Having returned to the drawing board to gather more game ideas, this week we fleshed these out and considered how each speaks to one of the CLVU campaigns. One of the new game ideas will be tested at the corner of Prospect/Magazine and Mass Ave in Central Square, Cambridge from 3-5 pm on Monday December 2nd. If it works and we get positive feedback, we will incorporate it into the final toolkit along with the Corn Hole game. Our next focus group, which will be held with the CLVU member leadership team, will take up a third game. Our goal is to have 2-3 working games to include in the final toolkit.

We are still debating what format to use for our website and what, if any, additional media components to include as supplements or complements to the online toolkit.

The toolkit outline, including some draft text and current game ideas, is included below:

Introduction

Who we are
Mike – City Life/Vida Urbana communications coordinator
Terry – community organizer/founder of Intelligent Mischief (a civic media hack lab)
Nene – youth worker/MIT urban planning student
Dara – former legal/housing advocate/MIT urban planning student

Background: The issue
City Life/Vida Urbana has been supporting tenant organizing to preserve housing affordability and resist displacement since their inception in the 1970s. Since the foreclosure crisis post-2007, CLVU has worked with tenants and homeowners facing eviction and foreclosure to help them stay in their homes. As the number of foreclosures has decreased, the narrative that the foreclosure crisis is over has risen. CLVU staff, however, continue to see people suffering foreclosures and evictions. They have seen housing prices rise as private investors buy up vacated homes and flip them for a quick profit. In these trends, CLVU recognizes the formation of a new housing bubble and wants to avoid a return to “bubble economics” by challenging the dominant narrative with one that reflects the experience of its members in Boston, and the working poor nationwide.

We came together in the MIT Media Lab course on Co-Design in the fall of 2013. Our goal was to develop an alternative narrative that addressed the systemic crisis that CLVU was helping households in Greater Boston address. We wanted this narrative to connect CLVU’s campaigns three campaigns, which fight eviction foreclosures, resist gentrification, and shed light on real estate investors who are turning a profit on foreclosed homes. We aimed to situate our project in a broader national economic context because we knew Bostonians weren’t the only ones struggling to stay afloat and retain their homes.

How to use this toolkit
We have created this toolkit with the expectation that it will be adapted, that it will serve as a starting point for activists to bring the issues most pressing to their communities into the public eye. We have designed an interactive model because we believe an engaging, social, tactile experience will enable the synthesis needed to shift how we think about the economic injustices of our times. It isn’t only the housing game that’s rigged. Use this toolkit to investigate the way the systems that most impact your community are structured, and to educate your community about what you learn. Use it to imagine how you would like to change these systems. Use it to connect with people who can help.  Ready? Okay, let’s go and Change the Game!

The Carnival
Carnival games promise a fun time and a big prize. But how many of us have ever won a carnival game? How many have actually gotten that big stuffed animal prize? Very few. Why? Because the carnival games are rigged so that it’s almost impossible to win. Similarly, the housing market promises a coveted reward, while the mortgage-lending practices that led to the 2008 market crash made it impossible for consumers to “win” that game either. However, much more is at stake in the housing “game.” Homebuyers’ and renters’ life savings and hard work go into their homes, whether in rent, mortgages, maintenance or improvements. A fair market is supposed to be fair, not a carnivalesque game of tricks and mirrors, promising rewards it never delivers.

Housing Narrative: three campaigns, related by a story:

ANTI-GENTRIFICATION GAMES

• Cornhole:
• Three holes:
  • Top – $50,000
  • Bottom two – $25,000
  • Board – $10,000
• Goal is to to make $72,150
• Jelly Bean Guess

PRIVATE REAL ESTATE INVESTOR GAME

• Musical Chairs

FORECLOSURE EVICTION GAMES

• Tarot card reader
• Shell Game, or Who’s holding your loan?
• Hot Potato

SOLUTIONS GAMES

• Pop a balloon: show that bubbles — like housing bubbles — do pop
• Communal Mural

Prizes

Format of the Carnival

User-experience

Call to Action/Next Steps

Appendix A:
Process
The group convened under the goals set forth by our community partner City Life/Vida Urbana, and CLVU’s liaison Mike Leyba. We began by meeting with CLVU Executive Director Curdina Hill, who grounded us in a firm understanding of the organization’s history, mission, and current issue areas. Early in our process, Nene and Terry led the group in a “They Say, We Say” exercise in which we responded to dominant problematic arguments about the housing crisis. The counter-arguments we developed in this exercise served as a guide for us to return to throughout the process.

Each step was iterative: we met weekly outside of class to revisit the last steps in our process, determine our next steps, and ground these in the overarching concept, which was itself in constant development. At key points, we integrated the feedback and participation of others. We brought our ideas to the CLVU member leadership team several times, and incorporated their recommendations. The course professors offered criticism. We tested our design in focus groups with the leadership team, our classmates, and the public. We used class time to brainstorm design concepts and ideas, again referring to the points derived from the “They Say, We Say exercise.”