Talks – Page 2 – Leapfroglog

Prototyping the Useless Butler: Machine Learning for IoT Designers

ThingsCon Amsterdam 2017, photo by nunocruzstreet.com

At ThingsCon Amsterdam 2017, Péter and I ran a second iteration of our machine learning workshop. We improved on our first attempt at TU Delft in a number of ways.

We prepared example code for communicating with Wekinator from a wifi connected Arduino MKR1000 over OSC.
We created a predefined breadboard setup.
We developed three exercises, one for each type of Wekinator output: regression, classification and dynamic time warping.

In contrast to the first version, we had two hours to run through the whole thing, in stead of a day… So we had to cut some corners, and doubled down on walking participants through a number of exercises so that they would come out of it with some readily applicable skills.

We dubbed the workshop ‘prototyping the useless butler’, with thanks to Philip van Allen for the suggestion to frame the exercises around building something non-productive so that the focus was shifted to play and exploration.

All of the code, the circuit diagram and slides are over on GitHub. But I’ll summarise things here.

We spent a very short amount of time introducing machine learning. We used Google’s Teachable Machine as an example and contrasted regular programming with using machine learning algorithms to train models. The point was to provide folks with just enough conceptual scaffolding so that the rest of the workshop would make sense.
We then introduced our ‘toolchain’ which consists of Wekinator, the Arduino MKR1000 module and the OSC protocol. The aim of this toolchain is to allow designers who work in the IoT space to get a feel for the material properties of machine learning through hands-on tinkering. We tried to create a toolchain with as few moving parts as possible, because each additional component would introduce another point of failure which might require debugging. This toolchain would enable designers to either use machine learning to rapidly prototype interactive behaviour with minimal or no programming. It can also be used to prototype products that expose interactive machine learning features to end users. (For a speculative example of one such product, see Bjørn Karmann’s Objectifier.)
Participants were then asked to set up all the required parts on their own workstation. A list can be found on the Useless Butler GitHub page.
We then proceeded to build the circuit. We provided all the components and showed a Fritzing diagram to help people along. The basic idea of this circuit, the eponymous useless butler, was to have a sufficiently rich set of inputs and outputs with which to play, that would suit all three types of Wekinator output. So we settled on a pair of photoresistors or LDRs as inputs and an RGB LED as output.
With the prerequisites installed and the circuit built we were ready to walk through the examples. For regression we mapped the continuous stream of readings from the two LDRs to three outputs, one each for the red, green and blue of the LED. For classification we put the state of both LDRs into one of four categories, each switching the RGB LED to a specific color (cyan, magenta, yellow or white). And finally, for dynamic time warping, we asked Wekinator to recognise one of three gestures and switch the RGB LED to one of three states (red, green or off).

When we reflected on the workshop afterwards, we agreed we now have a proven concept. Participants were able to get the toolchain up and running and could play around with iteratively training and evaluating their model until it behaved as intended.

However, there is still quite a bit of room for improvement. On a practical note, quite a bit of time was taken up by the building of the circuit, which isn’t the point of the workshop. One way of dealing with this is to bring those to a workshop pre-built. Doing so would enable us to get to the machine learning quicker and would open up time and space to also engage with the participants about the point of it all.

We’re keen on bringing this workshop to more settings in future. If we do, I’m sure we’ll find the opportunity to improve on things once more and I will report back here.

Many thanks to Iskander and the rest of the ThingsCon team for inviting us to the conference.

‘Hybrid Writing for Conversational Interfaces’ workshop

On May 24 of this year, Niels ’t Hooft and myself ran a workshop titled ‘Hybrid Writing for Conversational Interfaces’ at TU Delft. Our aim was twofold: teach students about writing characters and dialog, and teach them how to prototype chat interfaces.

We spent a day with roughly thirty industrial design students alternating between bits of theory, writing exercises, instructions on how to use Twine (our prototyping tool of choice) and closed out with a small project and a show and tell.

I was very pleased to see prototypes with quite a high level of complexity and sophistication at the end of the day. And throughout, I could tell students were enjoying themselves writing and building interactive conversations.

Here’s a rough outline of how the workshop was structured.

After briefly introducing ourselves, Niels presented a mini-lecture on interactive fiction. A highlight for me was a two-by-two of the ways in which fiction and software can intersect.

I then took over and did a show and tell of the absolute basics of using Twine. Things like creating passages, linking them, creating branches and testing and publishing your story.
The first exercise after this was for students to take what they just learned about Twine and try to create a very simple interactive story.
After a coffee break, Niels then presented his second mini-lecture on the very basics of writing. With a particular focus on writing characters and dialog. This included a handy cheatsheet for things to consider while writing.

In our second exercise students worked in pairs. They first each created a character, which they then described to each other. They then first planned out the structure of an encounter between these two characters. And finally they collaboratively wrote the dialogue for this encounter. They were required to stick to Hollywood formatting. Niels and I then did a reading of a few (to great amusement of all present) to close out the morning section of the workshop.
After lunch Niels presented his third and final mini-lecture of the day, on conversational interfaces, relying heavily on the great work of our friend Alper in his book on the subject.
I then took over for the second show and tell. Here we ramped up the challenge and introduced the Twine Texting Project – a framework for prototyping conversational interfaces in Twine. On GitHub, you can find the starter file I had prepared for this section.
The third and final exercise of the day was for students to take what they learned about writing dialog, and prototyping chat interfaces, and to build an interactive prototype of a conversational interface or interactive fiction in chat format. They could either build off of the dialog they have created in the previous exercise, or start from scratch.
We finished the day with demos, where put the Twine story on the big screen and as a group chose what options to select. After each demo the creator would open up the Twine file and walk us through how they had built it. It was pretty cool to see how many students had put what they had learned to very creative uses.

Reflecting on the workshop afterwards, we felt the structure was nicely balanced between theory and practice. The difficulty level was such that students did learn some new things which they could incorporate into future projects, but still built on skills they had already acquired. The choice for Twine worked out well too since it is highly accessible. Non-technical students managed to create something interactive, and more advanced students could apply what they knew about code to produce more sophisticated prototypes.

For future workshops we did feel we could improve on building a bridge between the writing for interactive fiction and writing for conversational interfaces of software products and services. This would require some adaptation of the mini lectures and a slightly different emphasis in the exercises. The key would be to have students imagine existing products and services as characters, and to then write dialog for interactions and prototype them. For a future iteration of the workshop, this would be worth exploring further.

Many thanks to Ianus Keller for inviting us to teach this workshop at IDE Academy.

‘Machine Learning for Designers’ workshop

On Wednesday Péter Kun, Holly Robbins and myself taught a one-day workshop on machine learning at Delft University of Technology. We had about thirty master’s students from the industrial design engineering faculty. The aim was to get them acquainted with the technology through hands-on tinkering with the Wekinator as central teaching tool.

Background

The reasoning behind this workshop is twofold.

On the one hand I expect designers will find themselves working on projects involving machine learning more and more often. The technology has certain properties that differ from traditional software. Most importantly, machine learning is probabilistic in stead of deterministic. It is important that designers understand this because otherwise they are likely to make bad decisions about its application.

The second reason is that I have a strong sense machine learning can play a role in the augmentation of the design process itself. So-called intelligent design tools could make designers more efficient and effective. They could also enable the creation of designs that would otherwise be impossible or very hard to achieve.

The workshop explored both ideas.

Format

The structure was roughly as follows:

In the morning we started out providing a very broad introduction to the technology. We talked about the very basic premise of (supervised) learning. Namely, providing examples of inputs and desired outputs and training a model based on those examples. To make these concepts tangible we then introduced the Wekinator and walked the students through getting it up and running using basic examples from the website. The final step was to invite them to explore alternative inputs and outputs (such as game controllers and Arduino boards).

In the afternoon we provided a design brief, asking the students to prototype a data-enabled object with the set of tools they had acquired in the morning. We assisted with technical hurdles where necessary (of which there were more than a few) and closed out the day with demos and a group discussion reflecting on their experiences with the technology.

Results

As I tweeted on the way home that evening, the results were… interesting.

Not all groups managed to put something together in the admittedly short amount of time they were provided with. They were most often stymied by getting an Arduino to talk to the Wekinator. Max was often picked as a go-between because the Wekinator receives OSC messages over UDP, whereas the quickest way to get an Arduino to talk to a computer is over serial. But Max in my experience is a fickle beast and would more than once crap out on us.

The groups that did build something mainly assembled prototypes from the examples on hand. Which is fine, but since we were mainly working with the examples from the Wekinator website they tended towards the interactive instrument side of things. We were hoping for explorations of IoT product concepts. For that more hand-rolling was required and this was only achievable for the students on the higher end of the technical expertise spectrum (and the more tenacious ones).

The discussion yielded some interesting insights into mental models of the technology and how they are affected by hands-on experience. A comment I heard more than once was: Why is this considered learning at all? The Wekinator was not perceived to be learning anything. When challenged on this by reiterating the underlying principles it became clear the black box nature of the Wekinator hampers appreciation of some of the very real achievements of the technology. It seems (for our students at least) machine learning is stuck in a grey area between too-high expectations and too-low recognition of its capabilities.

Next steps

These results, and others, point towards some obvious improvements which can be made to the workshop format, and to teaching design students about machine learning more broadly.

We can improve the toolset so that some of the heavy lifting involved with getting the various parts to talk to each other is made easier and more reliable.
We can build examples that are geared towards the practice of designing IoT products and are ready for adaptation and hacking.
And finally, and probably most challengingly, we can make the workings of machine learning more transparent so that it becomes easier to develop a feel for its capabilities and shortcomings.

We do intend to improve and teach the workshop again. If you’re interested in hosting one (either in an educational or professional context) let me know. And stay tuned for updates on this and other efforts to get designers to work in a hands-on manner with machine learning.

Special thanks to the brilliant Ianus Keller for connecting me to Péter and for allowing us to pilot this crazy idea at IDE Academy.

References

Sources used during preparation and running of the workshop:

The Wekinator – the UI is infuriatingly poor but when it comes to getting started with machine learning this tool is unmatched.
Arduino – I have become particularly fond of the MKR1000 board. Add a lithium-polymer battery and you have everything you need to prototype IoT products.
OSC for Arduino – CNMAT’s implementation of the open sound control (OSC) encoding. Key puzzle piece for getting the above two tools talking to each other.
Machine Learning for Designers – my preferred introduction to the technology from a designerly perspective.
A Visual Introduction to Machine Learning – a very accessible visual explanation of the basic underpinnings of computers applying statistical learning.
Remote Control Theremin – an example project I prepared for the workshop demoing how to have the Wekinator talk to an Arduino MKR1000 with OSC over UDP.

Playful Design for Smart Cities

Earlier this week I escaped the miserable weather and food of the Netherlands to spend a couple of days in Barcelona, where I attended the ‘Playful Design for Smart Cities’ workshop at RMIT Europe.

I helped Jussi Holopainen run a workshop in which participants from industry, government and academia together defined projects aimed at further exploring this idea of playful design within the context of smart cities, without falling into the trap of solutionism.

Before the workshop I presented a summary of my chapter in The Gameful World, along with some of my current thinking on it. There were also great talks by Judith Ackermann, Florian ‘Floyd’ Müller, and Gilly Karjevsky and Sebastian Quack.

Below are the slides for my talk and links to all the articles, books and examples I explicitly and implicitly referenced throughout.

Engagement design worksheets

Engagement design workshop at General Assembly Singapore

In June/July of this year I helped Michael Fillié teach two classes about engagement design at General Assembly Singapore. The first was theoretical and the second practical. For the practical class we created a couple of worksheets which participants used in groups to gradually build a design concept for a new product or product improvement aimed at long-term engagement. Below are the worksheets along with some notes on how to use them. I’m hoping they may be useful in your own practice.

A practical note: Each of these worksheets is designed to be printed on A1 paper. (Click on the images to get the PDFs.) We worked on them using post-it notes so that it is easy to add, change or remove things as you go.

Problem statement and persona

We started with understanding the problem and the user. This worksheet is an adaptation of the persona sheet by Strategyzer. To use it you begin at the top, fleshing out the problem in the form of stating the engagement challenge, and the business goals. Then, you select a user segment which is relevant to the problem.

The middle section of the sheet is used to describe them in the form of a persona. Start with putting a face on them. Give the persona a name and add some demographic details relevant for the user’s behaviour. Then, move on to exploring what their environment looks and sounds like and what they are thinking and feeling. Finally, try to describe what issues the user is having that are addressed by the product and what the user stands to gain from using the product.

The third section of this sheet is used to wrap up the first exercise by doing a quick gap analysis of what the business would like to see in terms of user behaviour and what the user is currently doing. This will help pin down the engagement design concept fleshed out in the next exercises.

Engagement loop

Exercise two builds on the understanding of the problem and the user and offers a structured way of thinking through a possible solution. For this we use the engagement loop model developed by Sebastian Deterding. There are different places we can start here but one that often works well is to start imagining the Big Hairy Audacious Goal the user is looking to achieve. This is the challenge. It is a thing (usually a skill) the user can improve at. Note this challenge down in the middle. Then, working around the challenge, describe a measurable goal the user can achieve on their way to mastering the challenge. Describe the action the user can take with the product towards that goal, and the feedback the product will give them to let them know their action has succeeded and how much closer it has gotten them to the goal. Finally and crucially, try to describe what kind of motivation the user is driven by and make sure the goals, actions and feedback make sense in that light. If not, adjust things until it all clicks.

Storyboard

The final exercise is devoted to visualising and telling a story about the engagement loop we developed in the abstract in the previous block. It is a typical storyboard, but we have constrained it to a set of story beats you must hit to build a satisfying narrative. We go from introducing the user and their challenge, to how the product communicates the goal and action to what a user does with it and how they get feedback on that to (fast-forward) how they feel when they ultimately master the challenge. It makes the design concept relatable to outsiders and can serve as a jumping off point for further design and development.

Use, adapt and share

Together, these three exercises and worksheets are a great way to think through an engagement design problem. We used them for teaching but I can also imagine teams using them to explore a solution to a problem they might be having with an existing product, or as a way to kickstart the development of a new product.

We’ve built on other people’s work for these so it only makes sense to share them again for others to use and build on. If you do use them I would love to hear about your experiences.

Buildings and Brains at the Nijmegen Design Platform (NOP)

It’s been a few weeks since I presented at the Nijmegen Design Platform (NOP), but I thought it would still be useful to post a summary of what I talked about here.

Update: it took me a while, but the slides that accompanied this talk are now up at SlideShare.

A little context: The NOP run frequent events for designers in the region. These designers mostly work in more traditional domains such as graphic, fashion and industrial design. NOP asked Jeroen van Mastrigt — a friend and occasional colleague of mine — to talk about games at one of their events. Jeroen in turn asked me to play Robin to his Batman, I would follow up his epic romp through game design theory with a brief look at pervasive games. This of course was an offer I could not refuse. The event was held at a lovely location (the huge art-house cinema LUX) and was attended by a healthy-sized crowd. Kudos to the NOP for organizing it and many thanks to them (and Jeroen) for inviting me.

So, what I tried to do in the talk was to first give a sense of what pervasive games are, what characterizes them. I drew from the Hide & Seek website for the list of characteristics and used The Soho Project as a running example throughout this part. I also tied the characteristics to some theory I found interesting:

Mixing digital technology with real world play — I emphasized that ultimately, technology is but a means to an end. At Interaction ‘09 Robert Fabricant said the medium of interaction design is human behavior. I think the same holds true for the design of pervasive games.
Social interaction — Raph Koster once said single player games are a historical aberration. It is clear much of the fun in pervasive games is social. In a way I think they bridge the gap between the “old” board games and contemporary video games.
Using the city as a playground — Here I could not resist bringing in Jane Jacob’s notions of the city as an entity that is organised from the bottom up and Kevin Lynch’s work on the mental maps we create of cities as we move through them. Cities play a vital role in facilitating the play of pervasive games. At best they are the main protagonist of them.
Transforming public spaces into theatrical stagesets — This is related to the previous one, but here I made a sidestep into the embodied nature of player interactions in pervasive games and how embodiment facilitates reading at a distance of such actions. In a sense, the social fun of embodied play is due to its performative quality.

After this, I tried to show why designers outside the domain of games should care about pervasive games. This I did by talking about ways they can be used for purposes other than ‘mere’ entertainment. These were:

Enlarging perceived reality; you can create games that play with the way we customarily perceive reality. This was inspired by the talk Kevin Slavin of Area/Code delivered at MIND08. Examples I used were Crossroads and The Comfort of Strangers.
Changing human behavior for the better; think of the Toyota Prius dashboard’s effect on people’s driving behavior. Examples of games that use feedback loops to steer us towards desirable goals are CryptoZoo and FourSquare.
Crowdsourcing solutions; games can simulate possible futures and challenge players to respond to their problems. Here I used Jane McGonigal’s ideas around collective intelligence gaming. The example game I talked about was World Without Oil.
Conveying arguments procedurally; Ian Bogost‘s concept of procedural rhetoric isn’t specific to pervasive games, but I think the way they get mixed up with everyday life make them particularly effective channels for communicating ideas. I used The Go Game, Cruel 2B Kind and Join the Line¹ as examples.

By talking about these things I hoped to provide a link to the audience’s own design practice. They may not deal with games, but they surely deal with communicating ideas and changing people’s behavior. Come to think of it though, I was doing a very old media style presentation in attempt to achieve the same… Oh well.

Join the Line is a game students conceptualized during a workshop I ran. [↩]

Play in social and tangible interactions

Now that the IxDA has posted a video of my presentation at Interaction 09 to Vimeo, I thought it would be a good idea to provide a little background to the talk. I had already posted the slides to SlideShare, so a full write-up doesn’t seem necessary. To provide a little context though, I will summarize the thing.

Summary

The idea of the talk was to look at a few qualities of embodied interaction, and relate them to games and play, in the hopes of illuminating some design opportunities. Without dwelling on what embodiment really means, suffice to say that there is a school of thought that states that our thinking originates in our bodily experience of the world around us, and our relationships with the people in it. I used the example of an improvised information display I once encountered in the paediatric ward of a local hospital to highlight two qualities of embodied interaction: (1) meaning is socially constructed and (2) cognition is facilitated by tangibility.¹

With regards to the first aspect — the social construction of meaning — I find it interesting that in games, you find a distinction between the official rules to a game, and the rules that are arrived at through mutual consent by the players, the latter being how the game is actually played. Using the example of an improvised manège in Habbo, I pointed out that under-specified design tends to encourage the emergence of such interesting uses. What it comes down to, as a designer, is to understand that once people get together to do stuff, and it involves the thing you’ve designed, they will layer new meanings on top of what you came up with, which is largely out of your control.

For the second aspect — cognition being facilitated by tangibility — I talked about how people use the world around them to offload mental computation. For instance, when people get better at playing Tetris, they start backtracking more than when they just started playing. They are essentially using the game’s space to think with. As an aside, I pointed out that in my experience, sketching plays a similar role when designing. As with the social construction of meaning, for epistemic action to be possible, the system in use needs to be adaptable.

To wrap up, I suggested that, when it comes to the design of embodied interactive stuff, we are struggling with the same issues as game designers. We’re both positioning ourselves (in the words of Eric Zimmerman) as meta-creators of meaning; as designers of spaces in which people discover new things about themselves, the world around them and the people in it.

Sources

I had several people come up to me afterwards, asking for sources, so I’ll list them here.

the significance of the social construction of meaning for interaction design is explained in detail by Paul Dourish in his book Where the Action Is
the research by Jean Piaget I quoted is from his book The Moral Judgement of the Child (which I first encountered in Rules of Play, see below)
the concept of ideal versus real rules is from the wonderful book Rules of Play by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman (who in turn have taken it from Kenneth Goldstein’s article Strategies in Counting Out)
for a wonderful description of how children socially mediate the rules to a game, have a look at the article Beyond the Rules of the Game by Linda Hughes (collected in the Game Design Reader)
the Will Wright quote is from an interview in Tracy Fullerton’s book Game Design Workshop, second edition
for a discussion of pragmatic versus epistemic action and how it relates to interaction design, refer to the article How Bodies Matter (PDF) by Scott Klemmer, Björn Hartmann and Leila Takayama (which is rightfully recommended by Dan Saffer in his book, Designing Gestural Interfaces)
the Tetris research (which I first found in the previously mentioned article) is described in Epistemic Action Increases With Skill (PDF), an article by Paul Maglio and David Kirsh
the “play is free movement…” quote is from Rules of Play
the picture of the guy skateboarding is a still from the awesome documentary film Dogtown and Z-Boys
for a lot of great thinking on “loose fit” design, be sure to check out the book How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand
the “meta-creators of meaning” quote is from Eric Zimmerman’s foreword to the aforementioned Game Design Workshop, 2nd ed.

Thanks

And that’s it. Interaction 09 was a great event, I’m happy to have been a part of it. Most of the talks seem to be online now. So why not check them out? My favourites by far were John Thackara and Robert Fabricant. Thanks to the people of the IxDA for all the effort they put into increasing interaction design’s visibility to the world.

For a detailed discussion of the information display, have a look at this blog post. [↩]

Mashing up the real-time city and urban games

Yesterday evening I was at the Club of Amsterdam. They host events centred around preferred futures. I was invited to speak at an evening about the future of games.¹ I thought I’d share what I talked about with you here.

I had ten minutes to get my point across. To be honest, I think I failed rather dismally. Some of the ideas I included were still quite fresh and unfinished, and I am afraid this did not work out well. I also relied too heavily on referencing other’s work, presuming people would be familiar with them. A miscalculation on my part.

In any case, thanks to Felix Bopp and Carla Hoekendijk for inviting me. I had a good time and enjoyed the other presenter’s talks. The discussion afterwards too was a lot of things, but dull certainly isn’t among them.

What follows is a write-up of what I more or less said during the presentation, plus references to the sources I used, which will hopefully make things clearer than they were during the evening itself.²

(This is where I did the usual introduction of who I am and what I do. I won’t bore you with it here. In case you are wondering, the title of this talk is slightly tongue-in cheek. I had to come up with it for the abstract before writing the actual talk. Had I been able to choose a title afterwards, it would’ve been something like “Growth” or “A New Biology of Urban Play”…)

This gentleman is Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. He is said to be the first to formulate a coherent theory of evolution. His ideas centred around inheritance of acquired traits. So for instance, a blacksmiths who works hard his whole life will probably get really strong arms. In the Lamarckist view, his offspring will inherit these strong arms from him. Darwinism rules supreme in evolutionary biology, so it is no surprise that this theory is out of favour nowadays. What I find interesting is the fact that outside of the natural domain, Lamarckism is still applicable, most notably in culture. Cultural organisms can pass on traits they acquired in their lifetime to their offspring. Furthermore, there is a codependency between culture and humans. The two have co-evolved. You could say culture is a trick humans use to get around the limits of Darwinism (slow, trial-and-error based incremental improvements) in order to achieve Lamarckism.³

You can think of cities as cultural meta-organisms. They’re a great example of natural-cultural co-evolution. We use cities as huge information storage and retrieval machines. What you see here is a map of the city of Hamburg circa 1800. In his book Emergence, Steven Berlin Johnson compares the shape of this map to that of the human brain, to illustrate this idea of the city being alive, in a sense. Cities are self-organizing cities that emerge from the bottom up. They grow, patterns are created from low-level interactions, things like neighbourhoods.⁴

Games are this other thing nature has come up with to speed up evolution. I’m not going to go into why I think we play (you could do worse than have a look at The Ambiguity of Play by Brian Sutton-Smith to get a sense of all the different viewpoints on the matter). Let’s just say I think one thing games are good at is conveying viewpoints of the world in a procedural way (a.k.a. ‘procedural rhetoric’ as described in Ian Bogost’s book Persuasive Games). They provide people with a way to explore a system from the inside out. They give rise to ‘systemic literacy’.⁵ The image is from Animal Crossing: Wild World, a game that, as Bogost argues, tries to point out certain issues that exist with consumerism and private home ownership.

Moving on, I’d like to discuss two trends that I see happening right now. I’ll build on those to formulate my future vision.

So trend number one: the real-time city. In cities around the globe, we are continuously pumping up the amount of sensors, actuators and processors. The behaviour of people is being sensed, processed and fed back to them in an ever tightening feedback loop. This will inevitably change the behaviour of humans as well as the city. So cities are headed to a phase transition, where they’ll move (if not in whole then at least in neighbourhood-sized chunks) to a new level of evolvability. Adam Greenfield calls it network weather. Dan Hill talks about how these new soft infrastructures can help us change the user experience of the city without needing to change the hard stuff. The problem is, though, that the majority of this stuff is next-to invisible, and therefore hard to “read”.⁶ The image, by the way, is from Stamen Design’s awesome project Cabspotting, which (amongst other things) consists of real-time tracking and visualization of the trajectories of taxis in the Bay Area.

Trend number two. In the past decade or so, there’s a renewed interest in playing in public spaces. Urban games are being used to re-imagine and repurpose the city in new ways (such as the parkour player pictured here). Consciously or subconsciously, urban games designers are flirting with the notions of the Situationist International, most notably the idea of inner space shaping our experience of outer space (psycho-geography) and the use of playful acts to subvert those spaces. Parkour and free running can’t really be called games, but things like SFZero, The Soho Project and Cruel 2 B Kind all fit these ideas in some way.

So I see an opportunity here: To alleviate some of the illegibility of the real-time city’s new soft infrastructures, we can deploy games that tap into them. Thus we employ the capacity of games to provide insight into complex systems. With urban games, this ‘grokking’ can happen in situ.

Through playing these games, people will be better able to “read” the real-time city, and to move towards a more decentralized mindset. The image is from a project by Dan Hill, where the shape of public Wi-Fi in the State Library of Queensland was visualized and overlaid on the building’s floor-plan.

Ultimately though, I would love to enable people to not only “read” but also “write” possible processes for the real-time city. I see many advantages here. Fore one this could lead to situated procedural arguments: people could be enabled to propose alternative ways of interacting with urban space. But even without this, just by making stuff, another way of learning is activated, known as ‘analysis by synthesis’. This was the aim of Mitchel Resnick when he made StarLogo (of which you see a screenshot here). And it works. StarLogo enables children to make sense of complex systems. A real-time urban game design toolkit could to the same, with the added benefit of the games being juxtaposed with the cities they are about.

This juxtaposition might result in dynamics similar to what we find in nature. Processes from these new games might be spontaneously transferred over to the city, and vice versa. The image is of roots with outgrowths on them which are caused by a bacteria called Agrobacterium. This bacteria is well known for its ability to transfer DNA between itself and plants. An example of nature circumventing natural selection.⁷ A new symbiosis between urban games and the real-time city might lead to similar acceleration of their evolutions.

(I finished a little over time and had time for one question. Adriaan Wormgoor of FourceLabs asked whether I thought games would sooner or later become self-evolving themselves. My answer was “absolutely”. to get to ever higher levels of complexity we’ll be forced to start growing or rearing our games more than assembling them from parts. Games want to be free, you could say, so they are inevitably heading towards ever higher levels of evolvability.)

Iskander Smit has posted a report of the evening over at his blog. [↩]
If you’re interested, the slide deck as a whole is also available on SlideShare. [↩]
I first came across Lamarck, and the idea of nature and culture co-evolving in Kevin Kelly’s book Out of Control. The blacksmith example is his too. [↩]
All this flies in the face of large-scale top-down planning and zoning, as Jane Jacobs makes painfully clear in her book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. [↩]
Eric Zimmerman talked at length about the need for systemic literacy at Playful 2008. [↩]
For more on this have a look at another blog post by Adam Greenfield titled Reading, writing, texts, literacy, cities. [↩]
As Kevin Kelly writes in Out of Control, evolution with symbiosis included is less like a tree and more like a thicket. [↩]

A Playful Stance — my Game Design London 2008 talk

A while ago I was interviewed by Sam Warnaars. He’s researching people’s conference experiences; he asked me what my most favourite and least favourite conference of the past year was. I wish he’d asked me after my trip to Playful ’08, because it has been by far the best conference experience to date. Why? Because it was like Toby, Richard and the rest of the event’s producers had taken a peek inside my brain and came up with a program encompassing (almost) all my fascinations — games, interaction design, play, sociality, the web, products, physical interfaces, etc. Almost every speaker brought something interesting to the table. The audience was composed of people from many different backgrounds, and all seemed to, well, like each other. The venue was lovely and atmospheric (albeit a bit chilly). They had good tea. Drinks afterwards were tasty and fun, the tapas later on even more so. And the whiskey after that, well let’s just say I was glad to have a late flight the next day. Many thanks to my friends at Pixel-Lab for inviting me, and to Mr. Davies for the referral.

Below is a transcript plus slides of my contribution to the day. The slides are also on SlideShare. I have been told all talks have been recorded and will be published to the event’s Vimeo group.

Perhaps 1874 words is a bit too much for you? In that case, let me give you an executive summary of sorts:

The role of design in rich forms of play, such as skateboarding, is facilitatory. Designers provide tools for people to play with.
It is hard to predict what people will do exactly with your tools. This is OK. In fact it is best to leave room for unexpected uses.
Underspecified, playful tools can be used for learning. People can use them to explore complex concepts on their own terms.

As always, I am interested in receiving constructive criticism, as well as good examples of the things I’ve discussed.

Continue reading A Playful Stance — my Game Design London 2008 talk

Reboot 10 slides and video

I am breaking radio-silence for a bit to let you know the slides and video for my Reboot 10 presentation are now available online, in case you’re interested. I presented this talk before at The Web and Beyond, but this time I had a lot more time, and I presented in English. I therefore think this might still be of interest to some people.¹ As always, I am very interested in receiving constructive criticism Just drop me a line in the comments.

Update: It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to briefly summarize what this is about. This is a presentation in two parts. In the first, I theorize about the emergence of games that have as their goal the conveying of an argument. These games would use the real-time city as their platform. It is these games that I call urban procedural rhetorics. In the second part I give a few examples of what such games might look like, using a series of sketches.

The slides, posted to SlideShare, as usual:

Urban Procedural Rhetorics @ Reboot 10

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

The video, hosted on the Reboot website:

I did post a transcript in English before, in case you prefer reading to listening. [↩]