Why did you choose to focus on neighbourhood sustainability?
“The neighbourhood strikes an excellent balance between the potential for impact and the possibility to personalise and humanise actions and costs for the residents. Residents can relate to the neighbourhood and everyday life, hence measures and actions proposed are more concrete and realistic.”
Why is a neighbourhood-focused approach key to helping citizens understand and engage with sustainability and adaptation?
“The inherent connection residents feel towards their immediate neighbourhood and community fosters a sense of responsibility and investment in identifying impactful solutions. This localised engagement provides the ideal ground for testing and evaluating innovative approaches that, if successful, could be scaled up to influence broader urban regions.”
How does gamification of this help explore the effectiveness of incentivisation methods?
“In the neighbourhood context, there is a wide range of incentives that can be explored via gamification approaches. It is possible to involve the local community in providing incentives that go beyond the usual digital ones. This provides the ideal ground to explore and assess the importance of the community engagement in incentivisation methods, and their effectiveness.”
How do you balance the realism of the scenarios with keeping the games accessible and engaging for the participants?
“This is a very crucial aspect, that we are addressing leveraging on hackathons and in-depth interviews. A preliminary idea is to focus on digital solutions, where the more engaging and gamified digital aspects are combined with physical and more realistic counterparts to provide a more complete and compelling experience.”
