Circular Families game
The project explored the ability of playful practices to engage urban communities like social housing, support collaborative discovery and promote bottom-up knowledge on how they can contribute to a circular economy.
Since games can raise citizens’ awareness, support learning, and promote behavioural change, a game called “Circular Families” was developed to involve citizens in production and consumption practices for a circular economy. By playing the “Circular Families” card game, players will discover how to be engaged in the transition to a circular economy through changes in daily life practices of producing and consuming. By behaviour change, citizens can have an active role in reducing the ecological impact of cities on the environment while promoting benefits for the society and economy.
The game is composed of a special 52-card deck arranged in 13 families, two joker cards, 10 letter cards, 7 citizen-ID cards and instructions cards for game making and playing. The game aims to collect 4 member cards of the same family to build a circular family. There are 13 circular families which are divided into five urban sectors: building, product, food, green infrastructure, and mobility. Each family is composed of four members, and each member has to use a social innovation strategy to implement one of the circular actions “take”, “make”, “use”, and “recover” to build a circular loop in their sector.
Each playing card contains the name of the circular family, the held family member highlighted with the implemented social innovation strategy, the action applied by the family member to implement a circular loop, the other family members, the type of citizen to which the member belongs and the urban sector of implementation.
The Circular Families DIY and Play brochure is freely available on this webpage for making and playing the game. Players will be guided to self-produce the game by printing and cutting cards as well as building an origami envelope for holding the card game at the end of playing sessions. Then, they will be provided with instructions for playing the game. A video developed by the European Commission and translated in all the European languages explaining the game rules is available on the platform Science is Wonderful!
Players will play sitting in a circle. They can play two versions of the game. In the first version called “Circular Happy Families”, the players build a circular family by asking other players for a specific member in a specific family. Whoever collects the most families win. In the second version called “Circular Loopy Families”, players build a circular family by passing cards one at a time to the left while receiving cards one at a time from the right until one builds a circular family.
After having played, players can select the preferred strategy on the playing cards and identify the type of citizen they would like to become. There are 7 types of citizens: Do-It-Together, Strategic, Sharing, Do-It-Yourself, Sensor, Zero-Waste, and Utility-Oriented. Through the Citizen-ID DIY and Play flyer available for free download from this webpage, players will discover the features of the selected citizen type on the related citizen-ID card. Translations of the flyer in all the European languages developed by the European Commission is available on the platform Science is Wonderful! Finally, players can place cards in the origami envelope to hold the card game for future playing sessions.
Download the Circular Families game and the Citizen ID flyer.
The Citizen ID flyer is also available to download in the 23 different languages listed below: