Detroit at Play

Detroit at Play is a participatory design series to co-produce architectural video games between a team of designers from the University of Michigan and Detroit’s youth. The project carried out a series of game design workshops hosted at the Boys & Girls Club, which has operated as a community partner, facilitating access for local high school students in the region. University of Michigan faculty contributed an open-source framework for video game design that was taught and utilized to develop video game installations themed around students’ interests, focusing on the city of Detroit as a setting. As a concluding event, the exhibition hosted at Newlab Detroit re-framed ‘PLAY’ as a social ritual that could be experienced collectively, seeing video games as more than just entertainment, but a simulation medium to co-create urban imaginaries.

With the support of the Arts Research Incubation & Acceleration (ARIA) program, Detroit at Play is co-led by University of Michigan faculty members Jose Sanchez, Torri Smith, Salam Rida, and Ishan Pal Singh, assisted by graduate students from Taubman College, in partnership with the Diversity in Design Collaborative and Boys & Girls Clubs of Southeastern Michigan.