Salon, a game of Tables and Chairs
2014-Current
Winner of two Internal Design Awards
Gold for Game Design
Bronze for Design for Social Impact.
Salon is part of a wide look into the nature of play in the creation process and inhabitation of space.
“Salon, a game of Table & Chairs” adapts the familiar space of the gridded Chess and Checker board to produce an interactive environment which refers specifically to the scale and protocols of the interior, rather than the plains of war.
The game play of Salon is altogether less metaphorically violent than the space of Chess. Building upon the social history of cultural salons as places of creative and intellectual dialog, Salon is a game of civil and somewhat collaborative interaction, while also being strategic and competitive.
The game was registered as Patent Pending, and the Trademark secured, but although the Patent was achievable it became apparent that patenting and trademarking were counter to the communitarian ethos of the project. Now the game has a Creative Commons registration to allow people to duplicate and modify the project, but by mutual agreement not for commercial purposes.
The prototypes for the board game and the room scale group play versions are near complete, and the virtual reality version is beginning development.
Salon was formally debuted at the “Interior Provocations Symposium: Interiors without Architecture”, at Pratt Institute 2018.
The Routledge book “Interiors Without Architecture” features a chapter by Alan Bruton on the “Ludic Space of the Interior” expanding on ideas explored in Salon.
Visit the official SalonTheGame.com site!
The project is the subject of a book chapter in the
“social practice, social sculpture, community engagement