The awareness game

A board game to raise awareness on living with a disability for schools and universities in Uganda

Client: Light for the world, Mastercard (donor)

Services: Design research, Game design

Partners: Urithi studio, Emilie de Witte

Context: In their project Cap-Able, Light for the World aimed to develop a board game to shed light on the challenges of living with a disability. In Uganda, as in many parts of the world, educational institutions often fall short in integrating individuals with disabilities into their infrastructures. It's a material problem for the lack of special installations for people in wheel chairs or with a visual impairment, but also a rigidity of the curriculum to accommodate for students with learning difficulties. The project seeks to address both tangible and systemic barriers to create a more inclusive educational experience.

Mission: Our contact at light for the world in Uganda asked us to conceptualise a game. We quickly landed on the idea to co-create a board game as an MVP for a future digital game.
The process was straight forward as a lot of content and research had already been done during the first phases of the project. One well organised co-creation session was enough to gather the insights necessary for a first concept version.

The objective is for the player to experience the challenges of someone living with disability(ies), become aware of the obstacles they face and the work needed to become more inclusive. As a collaborative game, the goal is to get your avatar, as a team, to the graduation. Along the road players need to stay true to the limitations of their avatar and will have to discuss with each other how their avatar will overcome the obstacles. At the end of the game, players discuss what could be improved in real life for someone like their avatar. Finally players draw their ideas in an ideal composition and submit it on the cap-able platform.