Safe & Pleasant Parks: Exploring the Power of Games for Co-Design and Perspective Taking

The research centres on public parks as “third places” in which people can connect outside their work or home. However, because of their divergent perception (e.g., from leisure during the day to potential illegal activities at night), public parks occupy a special role. Additionally, we want to investigate a park’s perception of safety and pleasantness in relation to different target groups (e.g., gender, physical disability) and structural factors (e.g., population density, rurality, socioeconomic background). Inspired by citizen science methodologies, the research emphasizes an inclusive and playful approach to public park design by harnessing the motivational pull of video games as a starting point. We envision participants utilizing a digital city-building game for designing their own "safe” park. Importantly, this goes beyond crime prevention through environmental design by focussing on the perceptions and the needs of individuals.
The study is split into three different phases with separate goals: (1) Deriving rules for safety perception and park attractiveness based on parks designed by individuals and in a paired co-design approach to facilitate perspective taking, (2) Generate fictional parks based on these rules established in the first two steps and have them re-evaluated by participants to validate the extracted rules, (3) classify and rate existing parks in urban-Amsterdam and rural-Enschede based on those rules.
Anticipated findings aim to contribute to the development of safer, more inclusive public spaces and advance participatory design methodologies for addressing societal challenges at large. After data analysis, we will engage in a dialogue with municipality officials, police and citizen science organisations such as Kennispunt Twente.

This project tackles the complex safety perceptions of public spaces and focuses on factors influencing people's sense of safety with the aim of providing design recommendations for public parks.