cutter aesthetic style, reflecting the interlinkage between the built environment, digital algorithms and keywords inputs. Cafe-hoppers upload and share images to Instagram resulting in constant exposure to trendy cafes. How do we break this loop of creating the unified, faux aesthetic style that is spreading across Johor Bahru?
In ‘Persona 5’, architectural doubles are created based on real-life city, for an immersive environment for player to experience the life of a normal high-schooler. We found resemblance of the constructed game realm to the constructed interiors of cafes that based on thematic elements. To explore how breaking the constructed realm of videogame environment could be translated into methods of renegotiating alternative cafe spaces, we studied glitching, wall-clipping and other going out-of bound techniques: where walls are proposed to be paper-thin and objects are disproportionate.
The spaces are later translated into a set of stamping patterns, where cafe-hoppers could collect stamps, to complete the cafe relay point card.
#Interaction between digital and physical world #Digital Twins & Architectural Doubles #Gamification of the digital experience
Jury Comments
– Kuba Jekiel
“An interesting approach to the global real-life issue is highlighted by the use of a local example and addressed using the medium of video games. Beautiful images show the idea in an intriguing but clear way.“
