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2017 | Buch

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Playable Cities

The City as a Digital Playground

herausgegeben von: Anton Nijholt

Verlag: Springer Singapore

Buchreihe : Gaming Media and Social Effects

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

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Über dieses Buch

This book addresses the topic of playable cities, which use the ‘smartness’ of digital cities to offer their citizens playful events and activities. The contributions presented here examine various aspects of playable cities, including developments in pervasive and urban games, the use of urban data to design games and playful applications, architecture design and playability, and mischief and humor in playable cities.
The smartness of digital cities can be found in the sensors and actuators that are embedded in their environment. This smartness allows them to monitor, anticipate and support our activities and increases the efficiency of the cities and our activities. These urban smart technologies can offer citizens playful interactions with streets, buildings, street furniture, traffic, public art and entertainment, large public displays and public events.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Towards Playful and Playable Cities

Abstract

Smart cities have inspired the introduction of various viewpoints, usually concerning the introduction of digital technology by governance bodies and its use by service providers and other economic stakeholders to allow a more efficient use of resources, transportation infrastructure, and an increase in citizen safety. However, there are also other aspects of smart cities that address, for example, our daily life activities, activities that are undertaken without having any type of efficiency in mind and interactions in which we want to engage just for social, entertainment, and fun reasons. To allow for applications that go beyond the efficient handling of our environments to those that also allow affective, social, entertaining, playful, and humorous interactions, we need to employ digital smartness. Digital smartness can be implemented in sensors and actuators in domestic situations, public spaces, and urban environments. This goal is what we want to achieve for playable cities, where residents have the opportunity to hack the city and use the smart city’s data and digital technology for their own purposes and applications. Where possible, the infrastructure of a smart city can be adapted to the playful applications residents have in mind, or smart city residents can take the opportunity to hack the environment and embed their own technology in an existing global network or to introduce their own local community network. In this introduction to the Playable Cities book, various viewpoints will be discussed and short introductions to the chapters will be given.

Anton Nijholt

Games for Playful Urban Design

Frontmatter

Games as Strong Concepts for City-Making

Abstract

Cities are becoming increasingly complex, both in terms of their social and cultural context, and in the technological solutions that are necessary to make them function. In parallel, we are observing a growing attention toward the public dimension of design, addressing societal challenges and opportunities at an urban scale. Conceptualizing, ideating, and framing design problems at a larger scale may still prove challenging, even as cities are becoming more and more relevant for all branches of design. In this chapter, we address the use of game mechanics to produce strong concepts for better understanding complex problems in city-making and communal participation, capitalizing on the necessity to shift the attention from smart cities to smart citizens. Through several examples we will show that games and play have a special quality of social bonding, providing context and motivational aspects that can be used to improve the dynamics and solutions within city-making.

Ben Schouten, Gabriele Ferri, Michiel de Lange, Karel Millenaar

Engaging with the Smart City Through Urban Data Games

Abstract

This chapter will explore how gamification can be used to motivate citizens to engage with data about their city. Through two case studies, we aim to show how prompting hands-on experiences with urban data can improve data literacy and ultimately increase citizen participation in urban innovation and the co-creation of smart city apps. The first case study presents a game called ‘Turing’s Treasure’ designed to elicit design features and data from the players for MotionMap, an interactive map that improves the planning of travel through different modes of transport around Milton Keynes, UK. The second case study describes the outcome of several creative and competitive app design sessions that have been conducted with school children in London and Milton Keynes. We conclude by discussing where we think this field is heading in the future and what additional benefits this will bring.

Annika Wolff, Alan-Miguel Valdez, Matthew Barker, Stephen Potter, Daniel Gooch, Emilie Giles, John Miles

Size and Shape of the Playing Field: Research Through Game Design Approach

Abstract

This chapter explores how to set up a game design-based research workshop format following the research through design paradigm. It elaborates on the ‘Size and Shape of the Playing Field’ workshop series initiated by the independent research lab Tacit Dimension to explore the following research question: from what kind of geodata is it possible to generate insight on the experience of walking on the street? The workshops are generating insight by involving participants with interdisciplinary backgrounds in an urban game design-related activity and reflection process. This chapter provides an account of the first two workshop sessions held in Berlin and Amsterdam in 2016.

Viktor Bedö

Game Engines for Urban Exploration: Bridging Science Narrative for Broader Participants

Abstract

One aspect of playing is exploration. A playable city could therefore be regarded as an explorable city. In recent years, a growing number of urban exploration tools have been developed, empowered by the technology of game engines. Traditionally, game engines have been used to create virtual environments for entertainment and enable the user to explore. We seek to apply game engines in urban planning beyond the visualization of buildings, trees, traffic, or people in the city. It can become a tool for a multidisciplinary approach that involves engineers, scientists, architects, planners, and even the citizens themselves. Those kind of mixed stakeholders have quite diverse needs, which all can be addressed by game engines in an easy way. In this chapter, we look toward bridging the seen and unseen elements in a collaborative game environment. One of the less visible elements in urban environment involves the urban microclimate: heat emission, wind flows, and outdoor thermal comfort. These unseen scientific elements have become a narrative on their own on top of the urban exploration. If they are to be presented in the traditional way of scientific visualization, the connection to the built environment would be difficult to understand for many kinds of stakeholders, especially the nonscientists. Hence, we utilize the power of the Unity3D game engine to show the potential of collaborative and explorative virtual environments: a bottom-up citizen design science within the narrative of exploration and urban science data.

Verina Cristie, Matthias Berger

Design of Urban and Pervasive Games

Frontmatter

Squaring the (Magic) Circle: A Brief Definition and History of Pervasive Games

Abstract

Pervasive games defy Johan Huizinga’s classic definition of play as being something “outside ‘ordinary life’” with their “own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and an orderly manner”. Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman develop Huizinga’s concept of the magic circle and discuss its function as a boundary between the real world and the game world. However, pervasive games seem to form a distinct category of games or types of play that breach both the spatial and the temporal confines of the magic circle. Pervasive games are of particular interest for the way in which they make use of the natural or the built environment as a playspace in a distinct and sometimes alarming overlap with the real world. This chapter offers some definitions and examples of some popular pervasive games, briefly tracing the evolution of treasure hunts, assassination games, live action role-play and alternate reality games, all of which more-or-less confound the notion of the magic circle.

Eddie Duggan

Mapping the Beach Beneath the Street: Digital Cartography for the Playable City

Abstract

Maps are an important component within many of the playful and gameful experiences designed to turn cities into a playable infrastructures. They take advantage of the fact that the technologies used for obtaining accurate spatial information, such as GPS receivers and magnetometers (digital compasses), are now so widespread that they are considered as ‘standard’ sensors on mobile phones, which are themselves ubiquitous. Interactive digital maps, therefore, are widely used by the general public for a variety of purposes. However, despite the rich design history of cartography digital maps typically exhibit a dominant aesthetic that has been designed to serve the usability and utility requirements of turn-by-turn urban navigation, which is itself driven by the proliferation of in-car and personal navigation services. The navigation aesthetic is now widespread across almost all spatial applications, even where a bespoke cartographic product would be better suited. In this chapter we seek to challenge this by exploring novel neocartographic approaches to making maps for use within playful and gameful experiences designed for the cities. We will examine the potential of design approaches that can produce not only more aesthetically pleasing maps, but also offer the potential for influencing user behaviour, which can be used to promote emotional engagement and exploration in playable city experiences.

Paul Coulton, Jonny Huck, Adrian Gradinar, Lara Salinas

Creating Shared Encounters Through Fixed and Movable Interfaces

Abstract

Currently, our cities become more and more equipped with information and communications technology (ICT). Rarely do these systems provide a fit with everyday public life. They focus primarily on efficiency, security, safety and business. There are few system designs which support social aspects such as identification with the city and community, responsibility, everyday habits, leisure, pleasurable stay, social interaction, courtesy behaviour, play, etc.—in short, aspects of social sustainability. To outfit our future city with technology currently lacking the support of those qualities, we created several novel interaction designs to explore how to best merge ICT with the public space. This chapter presents some of our theory developed from our research-through-design approach and three case studies including suggestions for measures of success such as the number of shared encounters, average interactions per minute (ipm), or accumulated interaction time. We believe those hard facts are needed to argue for the need of playful ICT in our city that makes our public life more enjoyable.

Patrick Tobias Fischer, Eva Hornecker

Design for Playful Public Spaces

Frontmatter

The City as Canvas for Change: Grassroots Organisations’ Creative Playing with Bogota

Abstract

In this paper, we look at people as makers of their cities. We examine the case of Bogota where many underserved communities face daily struggles to survive. By building on Lefebvre’s notion of the right to the city, we explore how civic agency, play and creativity offer fertile grounds to work towards the creative management of conflict for building active citizenship. The paper presents the results and insights of our work with two grassroots organisations in Bogota, which include four themes that bring to light how their work empowers through play, creativity and trust, the ways in which they find common ground for playful collaboration with other city constituents, the approach to street-based strategies that they use for bringing about social change, and the ways in which they work towards envisioning their future and that of the city. Finally, we discuss how conflict and difference can be leveraged to move grassroots agendas forward, and how civic agency, play and creativity are central to defining how cities are shaped by bottom-up work.

Leonardo Parra-Agudelo, Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Marcus Foth

Designing ICT for Thirdplaceness

Abstract

Thirdplaceness is the sense of being in a third place without architectural constraints. Third places are places that host regular, spontaneous, democratic, neutral, informal, and pleasurable anticipated gathering of individuals in which people can express themselves freely. These places contrast with the realms of home and work (first and second places), having an important role in community life in supporting civic engagement and community strength. Oldenburg defined the need for and properties of third places more than two decades ago, describing them as the heart of a community’s social vitality. Bars, bakeries, parks, town squares, theaters, and churches are typical examples of potential third places. In third places, thirdplaceness occurs often maintaining and reinforcing in the community this sense of third place. Once society and technology have changed since Oldenburg introduced the concept of third place, we describe in this chapter how to design applications for public spaces in order to promote thirdplaceness. In addition, we present and discuss two public installations—Selfie Cafe and WishBoard—used to observe the incidence of thirdplaceness that emerged through the interaction with the interactive system. In both installations, we were able to notice the essential role that Information and Communications Technology (ICTs) can play in promoting self-expression supporting, encouraging, and fostering social interaction and thirdplaceness creating a social place.

Vinicius Ferreira, Junia Anacleto, Andre Bueno

Mischief Humor in Smart and Playable Cities

Abstract

In smart cities we can expect to witness human behavior that is not necessarily different from human behavior in present-day cities. There will also be demonstrations, flash mobs, urban games, and even organized events to provoke the smart city establishment. Smart cities have sensors and actuators that maybe can be accessed by makers and civic hackers. Smart cities can also offer their data to civic hackers, who may create useful applications for city dwellers. Smart cities will have bugs that can be exploited for fun or appropriation. Humor is an important aspect of our daily activities and experiences. In this chapter, we explore how humor can become part of smart and playable cities. We do this by investigating the role of humor in game environments. In games, we have accidental humor, for example because of bugs, and we have humor that occurs because a gamer wants it to happen. This latter type of humor can be produced by looking for bugs, by not following the rules of the game, or by intentionally creating situations that lead to humorous events in the game. This may certainly include humor at the expense of others. We investigate how such views of game humor can find analogs in the humor that may appear and be created in smart and playable cities.

Anton Nijholt

Titel: Playable Cities
herausgegeben von: Anton Nijholt
Verlag: Springer Singapore
Electronic ISBN: 978-981-10-1962-3
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-1961-6
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1962-3