Alex Whee Kim

Alex Whee Kim (he/him) is a designer and writer from California. His research generally focuses on the role of games and other participatory media in the history of political and spatial practice. His dissertation, “With the World at Play: Games in Spatial Practice, Pedagogy, and Politics, 1968-1984,” examines the development of game-based methods of design, planning, and education, comparatively tracing spatial practices from the managerial to the counterculture. This research unpacks how gaming became a shared instrument and epistemology across such disparate ideological terrain during the long 1970s, and how these game-based practices influenced the development of environmental discourses and computational thinking in architecture and beyond. His writing—often collaborative—has appeared in The Whole Earth Redux, Perspecta, Imago: Studi di cinema e media, Places, and Disc. He has been a coordinating editor of Paprika! and is a co-editor of the forthcoming Perspecta 57. Alex has a B.Arch from Syracuse University and an M.E.D. from Yale.

Research Area Keywords

Games Studies, Media Theory, American Counterculture, Cold War Technologies, History of Computing, Environmental Design