Space Bingo

resource: tool

Apr 29

Written By Design Studio for Social Intervention DS4SI

This is a great exercise to help you and your collaborators to talk about spaces and to look at spaces in new ways. It works equally well across scale, from a school campus to a city or town.

Instructions

Make three poster-sized bingo boards. Here is an example of one we did.

It’s fun to have each board have some shared and some different descriptors.

Write different place descriptors on the board. We like to use ones that are subjective and metaphorical in nature, as we feel those kinds of descriptors make the conversation livelier. Here are some of the descriptors we’ve used:

  
    Hopeful Space
    Repellent Space
    Sacred Space
    Gendered Space
    Cut-Up Space
  

    Space in Identity Crisis
    Space for the Desired Public
    Permitted Space
    Possibility Space
    Public Space as Private Space
  

    Corporate Space
    Queer Space
    FREE
    Space in Decline
    Tacky Space
  

    Hangout Space
    Sanitized Space
    Temporary Space
    Enclosed Space
    Dangerous Space
  

    Undesirable Space
    Proper Space
    Contested Space
    Appropriated Space
    Sexy Space
  

Place these descriptors along the boards like a bingo board, five spaces across vertical and horizontal, with center space left blank.

Break up into small teams. Assign each team an area within the space you’re exploring. (We’ve experienced it enriches the listening when people are looking at different areas.) Send the teams out for a period of time commensurate to the size of the space they are covering and their modality for getting around. (Space bingo inside of a small school; on foot could be a shorter exercise than doing space bingo in three parts of a small town.)

Have teams get out and take photos of spaces they find that they feel match the descriptions. Teams can aim for a simple “Bingo” (5 across) or try for the whole board.

Have each team come back to print their pictures and place them on their bingo boards. Then have teams present back, sharing their choices of photos and how they represent the descriptors on the board. What do the different photos tell you about how different people are seeing each type of space? (At the end, we typically give each team a prize.)

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