Tag: social

What the hubbub is

There’s some move­ment over at the web­site for my new ven­ture. I men­tioned Hub­bub before: it is a design stu­dio I am set­ting up for phys­i­cal, social games that are played in pub­lic places. We hope to address social issues and the like using these games.

Recent­ly…

Today's harvest

Also, we’ll be doing some­thing play­ful and run­ning a work­shop at the upcom­ing Game in the City con­fer­ence in Amersfoort. 

To stay post­ed on Hub­bub devel­op­ments, fol­low us on Twit­ter or sign up for our newslet­ter. There’s good old RSS as well, of course.

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.

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

This pervasive games workshop I ran at this conference

A few things I got peo­ple to do at this year’s NLGD Fes­ti­val of Games:

Paper sword fight

Fight each oth­er with paper swords…

Hunting for a frisbee with lunch-boxes on their heads

…and run around with lunch-box­es on their heads.1

This was all part of a work­shop I ran, titled ‘Play­ful Tin­ker­ing’. The mys­te­ri­ous Mink ette — who amongst many things is a design­er at Six to Start — and I got peo­ple to rapid­ly pro­to­type per­va­sive games that were be played at the con­fer­ence venue the day after. The best game won a mag­nif­i­cent tro­phy shaped like a spring rider.

Some exer­cis­es we did dur­ing the workshop:

  • Play a name game Mink ette had made up short­ly before the work­shop in no time at all. This is good for sev­er­al things: phys­i­cal warm-up, break­ing the ice, demon­strate the kinds of games the ses­sion is about.
  • Walk around the room and write down imag­i­nary game titles as well as names of games you used to play as a child. Good for emp­ty­ing heads and warm­ing up mentally.
  • Walk around again, pick a post-it that intrigues you. Then guess what the game is about, and have oth­ers to fill in the blanks where need. Then play the game. This is most­ly just for fun. (Noth­ing wrong with that.)
  • Analyse the games, break them up into their basic parts. Change one of those parts and play the game again. See what effect the change has. This is to get a sense of what games design is about, and how chang­ing a rule impacts the play­er experience.

Participants brainstorming game ideas

Par­tic­i­pants brain­storm­ing game ideas

Peo­ple then formed groups and worked on an orig­i­nal game. We pushed them to rapid­ly gen­er­ate a first rule­set that could be playtest­ed with the oth­er groups. After this they did anoth­er design sprint, and playtest­ed again out­side the room, “in the wild”. All of this in less than four hours. Whew!

The games that were made:

  • A game that involved hunt­ing for peo­ple that matched the descrip­tions on post-its that were hid­den around the venue. You first need­ed to find a post-it, then find the per­son that matched the descrip­tion on it and final­ly take a pho­to of them for points. This game was so quick to play it already ran at the par­ty, hours after the work­shop finished.
  • ‘Crowd Con­trol’ — com­pete with oth­er play­ers to get the largest per­cent­age of a group of peo­ple to do what you are doing (like nod­ding your head). This game won the tro­phy, in part because of the fero­cious play­er recruit­ment style the run­ners employed dur­ing the playtest.
  • A sail­ing game, where you tried to maneu­ver an imag­i­nary boat from one end of a space to the oth­er. Your move­ment was con­strained by the “wind”, which was a func­tion of the amount of peo­ple on either side of your boat. It fea­tured an ingen­u­ous mea­sur­ing mechan­ic which used an impro­vised rope made from a torn up con­fer­ence tote bag.
  • The lunch­box thing was impro­vised dur­ing the lunch before the playtest. A stu­dent also brought in a game he was work­ing on for his grad­u­a­tion to playtest.

We set up the playtest itself as follows: 

The room was open to any­one pass­ing by. Each game got their own sta­tion where they could recruit play­ers, explain the rules, keep score, etc. Mink ette and I hand­ed each play­er a red, blue and yel­low tid­dly­wink. They could use this to vote on their favorite game in three sep­a­rate cat­e­gories, by hand­ing the run­ners a tid­dly­wink. Peo­ple could play more than once, and vote as often as they liked. We also kept track of how much play­ers each game got. We hand­ed out prizes to win­ners in the dif­fer­ent cat­e­gories (a lucky dip box loaded with piña­ta fillers). The most played game got the grand prize — the spring rid­er tro­phy I cre­at­ed with help from my sis­ter and fab­ri­cat­ed at the local fablab.2

The spring rider trophy and tiddlywinks all set for the playtest

Spring rid­er tro­phy and tid­dly­winks ready for some playtest­ing action

It was a plea­sure to have the elu­sive Mink ette over for the ride. I loved the way she explained what per­va­sive games were all about — being able to play any­time, any­where with any­thing. I was also impressed with the way she man­aged to get peo­ple to do strange things with­out think­ing twice.

We had a very ded­i­cat­ed group of par­tic­i­pants, most of whom stuck around for the whole ses­sion and returned again for the playtest the next day. I’m very grate­ful for their enthu­si­asm. The whole expe­ri­ence was very reward­ing, I’m keen on doing this more often at events and apply­ing what I learnt to the work­shops I run as part of my own games design practice.

Happy, happy winners!

Hap­py win­ners of the spring rid­er tro­phy flanked by Mink ette and yours truly

  1. May­hem ini­ti­at­ed by Evert and Marin­ka. [↩]
  2. I still need to write up the process of the tro­phy’s cre­ation. [↩]

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

ix09-lightning-talk-presented012

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. 

ix09-lightning-talk-presented015

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.

ix09-lightning-talk-presented025

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.

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

Teaching design for mobile social play

Last week, the group project I am coach­ing at the Utrecht School of the Arts kicked off. The project is part of the school’s mas­ter of arts pro­gram. The group con­sists of ten stu­dents with very dif­fer­ent back­grounds, rang­ing from game design & devel­op­ment to audio design, as well as arts man­age­ment, media stud­ies, and more. Their assign­ment is to come up with a num­ber of con­cepts for games that incor­po­rate mobile phones, social inter­ac­tions, audio and the web. Nokia Research Cen­ter has com­mis­sioned the project, and Jus­si Holopainen, game design researcher and co-author of Pat­terns in Game Design, is the client. In the project brief there is a strong empha­sis on sketch­ing and pro­to­typ­ing, and dis­ci­plined doc­u­men­ta­tion of the design process. The stu­dents are work­ing full time on the project and it will run for around 4 months. 

I am very hap­py with the oppor­tu­ni­ty to coach this group. It’s a new chal­lenge for me as a teacher — mov­ing away from teach­ing the­o­ry and into the area of facil­i­ta­tion. I am also look­ing for­ward to see­ing what the stu­dents will come up with, of course, as the domain they are work­ing in over­laps huge­ly with my inter­ests. So far, work­ing with Jus­si has proven to be very inspi­ra­tional, so I am get­ting some­thing out of it as a design­er too.

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:

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

Embodied interaction and improvised information displays

Recent­ly a good friend of mine became a dad. It made me feel real­ly old, but it also lead to an encounter with an impro­vised infor­ma­tion dis­play, which I’d like to tell you about, because it illus­trates some of the things I have learnt from read­ing Paul Dourish’s Where the Action Is.

My friend’s son was born a bit too ear­ly, so we went to see him (the son) at the neona­tol­ogy ward of the local hos­pi­tal. It was there that I saw this white­board with stick­ers, writ­ing and the famil­iar mag­nets on it:

Tracing of a photo of an improvised information display in a hospital neonatology ward consisting of a whiteboard, magnets, stickers and writing

(I decid­ed to trace the pho­to I took of it and replace the names with fic­tion­al ones.)

Now, at first I only noticed parts of what was there. I saw the patient names on the left-hand side, and recog­nised the name of my friend’s son. I also noticed that on the right-hand side, the names of all the nurs­es on duty were there. I did not think much more of it.

Before leav­ing, my friend walked up to the white­board and said some­thing along the lines of “yes, this is cor­rect,” and touched one of the green mag­nets that was in the mid­dle of the board as if to con­firm this. It was then that my curios­i­ty was piqued, and I asked my friend to explain what the board meant.

It turns out it was a won­der­ful thing, some­thing I’ll call an impro­vised infor­ma­tion dis­play, for lack of a bet­ter word. What I had not seen the first time around, but were point­ed out by my friend:

  1. There is a time axis along the top of the board. By plac­ing a green mag­net at the height of a child’s name some­where along this axis, par­ents can let the staff know when they intend to vis­it. This is impor­tant for many rea­sons. One being that it helps the nurs­es time the moment a child will be fed so that the par­ents can be present. So in the exam­ple, the par­ents of ‘Fara­mond’ will be vis­it­ing around 21:00 hours.
  2. There are dif­fer­ent colour mag­nets behind the children’s names, and behind the nurs­es’ names. This shows which nurse is respon­si­ble for which child. For instance, ‘Char­lotte’ is in charge of ‘Once’s’ care.

Dourish’s book has influ­enced the way I look at things like this. It has made me more aware of their unique val­ue. Where­as before I would think that some­thing like this could be done bet­ter by a prop­er design­er, with dig­i­tal means, I now think the grasp-able aspect of such a dis­play is vital. I also now believe that the promi­nent role of users in shap­ing the dis­play is vital. Dour­ish writes:1

“What embod­ied inter­ac­tion adds to exist­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al prac­tice is the under­stand­ing that rep­re­sen­ta­tions are also them­selves arte­facts. Not only do they allow users to “reach through” and act upon the enti­ty being rep­re­sent­ed, but they can also them­selves be act­ed upon—picked up, exam­ined, manip­u­lat­ed and rearranged.”

Par­ents and nurs­es reach through the dis­play I saw in the neona­tol­ogy ward to act upon the infor­ma­tion about vis­it­ing times and respon­si­bil­i­ty of care. But they also act on the com­po­nents of the dis­play itself to manip­u­late the mean­ing they have. 

In fact, this is how the dis­play was con­struct­ed in the first place! The role of the design­er in this dis­play was lim­it­ed to the com­po­nents them­selves. Design­ers were respon­si­ble for the affor­dances of the white­board, the mag­nets, the erasable mark­ers and stick­ers, which enabled users to pro­duce the infor­ma­tion dis­play they need­ed. In the words of Dour­ish:2

“Prin­ci­ple: Users, not design­ers, cre­ate and com­mu­ni­cate meaning.”

“Prin­ci­ple: Users, not design­ers, man­age coupling.”

It is the nurs­es and the par­ents and the social prac­tice they togeth­er con­sti­tute that gives rise to the mean­ing of the dis­play. What the board means is obvi­ous to them, because they have ‘work’ that needs to be done togeth­er. It was not obvi­ous to me, because I am not part of that group. It was not a design­er that decid­ed what the mean­ing of the dif­fer­ent colours of the mag­nets were. It was a group of users who cou­pled mean­ing to the com­po­nents they had avail­able to them.

It might be a rad­i­cal exam­ple, but I think this does demon­strate what peo­ple can do if the right com­po­nents are made avail­able to them, and they are allowed to make their own mean­ing with them. I think it is impor­tant for design­ers to realise this, and allow for this kind of manip­u­la­tion of the prod­ucts and ser­vices they shape. Clear­ly, Dourish’s notion of embod­ied inter­ac­tion is a key to design­ing for adap­ta­tion and hack­ing. When it comes to this, today’s white­boards, mag­nets and mark­ers seem to do a bet­ter job than many of our cur­rent dig­i­tal technologies.

  1. Page 169 [↩]
  2. Page 170 [↩]

Designing a mobile social gaming experience for Gen‑C

Update 21-03-2008: I’ve added some images of slides to allow for some more con­text when read­ing the text.

This is a rough tran­script of my lec­ture at GDC Mobile 2008. In short: I first briefly intro­duce the con­cept of expe­ri­ence design and sys­tems and then show how this influ­ences my views of mobile casu­al games. From there I dis­cuss the rela­tion of casu­al games with the trend Gen­er­a­tion C. Wrap­ping up, I give an overview of some social design frame­works for the web that are equal­ly applic­a­ble to mobile social gam­ing. As a bonus I give some thoughts on mobile game sys­tems mobile metagames. The talk is illus­trat­ed through­out with a case study of Playy­oo—a mobile games com­mu­ni­ty I helped design.

  • I’ve includ­ed a slight­ly adjust­ed ver­sion of the orig­i­nal slides—several screen­shot sequences of Playy­oo have been tak­en out for file size reasons.
  • If you absolute­ly must have audio, I’m told you will be able to pur­chase (!) a record­ing from GDC Radio some­time soon.
  • I’d like to thank every­one who came up to me after­wards for con­ver­sa­tion. I appre­ci­ate the feed­back I got from you.
  • Sev­er­al aspects of Playy­oo that I use as exam­ples (such as the game stream) were already in place before I was con­tract­ed. Cred­its for many design aspects of Playy­oo go to David Mantripp, Playy­oo’s chief architect.
  • And final­ly, the views expressed here are in many ways an amal­ga­ma­tion of work by oth­ers. Where pos­si­ble I’ve giv­en cred­it in the talk and oth­er­wise linked to relat­ed resources.

That’s all the notes and dis­claimers out of the way, read on for the juice (but be warned, this is pret­ty long).

Con­tin­ue read­ing Design­ing a mobile social gam­ing expe­ri­ence for Gen‑C

Storyboarding multi-touch interactions

I think it was around half a year ago that I wrote “UX design­ers should get into every­ware”. Back then I did not expect to be part of a ubi­comp project any­time soon. But here I am now, writ­ing about work I did in the area of mul­ti-touch interfaces. 

Background

The peo­ple at InUse (Swe­den’s pre­mier inter­ac­tion design con­sul­tan­cy firm) asked me to assist them with visu­al­is­ing poten­tial uses of mul­ti-touch tech­nol­o­gy in the con­text of a gat­ed com­mu­ni­ty. That’s right—an actu­al real-world phys­i­cal real-estate devel­op­ment project. How cool is that?

InUse storyboard 1

This res­i­den­tial com­mu­ni­ty is aimed at well-to-do seniors. As with most gat­ed com­mu­ni­ties, it offers them con­ve­nience, secu­ri­ty and pres­tige. You might shud­der at the thought of liv­ing in one of these places (I know I have my reser­va­tions) but there’s not much use in judg­ing peo­ple want­i­ng to do so. Planned ameni­ties include sports facil­i­ties, fine din­ing, onsite med­ical care, a cin­e­ma and on and on…

Social capital

One of the known issues with these ‘com­mu­ni­ties’ is that there’s not much evi­dence of social cap­i­tal being high­er there than in any reg­u­lar neigh­bour­hood. In fact some have argued that the glob­al trend of gat­ed com­mu­ni­ties is detri­men­tal to the build-up of social cap­i­tal in their sur­round­ings. They throw up phys­i­cal bar­ri­ers that pre­vent free inter­ac­tion of peo­ple. These are some of the things I tried to address: To see if we could sup­port the emer­gence of com­mu­ni­ty inside the res­i­den­cy using social tools while at the same coun­ter­act­ing phys­i­cal bar­ri­ers to the out­side world with “vir­tu­al inroads” that allow for free inter­ac­tion between res­i­dents and peo­ple in the periphery.

Being in the world

Anoth­er con­cern I tried to address is the dif­fer­ent ways mul­ti-touch inter­faces can play a role in the lives of peo­ple. Recent­ly Matt Jones addressed this in a post on the iPhone and Noki­a’s upcom­ing mul­ti-touch phones. In a com­mu­ni­ty like the one I was design­ing for, the worst thing I could do is make every instance of mul­ti-touch tech­nol­o­gy an atten­tion-grab­bing pres­ence demand­ing full immer­sion from its user. In many cas­es ‘my’ users would be bet­ter served with them behav­ing in an unob­tru­sive way, allow­ing almost uncon­scious use. In oth­er words: I tried to bal­ance being in the world with being in the screen—apply­ing each par­a­digm based on how appro­pri­ate it was giv­en the user’s con­text. (After all, some­times peo­ple want or even need to be immersed.)

Process

InUse had already pre­pared sev­er­al per­sonas rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the future res­i­dents of the com­mu­ni­ty. We went through those togeth­er and exam­ined each for sce­nar­ios that would make good can­di­dates for sto­ry­board­ing. We want­ed to come up with a range of sce­nar­ios that not only showed how these per­sonas could be sup­port­ed with mul­ti-touch inter­faces, but also illus­trate the dif­fer­ent spaces the inter­ac­tions could take place in (pri­vate, semi­pri­vate and pub­lic) and the scales at which the tech­nol­o­gy can oper­ate (from small key-like tokens to full wall-screens). 

InUse storyboard 2

I draft­ed each sce­nario as a tex­tu­al out­line and sketched the poten­tial sto­ry­boards on thumb­nail size. We went over those in a sec­ond work­shop and refined them—making adjust­ments to bet­ter cov­er the con­cerns out­lined above as well as improv­ing clar­i­ty. We want­ed to end up with a set of sto­ry­boards that could be used in a pre­sen­ta­tion for the client (the real-estate devel­op­ment firm) so we need­ed to bal­ance user goals with busi­ness objec­tives. To that end we thought about and includ­ed exam­ples of API-like inte­gra­tion of the plat­form with ser­vice providers in the periph­ery of the com­mu­ni­ty. We also tried to cre­ate self-ser­vice expe­ri­ences that would feel like being wait­ed on by a per­son­al butler.

Outcome

I end­ed up draw­ing three sce­nar­ios of around 9 pan­els each, digi­tis­ing and clean­ing them up on my Mac. Each sce­nario intro­duces a per­sona, the phys­i­cal con­text of the inter­ac­tion and the per­son­a’s moti­va­tion that dri­ves him to engage with the tech­nol­o­gy. The inter­ac­tions visu­alised are a mix of ges­tures and engage­ments with mul­ti-touch screens of dif­fer­ent sizes. Usu­al­ly the per­sona is sup­port­ed in some way by a social dimension—fostering serendip­i­ty and emer­gence of real relations.

InUse storyboard 3

All in all I have to say I am pret­ty pleased with the result of this short but sweet engage­ment. Col­lab­o­ra­tion with the peo­ple of InUse was smooth (as was expect­ed, since we are very much the same kind of ani­mal) and there will be fol­low-up work­shops with the client. It remains to be seen how much of this mul­ti-touch stuff will find its way into the final gat­ed com­mu­ni­ty. That as always will depend on what makes busi­ness sense. 

In any case it was a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for me to immerse myself ful­ly in the inter­re­lat­ed top­ics of mul­ti-touch, ges­ture, urban­ism and social­i­ty. And final­ly, it gave me the per­fect excuse to sit down and do lots and lots of drawings.

Playyoo goes beta

Today Playy­oo went beta. Playy­oo is a mobile games com­mu­ni­ty I have been involved with as a free­lance inter­ac­tion design­er since july of this year. I don’t have time for an elab­o­rate post-mortem, but here are some pre­lim­i­nary notes on what Playy­oo is and what part I’ve played in its conception.

Playyoo's here

Playy­oo brings some cool inno­va­tions to the mobile games space. It allows you to snack on free casu­al mobile games while on the go, using a per­son­al­ized mobile web page. It stores your high scores and allows you to inter­act with your friends (and foes) on an accom­pa­ny­ing reg­u­lar web site. Playy­oo is a plat­form for indie mobile game devel­op­ers. Any­one can pub­lish their Flash Lite game on it. Best of all — even if you’re not a mobile games devel­op­er, you can cre­ate a game of your own.

It’s that last bit I’ve worked on the most. I took care of the inter­ac­tion design for an appli­ca­tion imag­i­na­tive­ly called the Game Cre­ator. It allows you to take well known games (such as Lunar Lan­der) and give them your own per­son­al twist. Obvi­ous­ly this includes the game’s graph­ics, but we’ve gone one step fur­ther. You can change the way the game works as well.

Screenshot of my lolcats pairs game on Playyoo

So in the exam­ple of Lunar Lan­der you can make the space­ship look like what­ev­er you want. But you can also change the grav­i­ty, con­trol­ling the speed with which your ship drops to the sur­face. Best of all, you can cre­ate your own plan­et sur­face, as easy as draw­ing a line on paper. This is why Lunar Lan­der in the Playy­oo Game Cre­ator is called Line Lan­der. (See? Anoth­er imag­i­na­tive title!)

At the moment there are six games in the Game Cre­ator: Tic-Tac-Toe, Pairs, Revenge, Snake, Ping-Pong, and the afore­men­tioned Line Lan­der. There’s long list of oth­er games I’d like to put in there. I’m sure there will be more to come.

Since today’s launch, peo­ple have already start­ed cre­at­ing crazy stuff with it. There’s a maze-like snake game, for instance. And a game where you need to land a spi­der crab on the head of some per­son called Rebec­ca… I decid­ed to chip in with a pairs game full of lol­cats (an idea I’ve had since doing the very first wire­frame.) Any­way, the mind bog­gles to think of what peo­ple might come up with next! That’s the cool part about cre­at­ing a tool for cre­ative expression.

Screenshot of a Line Lander game in progress in the Playyoo Game Creator

So although mak­ing a game is very dif­fer­ent from play­ing one, I hope I man­aged to make it fun nonethe­less. My ambi­tion was to cre­ate a toy-like appli­ca­tion that makes ‘cre­at­ing’ a game a fun and engag­ing way to kill a few min­utes — much like Mii cre­ation on the Nin­ten­do Wii, or play­ing with Spore’s edi­tors (although we still haven’t had the chance to actu­al­ly play with lat­ter, yet.) And who knows, per­haps it’ll inspire a few peo­ple to start devel­op­ing games of their own. That would prob­a­bly be the ulti­mate compliment.

In any case, I’d love to hear your com­ments, both pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive. And if you have a Flash Lite com­pat­i­ble phone, be sure to sign up with Playy­oo. There is no oth­er place offer­ing you an end­less stream of snack sized casu­al games on your phone. Once you’ve had a taste of that, I’m sure you’ll won­der how you ever got by with­out it.