Hey! Imaginable Guidelines

HEY! Imaginable Guidelinesoffers an experience through which you can discover and learn city-design processes, discuss and share knowledge about public space design, take action, and have fun at the same time.Created by SANALarc as an inspirational and knowledge-centric deck of cards, HEY! Imaginable Guidelines will be the new tool to discover the city.

In our everyday lives we came face to face with many problems and experiences regarding the public space. Public space, as a major and surrounding part of our lives, might be open to contribution and change. In order to empower designers and citizen designers’ to imagine, explore, discuss and share city-design futures to realize livable, lovable and walkable cities, HEY! Imaginable Guidelines was launched as an open call for contributions, which culminated in Imaginable Guidelines ‘Deck-of-Cards’.

HEY! Imaginable Guidelines is a card game which allows users to discover how cities are designed and offers a base of knowledge that brings neighbors together to make real-life decisions and a design toolkit to explore the limits and opportunities your city offers. It helps to imagine and explore the decisions that are being made on behalf of citizens and empower them by supplying urban design vocabulary and know-how. It also has a transdisciplinary methodology to city-making aiming to realize a self-organized city-design process that nurtures vibrant public life and celebrates neighborhood coherence. Framed under six categories, 101 topics reveal fundamental domains of the public realm. In this regard, the design guidelines are a crucial reference in which the expert assistance, best practice standards, and performance parameters are prioritized, negotiated and rehearsed to give agency to the imagination of urban design initiatives.

The content of the cards was crowdsourced from Istanbul’s active city design experts, professionals, and sociologists and juxtaposed with artists, designers and poets investigating the city’s living culture. The gameplay approach of a ‘deck-of-cards’ offers each participant a dynamic pathway into the complexity of city making. Once participating – by reading, reflecting and debating – the ‘players’ re-organize the cards into a customized design guideline per their city design priorities and aspirations.

The ‘deck-of-cards’ object and ‘playing’ concept tap into social-learning for workshops, meet-ups and even at dinner parties. Workshop facilitators of NGO’s, municipal policy-makers and design professionals can create an ‘imaginative’ role-playing simulation where parallel exploratory and strategy thinking can flourish with the outcome of a ‘winning solution’ (the customized guideline) based on stakeholder consensus, debate, and priorities.

HEY! Imaginable Guidelines provides a sharing platform that empowers designers, citizens, and municipal actors to think holistically with artworks and design ideas of over 150 contributors. Ultimately, fluid conversations, debates on priorities, stakeholder accountability and open-ended proposals for complex physical, social and economic issues are all parts of this game.