Public Spaces play a key role in urban systems, by both acting as physical manifestations of societal relations and imaginary, as well as structural nodes that contribute to the resilience and functionality of cities. The COVID crisis itself has underlined this, calling for public spaces to quickly adapt and embed novel behavioural and utilization patterns in order to address the changing needs of communities.

The importance of societal engagement in the process of design and implementation of the public built environment is widely acknowledged by policy makers and the scientific community. Over the past decades, there has been a surge  of participatory and co-design processes worldwide including placemaking practices, calls for action, or co-design initiatives.

During the last decades, policy makers and city managers have started to use digital technologies as means to further engage citizens in the decision-making process. For instance, these activities can be supported by digital platforms which include features like polls for decision making, forums allowing interaction and discussion, or visualizations and animations in order to ease the communication of complex concepts. The concept of Gamification is also gaining importance; it is intended as a strategy to thoughtfully make these processes fun by applying game elements to real-world activities. The objective of this addition is to trigger more appealing and engaging participatory practices, as well as incentivizing active and consistent behaviour of the participants. Games are in fact demonstrated to have a motivational effect on their users, consequently increasing their level of participation. Some of the dynamics applied include rules, competition, outcomes, conflict, and other gameful or playful elements.

When applied to participatory practices for co-design in Public Space environments, gamification and responsive digital technologies, such as Virtual and Augmented Reality or Digital Interfaces, can become powerful tools to tackle the limitations of conventional methodologies. This contributes to widening the audience, ensuring the inclusivity of proposals, as well as to increasing the accessibility of design activities to non-expert citizens, empowering them as agents of transformation of the public realm.

The combination of Responsive Digital Technologies and Gamification Strategies can also empower designers with a wide range of applications. These include  stimulating citizen reflection and civic learning; generating interaction and resolving  conflicts between citizens with contrasting views; promoting values such as sustainability, coexistence and circular economy thanks to the purposeful use of objectives, challenges and tokens; simulating the impact of different design solutions; and generating awareness and informed decisions thanks to data visualization and indicators.