Originally published by Cluster, written by Cristina Lobnik

http://www.urbanplay.org/

Every city has its creative minds pondering about ways to diversify their cities, making them more colorful, livable and interactive, expressing pleasure as well as comfort.
Experimental projects like Torino Colors, an urban chromatic mapping method, and Urban Play, an international city project that aims to inspire citizen’s creativity, endeavor to put those ambitions into action.


Image: Fleur D’Plastique | Leon Reid | London 2004

Torino Colors presents an intuitive method using colors as a way to identify cities’ areas. People, even if arriving for the first time in a city, can orientate themselves in the city thanks to the colors relations. According to yet|matilde, creator of the project, the color code can be adapted to the whole communication of the city, using existing urban objects, such as bus stations, street signs or artistic elements as representative of the city area color.

In a more integrative way, Urban Play believes that “street-level inventiveness, energy and innovation is a window into a new form of creativity in the city”. Using a guerilla design the project’s objective is to transform cities in a playful way. Funny street lamps or a series of stickers turning the London Underground’s Northern Line map into an interactive game present interactive ways to express the personalities and desires of the people.
Urban Play, directed by Droog Design, Amsterdam, in partnership with curator Scott Burnham, creative director of Montreal’s Biennial (2009), has been launched in Amsterdam in 2008 and will continue to other European cities featuring “its own Second Life metropolis for global creative interaction”.

More information:
http://www.urbanplay.org/
http://www.torinocolors.it/