Minecraft Games and Public Participation in Landscape Design - Current Teaching Experience

The Covid-19 pandemic has resulted in a shift to on-line teaching and enforced adjustments to academic curricula all over the world. It has also affected the teaching of participative landscape design within landscape architecture studies in the Faculty of Architecture at Cracow University of Technology (FA-CUT), Krakow, Poland. In this article, the authors summarise experiences from the Social Communication subject during the 4th and 5th semester of landscape architecture directly linked to integrated design studio. A number of methods facilitating public participation were tested and included on-line questionnaires, social media profiles, on-line focus group interviews and elements of gaming on a special Minecraft server. Results indicate that although on-line participation may be fruitful, it requires considerable efforts in terms of time and workload. Therefore, despite the promising results, on-line participation requires as much careful planning and time management as traditional social research methods. Nonetheless, the on-line tools have proven to be particularly useful and appropriate in times of social distancing in the pandemic. © 2021 WIETE