Mission Accomplished! Our First Card Design Playshop Was a Joyful Success!
October 17th, 2025
Planning with pen and paper, sketching by hand, using the open-source graphic design app Krita, and AI tools for visual concepts—our participants uploaded their results to our open-source Nextcloud for collaboration, then printed, cut, and sleeved their cards.
In just two workshop days (12 hours total), our young participants entered a joyful creation space with head, heart and hands during their autumn holidays.
We all share a love for the card game genre of TCGs (Trading Card Games). Titles like Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! capture our artistic imagination. Our participants learned to articulate their own imagined and sketched cards, translating their ideas into a physical product using open tools—something they could proudly hold in their hands.
Our workflow and tools were designed to adapt to our participants, not the other way around. This was especially helpful for young participants with reading and writing challenges, as they could simply switch to clear voice prompts and graphical brushes instead.
We are so grateful and happy that our first small-group pilot resonated so well with participants across the full age range (10–19). We even received a beautiful, youth-collaborated card for our regenerative food systems game, fsys, dedicated to our partners in Busano, Uganda, who recently received a village and school well for fresh water.
The successful playshop was facilitated in collaboration with the Youth Development Department, City of Hessisch-Lichtenau, and youth care worker Kai Zerweck during the European Code Week 2025. The workshop was provided free of charge by Ktopia and André Boeing as part of the regenerative food systems fsysgame.org development. Ktopia is a project partner of The Jena Declaration at the UNESCO Chair on Global Understanding for Sustainability