By Carina Dantas, SHINE 2Europe
SHINE 2Europe brought together architects, designers, a hospital administrator and several civil servants from different services, to validate the scenes of a virtual game with a main focus on social inclusion.
BIG is a game that aims to make the population aware of the need for adequate measures to create healthy, intelligent and friendly built environments. The game has five different characters, which are being drawn in different circumstances: mobility, dementia, pregnancy, social isolation and child care.
These characters can be found in different situations, in five locations. SHINE validated the scenario of the Health and Social Support Center and the respective challenges of this space. In the future, the player will be asked to complete tasks or answer questions and will get feedback as to whether their options are the right ones. SHINE’s guests to participate in these scenario validation workshops used their experience in healthcare, architecture, design and collaboration in different public services to conclude whether the scenes designed by the international partners are appropriate to the Portuguese context and understand the relevance of the problems that the characters in the game will encounter.
Workshop participants concluded, for example, that in Portugal there is often no connection between health and social services, and when they go to the Health Centre, they usually do not talk to a social worker, for example. Another of the scenarios that raised some questions for the participants was the character “widower with a young daughter” and the issue of taking the girl to the toilet when there are no family toilets.
Experts were very interested in following the innovative game and generally agreed with the scenes developed and the characters that were presented to them, even admitting that some of the problems presented are new. One of these cases is the fact that there are no waiting spaces for teenagers when they go to the Health Center for an appointment. The project website is also available in Portuguese and can be consulted at https://www.big-game.eu/project/.