[PROPOSITIONS] ARCH 562 + MUD 722

Utilizing spatial computing and real-time gaming technologies, this design-build prototyping studio Gayming Architectures focuses on spaces existing and fantastical, taking and collapsing given definitions and mechanics from both architecture and video games in order to promote increasingly hybridized working methods between physical and digital spaces and objects. "Gaming the system" refers to certain methods used to manipulate the rules for a certain system to one's advantage. Gayming is a way of playing and experiencing games that's fundamentally gay, non-normative, messy, and out-of-step, non-binary, pessimistic yet joyful. When we "Gayme Architecture", we disrupt architecture's own antiquated tendencies towards normatively virtual proposals—the hypothetical building, the speculative future—and instead, develop generative, practical alternative applications for our hybrid present.

In this design-build prototyping studio, students design and prototype material, spatial scenarios and furniture in direct conversation with the spatial and aesthetic possibilities of the game engine, which collapses and combines multiple architecture mediums in time and space to create cohesive gaming worlds. Through hands-on experimentation, live user testing, and iterative refinement, we use Mixed Reality as a new design medium. The Final Project is a room-scale interactive VR/MR installation and game for at least one player, for which physical objects, armatures and building features are prototyped and built to directly support the digital game scenarios.