At the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca’s First Year Architectural Design Studio, we have a very clear pathway – the first semester is focused on guiding our students within the first steps in architectural representation, space analysis and understanding, having an introductory nature, while the sophomore semester is dedicated on applying those core principles in a practical manner, within a more complex architectural project. This project is usually represented by living spaces, be it in the form of a single-family home, a house for a certain personality, a vacation house, a house for two students, and so on. This year, we divided that our experiment should be rather oriented towards the future, with the rise in preoccupation in regards to what a house should be, with the increase in home-technology and the use of artificial intelligence in resolving our current needs. In this sense, we knew that we wanted our students to imagine a house for the future. However, whereas in a house for present times, where the specific conditions in which one builds a house are clear and precise, a house for the future brings with itself a certain set of uncertainties. What are the specific conditions in which this house is built? What is the cultural scenery of that future place? What will the world be like at that moment? We do not have the answer to these questions – and that is where this experiment starts. In order to build a house for the future, we decided to create that specific context, through the use of imagination, in the form of a short story. The proposed article presents this current experiment, in which the Architectural Design Studio takes a Science Fiction Route, our team becomes the crew of a spaceship finding a new, habitable planet, everything taking place within a spaceship entitled EPICA – Education, Perspective, Innovation, Communication, Ambiance – one hundred years from now. The paper will focus on the first stage of this pursuit, in which 90 researchers on board of EPICA have to look back on the way in which the architecture of a living home evolved on Earth, in order to later create their own architectural projects on the new found planet, with hidden gems which relate to innovation and the use of AI in architectural design.

Keywords: Educational Role-Playing, Game-Based Learning, Narration as a Tool in Education.