040 Migrant Voices

Migrant Voices is a participatory design-research tool developed to investigate how migrants understand, organize, and prioritize space through play. It was implemented at Casa Monarca Ayuda Humanitaria al Migrante in Monterrey, Mexico, as part of a week-long workshop involving more than forty migrants of different ages and nationalities.

The tool consists of a 9 × 9 modular board containing 81 cells and 30 color-coded spatial pieces, each representing a program, activity, or spatial condition associated with everyday life, shelter, care, community, and mobility. Participants were asked to select a limited number of pieces and arrange them freely on the board, producing individual spatial configurations rather than responding to a predefined architectural plan.

The game was conceived not as a conventional design exercise, but as a method for making spatial preferences, relationships, and priorities visible. By reducing architectural representation to a simple system of pieces, adjacency, position, and choice, the tool allowed participants with different ages, languages, and levels of architectural literacy to communicate spatial ideas directly.

The resulting boards form a dataset that can be analyzed through adjacency matrices, frequency maps, clustering, symmetry, centralization, density, and other spatial indicators. In this way, the project operates simultaneously as a participatory workshop, a research instrument, and a design methodology, foregrounding migrant agency in the production of architectural knowledge.