A board game on the circular economy of smartphones
One goal of the math4sustainability project is to promote environmentally sustainable actions through exhibits, which may be used in any educational context, be it in exhibitions, classrooms, workshops, or even at home. We brainstormed possible exhibit topics and ideas for exhibit formats and came up with the following combination: A board game on the circular economy of smartphones.
In a linear economy, the life of a phone would look like this (from left to right):
Now, to add circularity to the system, several additional arrows can be introduced (going in the opposite direction, from right to left), each representing one of the so-called R-strategies. For example, a broken phone can be repaired and used again, and an abandoned phone can be reused. The parts from a phone in the trash could be recycled and used to produce new phones from them. The strategies in these examples are: Repair, Reuse, and Recycle. There are several more (Refuse, Rethink, Reduce, Refurbish, Remanufacture, Repurpose, Recover), and since they are all conveniently named to start with the letter R, they are called R-strategies.
In a perfect circular economy world for smartphones – which unfortunately is an unrealistic paradise – all the phones would ideally stay in the system forever, never reaching the landfill, and there would be no need to take materials from nature since there are already enough phones. This ideal state cannot be reached, but you can try to come as close to it as possible (similar to a perpetuum mobile that moves forever).
For the board game, we are planning to use a worker placement game mechanic: the players influence the economy by placing a limited amount of tokens, which represent the probabilities for the different paths a phone can take (for example, the probability that a broken phone will be repaired or thrown into the trash). The game imposes restrictions on how the tokens can be placed.
We can share our first and second prototypes here:
IMAGINARY had already developed a museum exhibit called RRRRR on the topic, which includes a game table with a large interactive screen featuring a real-time simulation of the economy of smartphones. That one uses a stocks/flows model for the simulation:
Stocks (circles in the diagram above) represent the states of the phone (‘in use’, ‘broken’…), and can contain a certain amount of phones. An arrow represents the flow of phones from one stock to another.
For the board game, we use a different approach called agent-based modeling. Instead of tracking numeric amounts, we track a few individual phones placed by the users. The goal is, to keep these phones in the system for as long as possible. Obviously, applying the different R-strategies will help the players reach this goal. We hope, the game will encourage them to also apply these strategies in real life.