Claudio Granato and Enrico Pieraccioli: "We have always been interested in new technologies and their applications, both for communication purposes and for the areas of designing a vision.

All the more reason with the evolution of recent years, in which the fluidity between the real world and the virtual world is increasingly important, our curiosity has evolved almost naturally and has become daily.

Whether it's to escape reality or be directly linked to it, the world of gamification has been part of our daily lives for several years now.

The interest has also developed in the first person, using the vehicle since the 80s.

From the time of the first consoles and the Commodore 64. The other aspect that interests us is socio-cultural, that is, how this medium affects people, especially the perception of space.

We also deal with consultancy for the fashion sector and we have realized that in recent years there has been an increase in the use of narration for exclusively commercial purposes.

From there we wondered if there could be a different use to interpret space. We understood that gaming can be a useful tool to represent and bring concepts to life, which is what we usually do".

When did you realize that gamification was becoming a design key?

“We have always perceived the fact that gamification could be able to best describe a project. We do not believe that this can emerge during the design phase, but we think it is a useful tool for making a concept or an experience live better.

Since the early 2000s, the first cases of digital projects linked to augmented reality have been experimented, just think of the Adobe museum of 2010.

The difference with augmented reality lies in allowing greater involvement to be triggered in the user.

In this way, gamification allows the user to perceive not only a space but an emotional dimension of a project: this is what comes closest to our research".

What worlds does a search game open up to your business?

“For us it is essential in any project to trigger a reaction of any kind. This medium can help us restore this type of approach and help us to tell our work in a more engaging way, giving us extreme freedom design.

It allows us to bring an idea to life firsthand, without necessarily having to implement it as we are used to, i.e. through matter.

The world of gamification manages to break the cold and detached sensation with which we are used to perceiving the digital world and offers the possibility of experimenting with new scenarios applicable to different concepts and visions and allows us to open up to infinite narratives.

All this happens in the maximum spatial experimentation of research, without physical or economic limits, overcoming the limits of gravity and, above all, of building in the strictest sense.

We are therefore confronted with a spatial design in its purest sense, where we have the opportunity to interact and play not only with different aspects such as visual, material and sound perceptions, but also to interact with different professionals from those of architecture " .

What do you expect to emerge more generally from the meeting of design and gamification?

Claudio Granato and Emilio Pieraccioli: "We believe that the combination with the gaming world can make a significant contribution to the increase of the story, both on a narrative level and in the possibility of creating different and varied dynamics, in addition to discourse that opens with regard to the emotional and sensory involvement given by a project experienced in the first person.

The project can be linked to a storytelling and an experience.

The possibility of being able to experience the project and to be able to explore it from various points of view are other useful aspects for investigating its facets".

Your game is a deep research on Italian living, with references to fake and precise masters: which ones?

“Our references always start from concepts of stratification and contamination of situations, hence the name Lashup. We don't have fixed and canonical references or even real languages that inspire us.

What interests us is to understand interweavings and paradigms that come both from the analog world and from the digital world. This is because they best represent the complexity of contemporary society.

For the project An Individual Peace Of Mind, interferences of references are created that come from the visual poems of Robert Barry, Nancy Holt and Allan Kaprow, from the photography of Luigi Ghirri in the Italian landscapes of southern Italy and from psychological approach used by Alvar Aalto in architecture, combined with the atmosphere of the second homes of the films with Vitti and Tognazzi and the texts Poetry of Architecture by John Ruskin and Architettura Rurale Italiana by Giuseppe Pagano and Guarniero Daniel” .

Can gamification make architecture more popular?

Claudio Granato and Emilio Pieraccioli: "More than popular, gamification can allow you to explore architecture from multiple perceptive points of view.

If this helps bring the concept of architecture closer to a different audience, without making it fall into a mere entertainment attitude and without diminishing the architect's professionalism, then the tool can be considered useful in giving a clearer and more complete vision of the idea of architecture .

On the contrary it could be the world of architecture that begins to enter the world of gaming through the design of spaces or places, so as to contribute to the education of players who find themselves involuntarily inside a 'designed architecture'.