2025–
ongoing:

Playable Urban Ethnography of Situated Knowledge
by REN Yukun
 

​This doctoral research aims to incorporate “grassroots wisdom,” “informality,” and “affective evidence” into a play-based analytical framework integrated through games. This framework is used to document and analyze how community spaces are produced and given meaning through residents’ everyday practices, and to examine whether this fragile affective knowledge can be made playable while maintaining its diverse forms and fostering architectural production. The research will further explore how play-based research can link community affective knowledge to social design, enabling the products of design practice to generate interactivity and anticipated experiences while remaining accountable to the community’s lived experience. Grassroots wisdom is a form of contextual knowledge formed through ongoing engagement with a particular place. It connects practical judgment with local relationships, through which people learn how to respond to local conditions. Informality refers to the ever-changing relationship between institutional rules and actual practices, manifested in how people interpret and negotiate rules in their daily lives. Affective evidence enables the research to examine how attachments and encounters with the built environment guide action and imbue places with meaning. While these dimensions interact within contextual practices, the research does not treat them as a single form of knowledge. Therefore, this research examines whose knowledge is made visible and how disagreements, silences, or refusals should influence the representation of the community.

To investigate these questions, the thesis proposes playable urban ethnography as a design method grounded in research through practice. Existing ethnographic and archival media remain important for preserving accounts of place. Games add the possibility of organising those accounts around action and consequence. They place players within situations where interpretation develops through attention and judgement. Game design also functions as a creative practice and an integrative framework. It brings ethnographic material, participatory design, and social simulation into a shared process of making and inquiry. Participatory design can therefore enter the formation of the research artefact. Through play, residents’ review and engagement become part of social care. Disagreement directs revisions to the game and brings overlooked perspectives into view. Social simulation then tests how a selected interpretation behaves once it becomes part of the computational system. The choice between a scripted model and a bounded LLM agent depends on the research question and the available evidence. The resulting representation stays tied to its source and records the assumptions introduced through translation.

The current pilot study focuses on the hawker center at Blk 448 Clementi in Singapore. The study defines this site as a field of relations, where the abundant evidence of negotiation and affect that emerges gradually from daily use and operations will serve as the foundation and boundaries for the design of this playable system. This field material will first be compiled into the Field Evidence Codex. The researcher’s interpretations will be juxtaposed with the raw records and clearly labeled. As the research enters the game design phase, the Translation Ledger will track the decisions made in transforming specific evidence into a playable form. Through this process, the pilot study will examine what game design can capture from situational knowledge, with a particular focus on its informal and affective dimensions. The research will also identify where the simulation distorts the evidence and which materials should be excluded from the model. The playable world will provide a context in which research hypotheses can be directly confronted and challenged. Any subsequent revisions will remain visible in the research records. Through this process, the Clementi study will assess how playable research can support more accountable community representation and social design.

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Keywords: Situated grassroots knowledge; urban informality; affective evidence; playable urban ethnography; game design as creative practice; social care.