Design Map · Eindhoven
And Who are You?
Graduation project by Benjamin Sheppard at Design Academy Eindhoven, 2026. Shown during Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven on Design Map, location F5.
A group of players sits down to play a game. Each of them draws a character whose relationship to Christianity, life experiences and worldview may differ sharply from their own. ‘And Who are You?’ guides participants through a collective deliberation which will decide the future of the roles they are embodying and the world that they are living in. Utilizing friction as a role-playing tool, players are challenged to carry their character's convictions into every decision even when they feel contradicted by it. Through this act, discomfort and improvisation become deliberate tools to encourage players to renegotiate positions they might otherwise avoid examining. Developed as an open-source format, the game sets about returning Christian beliefs, nowadays regarded as sacred, to the forum of open discussion. The game environment explores how personal belief filters into politics in the West, often reproducing the very hierarchies and exclusions democracy is supposed to avoid.