Conference Agenda

Design education increasingly unfolds across studio, city and digital platforms, yet these environments are rarely orchestrated as coherent learning ecologies. This paper presents Territorial Quest, a location-aware, game-based activity embedded in a master’s level systemic and service design studio. The intervention turns urban exploration into a structured, data-driven process: student teams investigate different neighbourhoods, collect and categorise contextual data through shared digital tools, and participate in a lightweight scoring system that makes fieldwork visible and comparable. Using a research-through-design and design-based approach, the study combines questionnaires, digital trace data and qualitative feedback to examine how Territorial Quest shapes learning. Findings indicate that the activity supports more continuous and systematic fieldwork, strengthens team collaboration and fosters territorial awareness, while also surfacing tensions around competition, data quality and fairness. The paper discusses Territorial Quest as a phygital learning ecology for rehearsing public design capabilities and outlines design implications for public-oriented curricula.