Coalition game aims to untangle the complexity of the healthcare crisis

As part of the Healthy Society scientific program within Medical Delta: Lifestyle & Prevention, the BURO2040 project was recently launched. One of its key initiatives is the development of a coalition game that invites participants to collectively explore the future of healthcare through a series of immersive experiences and facilitated conversations.

BURO2040 focuses on the impending healthcare crisis, a wicked problem for which no single solution exists. The crisis is rooted in a complex web of interconnected medical, bureaucratic, insurance-related, financial, and political factors, all of which are intertwined with broader social and societal challenges.

A pop-up installation

The coalition game is a portable pop-up installation that can be easily set up at different locations. Over the course of a full day, a group of approximately 25 participants explores the healthcare crisis through a series of theatrical and interactive workshops, lectures, and speculative exercises, each offering a different perspective on the issue. By combining artistic methods—such as radical imagination and critical perspectives—with diverse forms and sources of knowledge, participants develop new directions for addressing the challenges facing healthcare. The coalition game provides participants with meaningful perspectives for action and encourages them to translate new insights into concrete steps.

Participants form a heterogeneous group, including healthcare professionals, administrators, people with lived experience, policymakers, and researchers. The aim is to gather diverse perspectives, confront them with one another, and integrate them. In this sense, the coalition game functions as a laboratory in which (partial) solutions emerge through an iterative process, and as an incubator for new, refined questions and outputs.

The plan is for the game to become playable within a year. It will then be followed by a version for the general public, which will tour theatres.

More information

The project’s knowledge partners include Medical Delta Professor Judith Rietjens (TU Delft, Erasmus MC, Leiden University), Wenda Doff, Wander van Baalen of TU Delft, and Lieke Oldenhof and Roland Bal of Erasmus University Rotterdam. BURO2040 also collaborates with transition experts from DRIFT, led by Derk Loorbach, also at Erasmus University Rotterdam. The initiative is partly funded by Medical Delta.

See also: Home | BURO 2040