Thailand Institute of Justice – Welcome to Arcadia the Game
Challenge
How do you create a shared language for policymakers working across fragmented and siloed justice initiatives? The goal: spark collaboration and proactive design in a system known for complexity, contradiction, and inertia.
Approach:
We designed a cooperative Serious Game that draws from speculative futures tools, ethnographic research, and real-world justice work in Thailand. The gameplay challenges participants to navigate justice scenarios while balancing power dynamics, representing community voices, and identifying actionable entry points for systems change. It became a platform for learning, trust-building, and conversation that continues long after the session ends.
Interesting Insight:
When designing a magical, bright, city of the future, it is defined by real spaces and real people. Even the most stodgy ideologues move away from a policy-first perspective, to a people-in-space perspective.
Players show a preference toward creating supportive environments and spaces that serve emotional and psychological needs over procedural or institutional functions. The role of these spaces are not just to be safe spaces for vulnerable populations, but for caretakers, judges, and many kinds of actors. This suggests that effective spaces are ones that are designed for multiple groups that can bridge across cultural and power divides. The strategy for developing a robust path to the future is in ensuring that even the most unlikely groups can collaborate. The starting point for that is that it must be in a well designed space.
Impact:
The game is now a regular staple in the Future Thinking for Social Justice curriculum, played by hundreds of policy makers. It is regularly played at Thailand Institute of Justice, and was played at the World Congress for Justice with Children 2025.
Related Work:
The game is a vital part of a much larger whole. The team has conducted participatory, longitudinal research into building resilient communities within Bangkok. This work fueled a project on assuaging gender based violence using a strategic foresight lens, started the Smile Space initiative to overcome unhealthy self-expression habits, and influenced strategy at the social teen program Mindventure and the mental health campaign “Unknown Together,” sponsored by Facebook and UN Thailand.