Making Smart Cities More Playable: Exploring Playable Cities [1st ed.] 978-981-13-9764-6;978-981-13-9765-3

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xi
Playful Introduction on “Making Smart Cities More Playable” (Anton Nijholt)....Pages 1-22
Front Matter ....Pages 23-23
Citizens of Play: Revisiting the Relationship Between Playable and Smart Cities (Troy Innocent)....Pages 25-49
Reappropriating, Reconfiguring and Augmenting the Smart City Through Play (Dale Leorke)....Pages 51-70
Critical Playable Cities (Lobna Hassan, Mattia Thibault)....Pages 71-85
The Sustainable Playable City: Making Way for the Playful Citizen (Miriam Börjesson Rivera, Tina Ringenson, Daniel Pargman)....Pages 87-106
From Smart City to Smart Engagement: Exploring Digital and Physical Interactions for Playful City-Making (Joel Fredericks)....Pages 107-128
Front Matter ....Pages 129-129
Beta Blocks: Inviting Playful Community Exploration of Smart City Technologies in Boston, USA (Sean Peacock, John Harlow, Eric Gordon)....Pages 131-147
Playful and Playable Lighting in Smart Cities: Towards a Holistic Framework of Design (Henrika Pihlajaniemi, Aale Luusua)....Pages 149-177
Saving Face: Shared Experience and Dialogue on Social Touch, in Playful Smart Public Space (Karen Lancel, Hermen Maat, Frances Brazier)....Pages 179-203
Front Matter ....Pages 205-205
The DigiPhysical Playscape (Eva-Lotta Sallnäs Pysander, Jon Back, Annika Waern, Susan Paget)....Pages 207-234
Towards Eco-Centric Interaction: Urban Playful Interventions in the Anthropocene (Valentina Nisi, Catia Prandi, Nuno Jardim Nunes)....Pages 235-257
Front Matter ....Pages 259-259
Interactive Narrative Design for Geographically Dispersed Points of Interest (Tonguc Sezen, Ido Iurgel, Nicolas Fischöder, Digdem Sezen)....Pages 261-277
A Game-Based Service to Mitigate the Risk of Inundations Caused by Solid Waste Accumulation (Francisco Lepe-Salazar, Tania Cortés-Álvarez, Elia Serratos-Chávez, Luis Jáuregui-Flores, Erick Juárez-Cervantes, Rodolfo Valdovinos-López et al.)....Pages 279-299
Front Matter ....Pages 301-301
Levelling Playing Fields, A Nomadic Play Design (Annika Olofsdotter Bergström)....Pages 303-317
‘Forget Your Gadget, Let’s Play Outside!’: Traditional Play in Jakarta, Indonesia (Fitri Arlinkasari, Debra Flanders Cushing, Evonne Miller)....Pages 319-352
Front Matter ....Pages 353-353
City Residents as Videogame Characters in Smart Urban Environments (Anton Nijholt)....Pages 355-377

Citation preview

Gaming Media and Social Effects

Anton Nijholt Editor

Making Smart Cities More Playable Exploring Playable Cities

Gaming Media and Social Effects Editor-in-Chief Henry Been-Lirn Duh, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TAS, Australia Series Editor Anton Nijholt, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands

The scope of this book series is inter-disciplinary and it covers the technical aspect of gaming (software and hardware) and its social effects (sociological and psychological). This book series serves as a quick platform for publishing top-quality books on emerging or hot topics in gaming and its social effects. The series is also targeted at different levels of exposition, ranging from introductory tutorial to advanced research topics, depending on the objectives of the authors.

More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/11864

Anton Nijholt Editor

Making Smart Cities More Playable Exploring Playable Cities

123

Editor Anton Nijholt Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science University of Twente Enschede, The Netherlands

ISSN 2197-9685 ISSN 2197-9693 (electronic) Gaming Media and Social Effects ISBN 978-981-13-9764-6 ISBN 978-981-13-9765-3 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3 © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

Preface

The primary objective of a city’s digital smartness is to make it more efficient. Efficiency issues include city governance, traffic and public transport management, energy consumption, and waste management. More general objectives address sustainability and safety. Another general objective, which is not yet a consideration of civic management and urban development authorities, is the use of smart technology to make cities more attractive to their inhabitants and to their visitors. Can we make the urban environment more attractive by using smart technology? Can we introduce technology that invites city dwellers to interact with the environment in playful ways and to enjoy recreational and artistic installations that are embedded in the urban environment? Moreover, can we provide citizens and communities with access to digital technology that is embedded in the urban environment to introduce useful and playful applications that are of interest to them or their community? It is also interesting to consider whether individuals (hackers, tinkerers, and makers) and communities have the opportunity to introduce their own networks of sensors and actuators into their local environment to serve their interests in creating safe and playful environments for their community and in allowing as much unsupervised play and independent mobility as possible for their children. In this book, our objective is to explore the ways in which the broad gamut of technologies that make up the smart city infrastructure can be harnessed to incorporate more playfulness into the daily activities that take place within the city to make the city not only more efficient but also more enjoyable to the people who live and work within its confines. Sensors and actuators and the digital communication networks that unite them offer new opportunities for playful interaction by bringing to life inert objects such as park benches and garbage cans, preserving and visualizing previously lost bits of the urban experience and enabling a host of new interactions and experiences, in addition to posing new challenges and concerns. Sensors, actuators, and communication networks also enable the introduction of location-based games, interactive playgrounds, and playable street art. When inviting researchers to contribute to this book, we discussed the following topics: embedding playfulness in outdoor daily life activities, digital art and entertainment v

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in urban environments, playful interactions with large digital displays, playfulness and smart city infrastructure, outdoor play for children and adults, child-friendly cities, enabling the disabled through playful interactions, playful interactions for urban animals, community building, maker cultures, playfulness, and robust sensor and actuator technologies for urban environments. Most of these topics are covered by the chapters in this book. Although most of these topics are covered by the chapters in this book, several shortcomings have been identified: Digital interactive art, community building, maker cultures, and virtual, augmented, and diminished reality in urban environments are insufficiently addressed here. These topics will be discussed in the introductory and concluding chapters, together with various meta-views on smart cities: How do we experience a city? Can we experience smartness, playfulness, playability, affect, and empathy? Can a city become too smart? Games that are designed to provide city dwellers with the possibility of becoming familiar with planned changes in their urban environment and comment them are also not this book. Remarks on such games will appear in the first chapter of this book. This is not the first edited book on playable cities. In 2016, the first book on Playable Cities appeared in the Springer’s Gaming Media and Social Effects series. Starting in 2016, three workshops on Playable Cities were organized. The first workshop (2016) took place in Utrecht and was conjoined with the 8th International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment (INTETAIN). The second workshop took place in Funchal (Madeira), which was again conjoined with the 2017 INTETAIN conference. The ArtsIT, Interactivity, and Game Creation conference in Braga (Portugal) hosted the third workshop on Playable Cities. All the papers that were presented at these workshops are available from the Springer Link Web sites. The chapters in this book make clear that, more than in the past, research on playable cities now addresses fundamental research issues on urban development, sustainability, digital technology, and user-centered design, rather than “just” introducing an entertaining game in an urban environment. Nevertheless, the introduction of games, interactive art installations, and playful additions to urban environments that make use of already available sensors and actuators in a smart city’s infrastructure or that are realized by (also) making use of community- and maker-added sensors and actuators in the urban environment remains highly challenging for designers of playful and playable urban environments. Enschede, The Netherlands June 2019

Anton Nijholt

Contents

Playful Introduction on “Making Smart Cities More Playable” . . . . . . . Anton Nijholt Part I

1

Views on Playable Cities

Citizens of Play: Revisiting the Relationship Between Playable and Smart Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Troy Innocent

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Reappropriating, Reconfiguring and Augmenting the Smart City Through Play . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Dale Leorke

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Critical Playable Cities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Lobna Hassan and Mattia Thibault The Sustainable Playable City: Making Way for the Playful Citizen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Miriam Börjesson Rivera, Tina Ringenson and Daniel Pargman

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From Smart City to Smart Engagement: Exploring Digital and Physical Interactions for Playful City-Making . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Joel Fredericks Part II

Designing and Experimenting with Playfulness in Urban Environments

Beta Blocks: Inviting Playful Community Exploration of Smart City Technologies in Boston, USA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131 Sean Peacock, John Harlow and Eric Gordon Playful and Playable Lighting in Smart Cities: Towards a Holistic Framework of Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149 Henrika Pihlajaniemi and Aale Luusua

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Saving Face: Shared Experience and Dialogue on Social Touch, in Playful Smart Public Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Karen Lancel, Hermen Maat and Frances Brazier Part III

Nature, Playscapes and Landscapes

The DigiPhysical Playscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 207 Eva-Lotta Sallnäs Pysander, Jon Back, Annika Waern and Susan Paget Towards Eco-Centric Interaction: Urban Playful Interventions in the Anthropocene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Valentina Nisi, Catia Prandi and Nuno Jardim Nunes Part IV

Designing Location-Based Games

Interactive Narrative Design for Geographically Dispersed Points of Interest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Tonguc Sezen, Ido Iurgel, Nicolas Fischöder and Digdem Sezen A Game-Based Service to Mitigate the Risk of Inundations Caused by Solid Waste Accumulation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Francisco Lepe-Salazar, Tania Cortés-Álvarez, Elia Serratos-Chávez, Luis Jáuregui-Flores, Erick Juárez-Cervantes, Rodolfo Valdovinos-López, Demis Rincón-Martínez and Ramón Moreno-de la Madrid Part V

Nomadic and Traditional Games

Levelling Playing Fields, A Nomadic Play Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 303 Annika Olofsdotter Bergström ‘Forget Your Gadget, Let’s Play Outside!’: Traditional Play in Jakarta, Indonesia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 319 Fitri Arlinkasari, Debra Flanders Cushing and Evonne Miller Part VI

Who Controls Your City’s Playability?

City Residents as Videogame Characters in Smart Urban Environments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 355 Anton Nijholt

Contributors

Fitri Arlinkasari Creative Industries Faculty, School of Design, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Qld, Australia; Faculty of Psychology, YARSI University, Jakarta, Indonesia Jon Back Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden Annika Olofsdotter Bergström Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlshman, Sweden Miriam Börjesson Rivera Media Technology and Interaction Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden Frances Brazier Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands Tania Cortés-Álvarez Cognos+, Centro, Colima, Mexico Debra Flanders Cushing Creative Industries Faculty, School of Design, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Qld, Australia Nicolas Fischöder Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, Kamp-Lintfort, Germany Joel Fredericks Design Lab, Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW, Australia Eric Gordon Engagement Lab, Emerson College, Boston, MA, USA John Harlow Engagement Lab, Emerson College, Boston, MA, USA Lobna Hassan Gamification Group, Faculty of Humanities, University of Turku, Turku, Finland; Gamification Group, Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Troy Innocent School of Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia Ido Iurgel Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, Kamp-Lintfort, Germany

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Luis Jáuregui-Flores Facultad de Telemática, Universidad de Colima, Las Víboras, Colima, Mexico Erick Juárez-Cervantes Facultad de Telemática, Universidad de Colima, Las Víboras, Colima, Mexico Karen Lancel Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands; Artists duo Lancel/Maat, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Dale Leorke Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Francisco Lepe-Salazar Ludolab, Centro, Colima, Mexico; Coordinación General de Tecnologías de Información, Universidad de Colima, Las Víboras, Colima, Mexico Aale Luusua Oulu School of Architecture/INTERACT, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Hermen Maat Artists duo Lancel/Maat, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Evonne Miller Creative Industries Faculty, School of Design, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Qld, Australia Ramón Moreno-de la Madrid Facultad de Telemática, Universidad de Colima, Las Víboras, Colima, Mexico Anton Nijholt Faculty EEMCS, Human Media Interaction, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands Valentina Nisi University of Madeira, ITI/LARSYS, Funchal, Portugal Nuno Jardim Nunes IST - University of Lisbon, ITI/LARSYS, Lisbon, Portugal Susan Paget Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden Daniel Pargman Media Technology and Interaction Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden Sean Peacock Open Lab, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK Henrika Pihlajaniemi Oulu School of Architecture, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland Catia Prandi University of Bologna, ITI/LARSYS, Bologna, Italy Demis Rincón-Martínez Facultad de Telemática, Universidad de Colima, Las Víboras, Colima, Mexico Tina Ringenson Strategic Sustainability Studies, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden Eva-Lotta Sallnäs Pysander Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

Contributors

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Elia Serratos-Chávez Cognos+, Centro, Colima, Mexico Digdem Sezen Faculty of Communications, Istanbul University, Beyazit Fatih/Istanbul, Turkey Tonguc Sezen Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, Kamp-Lintfort, Germany Mattia Thibault Gamification Group, Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland Rodolfo Valdovinos-López Facultad de Telemática, Universidad de Colima, Las Víboras, Colima, Mexico Annika Waern Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden

Playful Introduction on “Making Smart Cities More Playable” Anton Nijholt

Abstract This chapter provides a brief introduction to playable cities. Future cities are smart. They have embedded sensors, actuators, and data processors. These devices are connected in the internet of things, in which city dwellers and their wearables are among the ‘things’ that are sensed, and such devices can collect and process data and actuate. Why not use this smart technology and the smartness of the city dwellers to make a city playable? Smart technology can make a city more enjoyable by introducing smart interactive urban art and smart and interactive playful installations and by granting city dwellers and their emerging smart communities access to the data that are collected by a smart city or to the smart devices that are embedded in a smart city’s infrastructure. Communities, gamers, makers, and hackers will also see possibilities in using cheap smart devices that are connected in a communityowned network to make a community more livable and to make being part of it more enjoyable. In this chapter, we examine why play is a necessary component of smart cities and we present examples of urban play, of enjoyable events, and of turning everyday experiences into play. Our observations on play in urban environments and on making urban environments playable should help put the other chapters in this book in context. The contributions of the other chapters to the objectives of this book are summarized in the second part of this chapter. Keywords Playable cities · Smart cities · Digital technology · Sensors · Actuators · Urban games · Location-based games · Traditional games · Sustainability

A. Nijholt (B) Human Media Interaction, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_1

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1 Introduction Every city wants to be a smart city. To become smart, a city must use smart technology: physical sensors and actuators that are embedded in the physical infrastructure of the city (streets, public spaces, etc.); internet, World Wide Web and social media services; and hybrid services in which public spaces and services are augmented with augmented reality, virtual reality, and social media technology. Underlying the smart services that become visible to the citizens are achievements in advanced information and communication technology. These include broadband networks that ensure high-speed internet activities and continuous and real-time data exchange between the city and devices. Sensors and actuators that are embedded in physical spaces provide data to government systems, city administrations, and companies that have been given ownership or control of urban public spaces. The data can be used for web-based applications and services for the innovation of transportation, local business, education, and health services. Civic authorities have begun to learn about pervasive computing and Internet of Things technology, which is a digital technology that is embedded in our environments, public spaces, workplaces and objects and devices that are part of our daily living environment. Collected data about traffic and public transport, presence in public spaces, waste management, energy consumption, air quality or street noise level can be integrated with information from social media and can be analyzed and used to predict, anticipate, manage, and control or enforce the behavior of city residents. Digital technology can also be used to persuade city residents to exhibit ‘preferred behavior’ in public spaces. Preferences can be built into the urban operating system (UOS) of a smart city. More efficient city management, superior public services, and, possibly, lower taxes are in the interest of city residents and they can accept that those benefits transcend concerns about being monitored at home, at work, in traffic, on public transport, and in public spaces (e.g., squares, streets, parks, parking places, and shopping malls). Social media, the use of web-based services, and sensors and actuators that are implemented in urban environments enable the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; the results are used to design and offer applications to users that are entertaining, enable play, and bring enjoyment to users while they are in public spaces or using public services. As argued in “Against the Smart City” [9], the smartness of a city evolves from the ways of life, cultures, and pragmatic local adaptions that evolve in a city. However, these are not the qualities that are pursued by the proponents and champions of the current smart city movement, such as city councils and multinational corporations. In addition, to make existing cities smart by embracing and managing smart technology, greenfield projects are being carried out [29], which are initiatives for India, United Arab Emirates China, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, North America, and European countries to building smart and sustainable cities from the ground up. A well-known example that now has been dismissed is the PlanIT Valley near Porto in Portugal. In South Korea, a smart city, namely, Songdo, was planned to be ready to

Playful Introduction on “Making Smart Cities More Playable”

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have 300,000 inhabitants in 2015. Presently, it has approximately 70,000 inhabitants and no cultural activities, theatres or museums. A $500 billion investment has been announced for developing an envisioned smart and sustainable city, namely, Neom, in Saudi Arabia near the Red Sea coast. The town of Toronto has given Google’s sister company Sidewalk responsibility to design a $50 million smart city neighborhood (the Quayside area), which would be ‘the most measurable community in the world’. Experiencing a city as playful and playable does not necessarily require digital technology. However, for an existing city that has become smart or a greenfield smart city, smart technology can help make a city more playful and more playable. The notion of ‘playable cities’ was included in videogames such as SimCity, which has scenarios that replicate real cities. German cities have been defined as ‘bespielbar’ (playable) [12]; however, these initiatives consider play objects for children in the city and making streets car-free during limited hours (“Spielstraße auf Zeit”), rather than considering opportunities for using smart technology. More recently, the notion of a playable city was introduced in Bristol, England and imagined as a counterpoint to the ‘Smart City’. From Bristol’s Playable City website: “A Playable City is a city where people, hospitality and openness are key, enabling its residents and visitors to reconfigure and rewrite its services, places and stories.” Although not clear from this definition, the main objective of this initiative was to investigate how smart city technology can contribute to making a city playable, namely, to build on the ideas and infrastructure of the smart city to create novel interactions that are intended to inject fun and playfulness into urban environments both as a simple source of pleasure and as a means of facilitating and fostering urban and social interactions. In this concept, it is assumed that smart technology can make a city more playable, regardless of whether the technology is already available in a city’s infrastructure or is designed for that purpose. Hence, in addition to aiming at making the urban environment (e.g., its traffic, waste management, energy consumption, and safety) more efficient, smart technology can be explored for designing and implementing applications that are intended to entertain and bring enjoyment. In Chapter “Citizens of Play: Revisiting the Relationship Between Playable and Smart Cities” of this book, in an analysis on the relation between smart and playable cities, author Troy Innocent distinguishes three strategies to make cities playable: appropriation, datafication, and conversation. Appropriation of a public space can be spontaneous or consist of planned situated interventions. In datafication, data that have been collected from sensors, actuators, smartphones, social media, or geolocation services are used for creative and playful applications. The conversation strategy refers to a participatory approach in which communities and other stakeholders cocreate playful city interventions through play and civic conversation. In all these strategies, use can be made of sensors and actuators that are embedded in a city’s infrastructure, playability-specific sensors and actuators that have been added to the existing infrastructure, wearable devices that enable implicit and explicit interactions with the digitally enhanced urban environment and collected data that can inform playability designers about the preferences and behaviors of city dwellers.

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2 Play and the City Why introduce play into a city? Play can be considered one of the basic needs of human beings. Perhaps we can compare it with humor. It requires a safe environment to enjoy it. Nevertheless, it can involve pleasant risks, it can be accompanied by unusual behavior and failure to follow social rules of interaction, rule changing can be accepted, and the ultimate objective is to realize a satisfying experience (e.g., participation, being part of a community, being physically or emotionally satisfied, being mentally exhausted in a pleasant way, pride, or winning). Rather than being involved in physical play ourselves, we can enjoy the playing of others, share the enjoyment with others, and experience a playful atmosphere in a city. We can sense a city and can develop affective feelings for a city because we experience it as being playful for us, for our children, for our friends, or for the community we live in. We may assume that every city will use digital technology to increase its efficiency and its sustainability, namely, every city will aim at becoming smart, will have sensors and actuators embedded in its urban environment and will monitor and control its citizens, their behaviors and their consumption patterns (e.g., energy, traffic, shopping, recreation, and waste). Municipalities will employ web-based management and will communicate with inhabitants using web-based and social media applications. In terms of adding playfulness and play to a city, what can be offered by a smart city? Experiencing playfulness in our daily environment adds to our enjoyment of life in a city, its quarters and its (social) communities. We can enjoy and take part in playful events without being physically active. There are various reasons for having play and playful events in urban environments. We must consider how to match the availability of smart technology with these reasons. This is part of ongoing research; for example, in other chapters in this book, we have considered play and sustainability, critical and ‘subversive’ play that challenges the norms that underlie the use of a public environment, and the ‘nature’ play that can be offered to children in their various outdoor play environments. Indeed, there are various reasons for introducing play, playfulness, and playability into urban environments. Actors can have various motivations, which must be considered as well. First, we examine the reasons for having playfulness and play in urban environments (slightly adapted from [16] and the role that can be played by digital technology. • Play and playful events can be introduced to have fun or, more formally, to create positive emotions. There is not necessarily a direct behavior changing objective; nevertheless, from the perspective of decision-makers (civic authorities), it is a functional use and management of playfulness, which is aimed at increasing happiness for a city’s residents and at increasing appreciation of a city’s living conditions. It can also support, challenge and stimulate ‘bottom-up’ creativity in a city’s communities. A city is not an amusement park; however, it is certainly possible to introduce playful elements into public spaces and public transport that can be viewed as playful and humorous additions to everyday life and routine activities.

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• Playfulness can also be introduced with the main objective, or the additional objective, of changing the behavior of citizens. Technology that aims at behavior change has become known as persuasive technology. Adding humor, playfulness and gaming elements to otherwise boring and nonchallenging daily activities can make them challenging, interesting and fun. People can be motivated or persuaded to perform actions and activities that have an impact on their health, consumption behavior, traffic behavior, energy consumption, or social behavior. • For children and young adults, there can also be the objective of having playful applications and city activities that have an educational role. Interactive playgrounds and adventure playgrounds are examples where they can develop social, intellectual and physical skills. By having various physical designs of streets and public spaces, play fun can emerge and such skills can develop in a more natural environment rather than in ‘artificial’ playgrounds. Humor, as experienced by children, can facilitate the design of educational environments. The positive role of humor in education is well-known. • Instead of consuming playfulness, it can be fun to generate playfulness. Makers, tinkerers, and hackers can use cheap technology and software tools to introduce their own sensor and actuator applications into their environment, their streets or their community. They may have access to data that have been collected by already available sensors and actuators in their environment that can be used to develop applications that are of interest to them. In addition, they may have access to networks that they can reconfigure, adapt or hack for their own purposes or they could introduce their own special-purpose sensor networks [5, 6]. • Urban designers and architects have learned to consider their users’ preferences and experiences. There are several ways of becoming informed about such preferences and experiences. A virtual or augmented reality perspective on a future change or urban development may facilitate the collection of opinions about such developments and their modification. An urban game enables us to gather information about how users will experience an environment or how users will experience changes in an environment. Although it is not yet a standard procedure, urban designers are interested in using urban games to obtain such experience information [3, 22]. Decades ago, children could play everywhere. Streets and street furniture provided opportunities for play. For example, a lamppost could be turned into a play object by attaching a homemade swing to it and spinning around it (Fig. 1, left). Play can also occur on a frozen Amsterdam canal that is full of discarded junk and furniture (Fig. 1, right). Rather than having children play in the streets, in the 1950s, urban architects such as Aldo van Eyck designed playgrounds for children. Children should be able to practice climbing, jumping, and swinging in safe areas. In urban environments (e.g., parks and public squares), there are sometimes designated places where also adults are invited to play, for example, in a public square with big and heavy chess pieces for playing chess. In addition to traditional board games, video games such as Tetris, Space Invaders, and Pac-Man have implemented physically. Digital tech-

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Fig. 1 Left: London, 1954 (Photo credit Marc Riboud/Magnum/Hollandse Hoogte; also ©Tate, London 2019). Right: Amsterdam, 1963 (Photo credit Frits Weeda/Stadsarchief Amsterdam)

nology enables video games to be projected on the street or on public buildings and mobile phones can be used as remote controllers for the game. With augmented reality, it is possible to project video game elements such that they are perceived as real. Streets and other public spaces can be ‘painted’ via augmented reality technology. Sensors and actuators that are embedded in urban environments can support play that is aimed at children or adults. Play supports placemaking. Placemaking refers to creating places that are pleasurable and attractive. In a neighborhood, places can be essential to creating a community feeling. Places are shared and enable social interaction and neighborhood members experience ownership and responsibility. Placemaking aims at making places more enjoyable and strengthening connections between people and the places they share. Placemaking can be facilitated using a top-down design approach to the social and creative use of a place; however, it also requires the willingness of potential community members to socially interact with others, to decide about their interests and to collaborate to pursue joint interests. In “From placemaking to digital placemaking” [27], the role of digital technology in placemaking is investigated. A useful distinction is made among ‘community placemaking’ (citizen-focused placemaking), ‘spectacle placemaking’ (creating new, temporary places), and ‘infrastructure placemaking’ (improving the existing infrastructure). In the later sections of this chapter and the other chapters, many examples of play or the use of (digital) play technology are discussed that belong to these categories of placemaking.

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3 Making Cities Playable Rather than looking at traditional games, whether board games or videogames adapted to the urban environment, it is more interesting to look at location-based games that make use of location-aware handheld devices and that in addition allow cooperation and competition with other players. These games were among the first attempts to transfer game-lay from the personal computer to the urban environment [11, 14]. In location-based games such as Niantic’s Ingress and Pokémon GO, users are provided with a narrative and augmented reality technology. In Pokémon GO real-world locations are augmented with virtual creatures that, for example, can be captured. Location-based games promote more than physical activity. They can make players aware of unknown aspects of a city and playing them can also lead to surprising and humorous situations [1]. Play in urban environments need not always follow fixed rules. Hopscotch does, but players can change the rules while playing. The same is true for hide-and-seek and tag games. Board games and videogames that are transferred to an urban environment have fixed rules that must be followed by players. Location-based games offer more freedom. A player can make incorrect decisions for a long time without being corrected. Identifying incorrect decisions and trying to correct them is part of the game. Games can be created by players as well. For example, in open-ended play for children, we offer opportunities for play, but leave it to the children to create games by inventing rules that must be followed. In Chapter “The DigiPhysical Playscape” of this book, examples of digitally enhanced open-ended play for children can be found. Although not necessarily leading to location-based games, we should mention the participatory design of outdoor playgrounds in specific neighborhoods, where citizens can engage with their local community. This can be done for different age groups [24]. Of course, the specific environment can be taken into consideration, in particular street furniture or natural elements (sand, snow, temperature, water, plants, trees, animals, …). Tangibles for outdoor play allow ‘Head-Up Games’, that is games where players physically interact with objects, embedded sensors, and controllers, and are not forced to attend to a screen [2, 4]. IoT (Internet of Things) toolkits provide community members with programming facilities for sensors and output controllers. Such toolkits can also be used by children, allowing them to design playful digital-physical interactions for a playground, a school garden or a park. Possibilities for open-ended play can also be found in many artistic playful installations that have been made available to an audience during a city’s organized public events. One example is the Congregation kinetic video and sound installation for pedestrian performers, which was created by media artists Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler. The installation provides light projections on a square or a street. The projections (circles and lines) invite the audience to play with them, explore possibilities, invent rules for playing with them, and change these rules as the projections change (see Fig. 2, which was captured at a performance in Enschede, The Netherlands).

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Fig. 2 Congregation, Enschede, 2016. Photo by/courtesy of Willem Jan Mengerink, Enschede

3.1 Play and Enjoyment In addition to location-based games using handheld devices, in playable cities, city dwellers and city visitors can be invited to use and enjoy playful installations and interactive urban art that have been made part of a city’s public spaces or roads. Such installations can provide playful experiences to city residents and visitors. Enjoyment can be provided without asking or obliging people to follow the rules of a game. They can be invited to explore a playful and digitally enhanced installation without being bothered with rules of play, apart from discovering ‘rules’ of interaction. A simple example is a fountain installation that detects the presence and movements of children and surprises them with unexpected showers of water. We can also consider ‘musical roads’, which are roads that sense a car’s road deviation and warn the driver with music with the objective of correcting his driving behavior, or lighting in a park that adapts to a visitor’s mood (see also Chapter “Playful and Playable Lighting in Smart Cities: Towards a Holistic Framework of Design” in this book). Rainwork, by Peregrine Church, is a type of street art that uses a superhydrophobic coating that is undetectable on sunny days but displays drawings and messages on the pavement when the street is wet (see Fig. 3). There are examples of installations where the audience is expected to be (inter)active to enjoy the digital playability that is offered by the city or its creative inhabitants. Well-known are the piano stairs of a Stockholm metro station, which have also been installed in many other cities and give users the choice of using a

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Fig. 3 Art that only appears when it rains. Photos courtesy of Peregrine Church

traditional escalator or stairs that have been transformed into a working piano, with every step playing a note when a user steps on it. Other installations are a trashcan in a park that emits a rewarding sound when trash is thrown in it, a pedestrian traffic light that enables the user to play the game of Pong with someone who is waiting at the opposite side of the crosswalk, and a bus stop that entertains users while they are waiting. Playfulness can be introduced without any interference from officialdom or bureaucracy. Sometimes, this can be considered hacking the city for playability. Is Rainwork allowed everywhere in the city or does it require official permission? Graffiti is not allowed, but sometimes it is tolerated. What about digital graffiti that is projected on a building’s wall without permission? SMSlingshot [28] is a ‘game’ that enables players to project messages on walls of public and private buildings. Embedded in the slingshot is a mobile device on which one can type a message. This device is connected to a laptop and a projector that displays the message on the wall of the building at which the slingshot is aimed with its embedded laser pointer. We can also consider whether Pokémon GO involves regular and governmentally approved use of public (and sometimes private) spaces, whether we should consider it as a claim of a company on our public and private spaces, or whether we should consider gamers as hackers that infiltrate public and private spaces (Fig. 4). Many examples of interactive playful installations in the urban environment can be found in [21]. In this book, the authors report on the European Union (EU)supported initiatives for introducing playful media art projects in EU countries, with the theme of ‘connecting cities’. More than forty playful projects that address this theme are discussed, along with the development of urban screens for urban media environments. The urban environment projects address issues such as shared experiences, physically distributed collaboration, storytelling on media facades, sharing touch on a public screen, expressing opinions on smart city developments (using a smart city sentiment dashboard), placemaking using social media, reclaiming and

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Fig. 4 Take back the streets. Pokémon GO players in Toronto, July 2016. Photo by Anton Nijholt

connecting urban screens to invite people to meet on the screen, joint video painting on buildings, and presence-aware lighting installations.

3.2 Play and Persuasion Persuasive design and technology aim at changing behavior [8]. Rather than focusing on the negative consequences of a behavior, persuasive technology aims at rewarding desired behavior and informing about alternatives. Simply confronting a user with information about his or her consumption behavior can change such behavior. Public exposure and comparison with others can facilitate the changing of behavior. For example, public exposure of electricity usage using scoreboards has been reported in [25]. This led to energy savings for households. Smart street furniture makes it possible to identify passersby and to personalize and adapt an environment to a user. Smart billboards with embedded sensors can be used to display messages that are humorous and that aim at changing the attitudes of passersby. Information about a city dweller’s behavior can be shared with others and comparisons can be made. This information can be shared via social media using applications that are accessible with a smartphone or on public displays. Smartphone applications make it possible to adapt to the user according to his or her preferences. City dwellers can be engaged in physical, digital, or hybrid games that aim at changing behavior. Smart technology enables the detection of types of unwanted behavior and the display of behavior-changing messages on a user’s smartphone or on a public display. In a gamification situation, the user can lose or win points. In the Chinese social credit system (see also Chapter “City Residents as Videogame Characters in Smart Urban Environments”), public behavior that can be considered

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socially and morally inappropriate can have consequences, such as not being allowed to travel using trains or planes. There are many examples of smart urban environment projects that aim at behavioral change. For example, behavior-changing messages can take into account events that occur near a smart billboard. Sensors that detect a train’s arrival at a platform of a station can trigger animations on a billboard. Sensors can detect that someone near a billboard is smoking and display a message on the public billboard or on a user’s smartphone about the dangers of smoking. These examples are from Sweden. In Paris, there are pedestrian crossings that emit the sounds of squealing tires and a crunching collision when a pedestrian neglects a red light. These sounds scare people and their pictures are taken during this terrifying experience and displayed on a billboard to warn others. Other examples are the previously discussed piano stairs that invite metro users to use stairs rather than an escalator. Pedestrian traffic lights have been designed such that waiting is rewarded with a fun or gaming experience. City dwellers can be persuaded to take particular routes when traveling from home to work or visiting a city as a tourist. As a final example, TetraBIN (Fig. 5) is a behavior change project that aims at motivating users to properly dispose of trash in public trash cans by turning trash disposal into a game [25, 26]. A display on which hundreds of LEDs cover the circular surface of a bin makes putting a piece of rubbish into the bin similar to waiting for the right moment to release a block in the familiar Tetris game. Although it is not always clear how to evaluate these projects or what their long-term effects will be, the general conclusion is that adding such smartness to familiar street furniture has a positive effect on the behavior of city dwellers and city visitors.

3.3 Bristol’s Playable City’s Projects We already discussed the city of Bristol’s view on smart technology “… enabling its residents and visitors to reconfigure and rewrite its services, places, and stories.” This does not differ substantially from the ideas that underlie the projects that have been discussed above. Since 2012, with the support of the British Council, a yearly contest has been organized in which design studios and research groups have been invited to propose playful installations for the city with the objective of making the city more playful (during the few months that each installation was accessible to the audience) and for commercial exploitation of the ideas. Here is the list of award-winning designs: • 2013 Hello Lamp Post (artificial interactions using a mobile phone and SMS messages with lampposts and other street furniture); • 2014 Shadowing (infrared cameras that are attached to lampposts capture shadows of passersby and project one of these shadows later when another person passes; confusion is guaranteed);

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Fig. 5 TetraBIN: Persuasion and play. Project by Steven Bai, Sam Johnson, and Martin Tomitsch. Photo by Steven Bai

• 2015 Urbanimals (jumping and crawling virtual animals are projected on walls of buildings and parking garage floors and invite passersby to follow or imitate them); • 2016 Stop Smile Stroll (initially announced as a disco experience while waiting and while crossing a street, in its actual implementation, users watched smiley-like animations be drawn on their camera-captured faces while crossing a road. These animations were shown on a display that was attached to a pedestrian traffic light pole); • 2017 Star Light, Star Bright (implemented in Oxford; star constellations that are visible above Oxford are mapped on a step-activated light installation and people must work together to turn on a whole constellation). Some of these projects have been commercialized and implemented in other cities. Since the projects are realized in public spaces, the technology must be robust. Interesting are applications such as the Hello Lamp Post, Shadowing, and Urbanimals projects. In the proposal for the 2016 Stop Smile Stroll project, the following description was provided: “Pressing a traffic light button ignites speakers and a dance floor, bringing the crossing to life. A spotlight will guide you across the road, imitating the lights of a stage performance …. As further people join the dance floor, more and more of the crossing’s surrounding furniture will progressively light up and trans-

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form into a disco!” In practice, using a primitive camera system that was hidden in a pedestrian traffic light, the project attempted to entertain crossers with manipulated pictures of their faces, similar to what can be done in photo kiosks, that were displayed on a small screen that was attached to the traffic light. As discussed in [19], it seems that the winners of this contest are selected according to the potential for commercial exploitation of their ideas in various cities and countries, which may lead to a McDonald’s ball pit commercialization of this playable city concept. In addition, according to [20], playable city designs, regardless of whether they are from Bristol or from other initiatives, are typically not ‘inclusive’; they are aimed at the interests of a city’s ‘creative class’ [10], namely, the happy and the creative few, along with the civic authorities and the city’s cultural institutions, not the children, elderly, disabled or ‘common’ people. The complicated 2017 Star Light, Star Bright installation in Oxford attracted interest from Oxford’s university staff and Ph.D. students; however, we can expect more enthusiasm for an initiative in Philadelphia to set up high-powered telescopes on crowded street corners for everyone to use, with the objective of sparking people’s interest in astronomy and enabling them to experience science. In Chapter “Citizens of Play: Revisiting the Relationship Between Playable and Smart Cities” of this book, Troy Innocent presents his more positive opinions on some of these playful Bristol installations, based on discussions and interviews with the contest organizers, and shedding a light on their motivation.

4 Stakeholders of the Playable Cities We identify the following stakeholders in making smart cities more playable [16]: • Civic authorities who are interested in issues that are related to efficiency (management of traffic, energy, waste, and safety) and in promoting cultural and entertainment activities that may be of interest to their citizens; • Large corporations such as Alphabet (Sidewalk Labs, Google), Cisco, IBM, Siemens, AT&T that promise a comprehensive smart city approach. Although the focus is on efficiency issues, sustainability and facilitating leisure activities can be expected to become part of their interest; • Small companies (typically media design studios and start-ups) that propose and promote playful multimedia applications in urban environments to local authorities with the objectives of obtaining their support and of being hired to implement their ideas; • Interactive media artists who are interested in showing their art and playful installations in public spaces. They are asked as artists, rather than as media designers, to add interactive art installations to public spaces. There are also examples of artists who introduce their art in public spaces without being asked and without permission, sometimes just for fun, to make a statement or to provoke;

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• Computer scientists, in particular, those who focus on human-computer interaction, who want to explore and promote interactions that go beyond interactions with PC, laptop, tablet, and smartphone screens and who want to explore challenging applications that make use of available sensor and actuator (or IoT) technology in which they can demonstrate, use and evaluate their research; • The general city dweller who feels attracted to playful experiences in his urban environment. These experiences can occur during recreational outdoor activities or shopping or while in traffic or on public transport. For tourists, holiday-makers, children, and pets at play, specialized technology can be utilized; • Players and designers of urban and pervasive games, namely, games that make use of the natural and built environments. Apart from entertainment, these games can be designed to involve citizens in urban issues or in the planning processes of urban development. Hence, city planners, urban designers, and architects are also interested in urban games; • Individuals, groups of individuals and community members who are familiar with digital technology or who receive support from researchers, makers, and tinkerers who know how to adapt cheap sensors, actuators and computing devices for urban community applications. Living conditions (parking, traffic noise, air quality, and safety) are among the primary concerns. Urban community applications also include the support of playful and recreational activities that enable community members to collaborate and compete in playful ways. In Chapter “Citizens of Play: Revisiting the Relationship Between Playable and Smart Cities” of this book, Troy Innocent introduces the notion of a conversation strategy in which communities and other stakeholders cocreate playful smart city interventions. In Chapter “From Smart City to Smart Engagement: Exploring Digital and Physical Interactions for Playful City-Making” of this book, Joel Fredericks discusses a framework that enables a civics’ authority top-down approach to playability to be integrated with a bottom-up approach that is initiated by communities and individuals. Chapter “Beta Blocks: Inviting Playful Community Exploration of Smart City Technologies in Boston, USA” in this book provides an example of participatory design in Boston, USA. In Chapter “City Residents as Videogame Characters in Smart Urban Environments” by Anton Nijholt more will be said about the role of large corporates (from the early interest of The Walt Disney company to the current interest of Google sister company Sidewalk Labs) in offering smart city solutions.

5 More About This Book After this introductory chapter, this book is divided into six parts: (1) Views on Playable Cities, (2) Designing and Experimenting with Playfulness in Urban Environments, (3) Nature, Playscapes and Landscapes, (4) Designing Location-based Games, (5) Nomadic and Traditional Games, and (6) Who Controls Your City’s Playability?

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5.1 Views on Playable Cities (Part I of This Book) This part, which discusses views on playable cities, begins with Chapter “Citizens of Play: Revisiting the Relationship Between Playable and Smart Cities” by Troy Innocent. He reports on a one-year study that investigated the relationship between playable and smart cities by drawing upon interviews with artists, designers, producers, and architects. In his analysis, he identifies three strategies in playable cities: appropriation, datafication, and conversation. Appropriation of a public space can be spontaneous or consist of planned situated interventions. In datafication, data that have been collected from sensors, actuators, smartphones, social media, or geolocation services are used for creative and playful applications. The conversation strategy involves a participatory approach in which communities and stakeholders cocreate playful city interventions through play and civic conversation. The author observes the emergence of convergence between smart and playable cities. In Chapter “Reappropriating, Reconfiguring and Augmenting the Smart City through Play”, Dale Leorke discusses the ‘play versus instrumentalism’ view of smart and playable cities. He identifies three positions with different degrees of engagement and overlap with the smart city. They are ‘appropriation’, that is, the re-use of smart city technology, ‘reconfiguring’, that is incorporating play in the smart city infrastructure (including playful inefficiencies), and ‘augmenting’, that is, gamifying the smart city. Each of these positions is elaborated in this chapter. In Chapter “Critical Playable Cities”, Lobna Hassan and Mattia Thibault introduce their ‘critical urban gamification’ framework. They distinguish between ‘everyday urbanism’, which involves bottom-up use of city places by individuals (e.g., street vendors or street musicians) or more large-scale use of public spaces (e.g., festivals or demonstrations), and do-it-yourself (DIY) urbanism. The latter involves unauthorized changes and improvements of urban spaces with the objective of benefiting a community or the general public. In addition, they discuss the notion of ‘critical design’, which was introduced by Mary Flanagan in 2009 [7] and assigns a role to design that is meant to challenge the status quo of public spaces. Such a critical role can be useful; however, it can also be disruptive and unsettling for the general audience of city residents. The authors argue that this disruptive and unsettling nature of critical design can be mitigated by a playful implementation: critical urban gamification. In Chapter “The Sustainable Playable City: Making Way for the Playful Citizen”, Miriam Börjesson Rivera and colleagues explore the intersection of smart, playable and sustainable cities. They argue that sustainability consists not only of ecological sustainability but also of sociological sustainability, for which we should focus on issues of human well-being. What are the characteristics of a smart sustainable city and what are the characteristics of a sustainable playable city? The authors discuss how the concept of playable cities can be interpreted from the perspective of Henri Lefebvre’s ‘Right to the City’ (1968) and from the perspective of the ‘Slow City Movement’, which began more than a decade ago in Italy. The possible alignment of playability and sustainability constitutes the core of the discussion in this chapter.

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In Chapter “From Smart City to Smart Engagement: Exploring Digital and Physical Interactions for Playful City-Making”, Joel Fredericks explores middle-out engagement and hybridity for collaboration between stakeholders in the city-making process. Middle-out engagement integrates objectives from top-down decisionmakers with those of everyday people from the bottom. Hybridity for city-making refers to engaging and integrating people across a wide range of demographics. Examples of digital and physical engagement for city-making are discussed, such as playful community activism and urban art for playful engagement. Fredericks introduces a smart engagement framework in which community engagement, urban interventions, and decision-making are identified as the main stages of playful-citymaking.

5.2 Designing and Experimenting with Playfulness in Urban Environments (Part II of This Book) Part II of this book is on designing playfulness in urban environments. The first chapter in this part Chapter “Beta Blocks: Inviting Playful Community Exploration of Smart City Technologies in Boston, USA” by Sean Peacock, John Harlow, and Eric Gordon. Incorporating play in the smart city infrastructure is the topic of their chapter. They discuss a pilot project of community-based exploration of smart city technology. The chapter contains extensive observations on the roles of stakeholders in public-private partnerships and how to engage city residents in the design and decision process. Chapter “Playful Lighting in Smart Cities: Towards a Holistic Framework of Design”, is by Henrika Pihlajaniemi and Aale Luusua. The chapter explores some of the authors’ projects on the change in design from static lighting to dynamic, adaptive, intelligent and interactive urban lighting. The authors discuss how these control technologies are related to playful and playable lighting. In this chapter, various case studies are discussed. In one of the studies, city inhabitants could introduce their own lighting scheme with a corresponding text story into a pedestrian-oriented street. Another case study involved the design of a movement-adaptive park lighting installation that could provide light playing visualizations in support of answers to inquiries about current events in the city. Inquiries could be made with a smartphone. A third case study concerns an interactive light and sound installation that was designed for an attraction that involved climbing and sliding in the snow, in which the lighting was physically playable with bodily activity. The authors extensively discuss the evaluation of the users’ experiences and the viability of such playful and playable lighting installations. These are issues that emerge for all playful and playable installations that are introduced into an urban environment. Who is responsible for maintenance and new content? Companies may remain interested if the services they provide to a playable city generate user information that can be used for marketing. As discussed in this chapter, due to lack of maintenance, one of their

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lighting installations that initially upgraded an urban space is now degrading the image of the urban area. Chapter “Saving Face: Shared Experience and Dialogue on Social Touch, in Playful Smart Public Space” by Karen Lancel, Hermen Maat, and Frances Brazier investigates the following question: “Can shared experience and dialogue on social touch be orchestrated in playful smart public spaces?” The authors discuss experiments on self- and social touch as part of their public space performance installations in Beijing, Utrecht, and Dessau. Participants were asked to caress their faces, while face recognition technology displayed their face and caressing gestures on a large city public screen. Hence, participants agreed to have their actions visualized and discussed, including feelings of discomfort, embarrassment, enjoyment, and agency. The experiments provide insight into people’s willingness to self-disclose in playful public spaces that make use of smart technology.

5.3 Nature, Playscapes, and Landscapes (Part III of This Book) In Chapter “The DigiPhysical Playscape” by Eva-Lotta Sallnäs Pysander and colleagues, the notion of a digiphysical playscape is introduced: “play installations in which the landscape, the installations, and their digital augmentations are designed together.” Their research aims at integrating vegetation, natural materials, and terrain with digital interactivity in children’s everyday (outdoor) environments. The authors discuss the possible role of nature in open-ended outdoor play. Digital installations have been introduced in various outdoor environments (a school yard, the walkway from home to school, between houses in a residential area, a park area, and a forest). Digital interactivity was integrated with playing with wooden structures, trees and natural materials such as stones, water, sand, and branches. Play types and play patterns were identified and analyzed via observation, note-taking, and interviews. In Chapter “Towards Eco-centric Interaction: Urban Playful Interventions in the Anthropocene”, Valentina Nisi, Catia Prandi, and Nuno J. Nunes address issues of biodiversity and sustainability in urban environments. Can we design and implement playful activities that help increase awareness and preserve biodiversity in urban environments and that lead to behavioral changes? They report on the use of various technologies (e.g., monitoring urban movements, interactive design for sustainability, and ecoacoustics) and the use of these technologies in interactive storytelling, education, and games. Several case studies are discussed, such as the promotion of environmental awareness among the local population in Madeira, among the visitors of the island, and among visitors of museum exhibitions. Games and interactive storytelling that deal with issues regarding Madeiran biodiversity, flora and fauna, and endangered species and that explain about whales, dolphins, and seals in coastal urban environments are discussed. According to the authors, acoustic monitoring

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systems for enhancing whale watching experiences are also used to provide citizen data to marine biologists and environmental protection agencies.

5.4 Designing Location-Based Games (Part IV of This Book) Part IV of this book is on designing location-based games. The Dutch-German RhineWaal region and Colima (Mexico) are the locations that are considered in this part. Chapter “Interactive Narrative Design for Geographically Dispersed Points of Interest” by Tonguc Sezen and colleagues addresses the design and implementation of a ‘continuation network’ among eight museums in the Rhine-Waal region of Germany and the Netherlands. The network aims at connecting geographically dispersed locations and transforming them into continuous game locations through a narrative, animated virtual game with characters and location-based augmented reality experiences. Unity3D is used as a game development platform. The project is under development. Visitors are expected to interact with the story using their mobile devices. The game is being developed in close cooperation with museum specialists from the participating museums. The authors discuss the possibility of transferring their research to other realms where the locations have sufficient resemblances for a narrative connection, for example, distinct quarters of a city with tourist attractions. In Chapter “A Game-based Service to Mitigate the Risk of Inundations Caused by Solid Waste Accumulation”, Francisco Lepe-Salazar and coauthors report on their pilot study of a serious game (‘Wood of War’) that aims at hunting—in a Pokémon GO-like way—solid waste pollution in the Mexican town of Colima. Solid waste blocks sewage systems, which can cause inundations. The game can be played on mobile devices. Users can earn points by providing GPS information about the locations of clandestine waste dumps. Interviews with local agencies that are responsible for the environment and waste management guide the design of the proposed gamebased service.

5.5 Nomadic and Traditional Games (Part V of This Book) In Part V of this book, two chapters are devoted to nomadic and traditional games that do not use digital technology. These games focus on physical activity, the role of the body in play, and the sites where this physical play takes place. Therefore, the games can be location-based or site-specific, but they don’t assume that, as in the previous part, players focus on a mobile phone screen. We can assume that these players don’t have access to digital technology. In Chapter “Leveling Playing Fields, a Nomadic Play Design”, by Annika Olofsdotter Bergström, the players’ bodies are ‘game tokens’ on the physical playing field. Bergström reports on her experiences in a Palestinian refugee camp where she was involved in attempts to stimulate women to become active in public spaces. Under-

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lying these attempts are ideas that are inspired by the concepts of Mary Flannagan’s ‘critical play’ and Rosi Braidotti’s ‘nomadic body’, in which creative activities challenge the normative structures that are present in public spaces and in which play activities can be considered subversive and are intended to realize agency over a public place; see also Chapter “Critical Playable Cities” in this book by Lobna Hassan and Mattia Thibault. In the case that is discussed by Bergström, agency involves being able to move from the small and cramped women’s center, along with its social control and its daily pressure, to a playground to move freely and engage in joint, playful activities. While in the previous chapter the memories of the games they had played as children helped the women in the Al-Arroub refugee camp become active again and reclaim the public spaces from which they were expelled, in Chapter “‘Forget Your Gadget, Let’s Play Outside!’: Traditional Play in Jakarta, Indonesia”, Fitri Arlinkasari and coauthors focus on traditional children’s games. The women in the previous chapter played ball games such as ‘Seven Stones’ and rope games such as skipping rope, participated in organized relay races, or engaged in fanciful games that required physical contact. Similar games are discussed in this chapter. Traditional children’s games such as ‘hide and seek’, ‘coppers and robbers’, hopscotch, tag, and kite making and flying require running, jumping, collaboration, decision-making, and negotiation. They lead to improvements in motor skills, handeye coordination, spatial awareness, risk assessment, and social skills. In this chapter, the social affordances of Indonesian traditional games, which do not differ substantially from traditional children’s games from all over the world, are investigated in the context of government-supported initiatives for child-friendly public spaces and community centers and the ‘Traditional Game Return’ initiative as a countermovement to indoor screen-based play without physical activity and face-to-face social interaction, which has the slogan “Forget Your Gadget, Let’s Play Outside!” The focus of these initiatives is on children from low-income families. In the chapter, the authors discuss how traditional games remain relevant for modern children.

5.6 Who Controls Your City’s Playability? (Part VI of This Book) Finally, in Part VI on control of playability in smart cities, Chapter “City Residents as Videogame Characters in Smart Urban Environments” by the editor of this book provides an alternative view on the future of play in smart cities. This chapter, which is entitled “City Residents as Videogame Characters in Smart Urban Environments”, discusses observations on the McDonaldization, Disneyization, privatization, and Googlization of society and possible consequences for play and behavior in public spaces. It argues that there is a chance that playing activities of city residents and city visitors will not differ from the behavior of characters in videogames. Urban operating systems will operate sensors, actuators, mobile devices and wearables in

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such a way that they control human behavior in public spaces, just as players and non-player characters are controlled in a videogame. There will be a convergence of the digitally enhanced city (the smart city) with video games that have a narrative and that have players and non-player characters. ‘Play’ is fully controlled by the videogame environment and so, it is argued, will be the play in future smart and playable cities. The chapter also discusses observations on urban art, urban games, and playful activities in the urban environment that aim at resisting this development.

6 Conclusions In this introductory chapter, we presented several views on play, play in urban environments, playable cities, and stakeholders. We considered playful events and playful installations that can bring enjoyment to city dwellers, urban art, and location-based and persuasive games. We summarized the various chapters in this book and put them in context. Broadband networks, high-speed internet, web-based applications, sensors, processors, and actuators that are embedded everywhere in the urban environment make a city smart. City dwellers are nodes in the urban internet of things. They sense, they are sensed, and they actuate, although actuation can be implicit rather than explicit and there is not necessarily immediate feedback. Citizens behaviors (in its broadest sense) are monitored and collected data are used to implement changes in the smart city and in the way in which the smart city functions, including the ways the smart city deals with its inhabitants. Smart technology in smart cities is used to promote efficiency, safety, sustainability, health, and well-being. In this book, we consider how smart technology can be used to make cities more entertaining and enjoyable for city dwellers. Digital technology that is already embedded in the urban environment can also be used to make the environment playable. There can be a benign appropriation of a city’s digital smartness, the smartness can be hacked, and DIY implementation of digital smartness is becoming easier due to the unrestrained use of smartphones and inexpensive smart devices (sensors and actuators) that are easy to employ for community or individual purposes. As we discussed in [17, 18], smart technology should not only allow for the configuring or reconfiguring of sensor and actuator networks in smart city environments, but technology such as ‘robotic architecture’, kinetic art, and smart materials [13], which are also discussed in [23], should make it possible to fulfill the dreams of Dutch architect, artist, and philosopher Constant Nieuwenhuys [15], who foresaw the development of cities and buildings with movable assembly systems and technical devices for controlling climatic conditions (light, temperature, and ventilation) that are accessible to everybody and the use of audiovisual media becoming an important factor in ludic social behavior. In Constant’s words about the residents of his New Babylon city, “They wander through the sectors of New Babylon seeking new experiences, as yet unknown ambiances. Without the passivity of tourists, but fully aware of the power they have to act upon the world, to transform it, recreate it. They

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dispose of a whole arsenal of technical implements for doing this, thanks to which they can make the desired changes without delay.” This is the second book on Playable Cities. Interestingly, while in the previous book [16] the contributions focused on play and smart technology for play in urban environments, the current book has many chapters in which authors reflect on what it means for a city to be playable, how playability relates to digital smartness, and how playability relates to sustainability. Other chapters focus on how city dwellers experience playability, their willingness to expose themselves during play, and how play can be controlled by civic authorities, rather than allowing spontaneous play or playful events to be organized by citizens or city communities without the involvement of civic authorities.

References 1. Andujar M, Nijholt A, Gilbert JE (2017) Mobile augmented reality games in playable cities: a humorous interaction with Pokémon GO. In: Streitz N, Markopoulos P (eds) 5th international conference on distributed, ambient and pervasive interactions (DAPI 2017). LNCS, vol 10291. Springer, Cham, pp 575–586 2. Back J, Vidal LT, Waern A, Paget S, Sallnäs Pysander EL (2018) Playing close to home: interaction and emerging play in outdoor play installations. In: Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (CHI’18). Paper 156. ACM, New York, p 11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173730 3. Bedö V (2016) Size and shape of the playing field. In: Nijholt A (ed) Playable cities. The city as a digital playground. Gaming media and social effects series. Springer, Singapore, pp 67–86 4. Bekker T, Sturm J, Eggen B (2010) Designing playful interactions for social interaction and physical play. Pers Ubiquit Comput 14(5):385–396 5. Cheok AD, Romão T, Nijholt A, Yu G (2014) Entertaining the whole world. In: Cheok AD, Romão T, Nijholt A (eds) Entertaining the whole world. Human-computer interaction series. Springer, London, pp 1–3 6. DiSalvo C, Louw M, Coupland J, Steiner M (2009) Local issues, local uses: tools for robotics and sensing in community contexts. In Proceedings 7th ACM conference on creativity and cognition (C&C’09). ACM, New York, pp 245–254 7. Flanagan M (2009) Critical play: radical game design. MIT Press, Cambridge 8. Fogg BJ (2002) Persuasive technology: using computers to change what we think and do. Morgan Kaufmann, San Francisco 9. Greenfield A (2013) Against the smart city. Part I of the city is here for you to use. Do projects, New York City 10. Hollands RG (2008) Will the real smart city please stand up? City 12(3):303–320 11. Leorke D (2019) Location-based gaming. Play in public space. Palgrave MacMillan. Springer, Singapore 12. Meyer B (2009) Die bespielbare Stadt—Die Rückgewinnung des öffentlichen Raumes. Shaker Verlag, Aachen 13. Minuto A, Nijholt A (2013) Smart material interfaces as a methodology for interaction: a survey of SMIs’ state of the art and development. In: Proceedings of the second international workshop on smart material interfaces: another step to a material future (SMI’13). ACM, New York, pp 1–6 14. Montola M, Stenros J, Waern A (2009) Pervasive games: theory and design. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., San Francisco

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15. Nieuwenhuys C (1974) (Constant): New Babylon. manuscript. Written by Constant, for the exhibition catalogue published by the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Online at http:// stichtingconstant.nl/system/files/pdf/1974%20New%20Babylon_0.pdf 16. Nijholt A (2017) Playable cities: a short survey (keynote paper). In: Proceedings 6th international conference on informatics, electronics & vision (ICIEV). IEEE Xplore, New York, pp 1–6 17. Nijholt A (ed) (2017) Playable cities: the city as a digital playground. Springer, Singapore 18. Nijholt A (2017) Towards playful and playable cities. In: Nijholt A (ed) Playable cities: the city as a digital playground. Springer, Singapore, pp 1–20 19. Nijholt A (2019) Smart, affective, and playable cities. In: Proceedings of the ArtsIT 2018—7th EAI international conference: ArtsIT, interactivity & game creation, LNICST, vol 265. Springer, Cham, pp 163–168 20. Nijholt A (2019) Playable cities for children? In: Fukuda S (ed) Advances in affective and pleasurable design. Proceedings of the AHFE 2018 international conference on affective and pleasurable design, vol 774. Advances in intelligent systems and computing. Springer, Cham, pp 14–20 21. Pop S, Toft T, Calvillo N, Wright M (eds) (2016) What urban media art can do. Why, when, where & how. AVediton, Stuttgart 22. Schouten B, Ferri G, de Lange M, Millenaar K (2017) Games as strong concepts for CityMaking. In: Nijholt A (ed) Playable cities: the city as a digital playground. Springer, Singapore, pp 23–45 23. Sicart M (2016) Play and the city. In: Ackerman J, Rauscher A, Stein D (eds) Playin’ the city. Artistic and scientific approaches to playful urban arts. Navigationen, Zeitschrift für Medienund Kulturwissenschaften. Universität Siegen, Siegen, pp 25–40 24. Slingerland G, Lukosch S, Comes T, Brazier F (2019) Exploring requirements for joint information sharing in neighbourhoods: local playgrounds in the Hague. In: Brooks AL, Brooks E, Sylla C (eds) Interactivity, game creation, design, learning, and innovation. Springer, Cham, pp 306–315 25. Tomitsch M (2014) Towards the real-time city: an investigation of public displays for behaviour change and sustainable living. Paper presented at the 7th making cities liveable conference, Kingscliff (NSW) 26. Tomitsch M, Bai L, Johnson S (2014) TetraBIN: encouraging behaviour change through playful urban interventions. In: Vivid light 2014. Vivid Sydney. Sydney 27. Tomitsch M (2016) Communities, spectacles and infrastructures: three approaches to digital placemaking. In: Pop S, Toft T, Calvillo N, Wright M (eds) What urban media art can do. Why when where & how. AVediton, Stuttgart, pp 339–347 28. VR/Urban (2016) SMSlingshot. In: Pop S, Toft T, Calvillo N, Wright M (eds) What urban media art can do. Why when where & how. AVediton, Stuttgart, pp 103–105 29. Woetzel J, Remes J, Boland B, Lv K, Sinha S, Strube G, Means J, Law J, Cadena A, von der Tann V (2018) Smart cities: digital solutions for a more livable future. June 2018 report, McKinsey Global Institute, New York. See also: https://medium.com/mckinsey-global-institute/smart-from-the-start-6-examples-ofgreenfield-smart-city-projects-from-around-the-globe-2db82ac702e9

Part I

Views on Playable Cities

Citizens of Play: Revisiting the Relationship Between Playable and Smart Cities Troy Innocent

Abstract Although play has always been situated in cities, more recently playable cities have explored play in relation to of the increasingly role of ubiquitous technologies in shaping urban environments. The playable city has emerged in the past decade to critique and challenge the dominant narrative and technological determinism of smart cities. Initially, playable and smart cities operated in opposition—playable cities advocating for people and place, smart cities advocating for data and control. Following the emergence of playable cities, the diversity of approaches to smart cities has increased with some smart cities adopting approaches usually associated with playable cities that are based on people, place, community and co-creation. Revisiting the relationship between playable and smart cities reveals uneven engagement and discourse between the two as they have become enmeshed and intertwined. To explore this complexity, initial findings from a one-year study investigating the relationship between playable and smart cities are analysed, drawing upon interviews with over thirty artists, designers, producers, architects working within cities. While all of the participants in the study engage with the concept of play in some way, their creative strategies are widely divergent. Subsequently, three main themes are explored in this analysis: firstly, strategies of appropriation—of smart cities infrastructure for example—that are used by those working in playable cities; secondly, responses to issues and opportunities that have resulted from the increased datafication of cities; and thirdly, adoption of the use of conversation in the co-creation of cities and the impact that this has on public space. As a result, the changing relationship between playable and smart cities is explored. Keywords Playable cities · Smart cities · Co-creation · Datafication · Pervasive games · Public space · Urban design · Playful cities · Urban codemaking

T. Innocent (B) School of Design, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_2

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1 Introduction Over the past decade, competing understandings of cities have co-existed and coevolved in response to the impact of public, civic, private and corporate technologies and systems introduced into urban environments. Smart cities, playable cities, responsive cities, algorithmic cities, hackable cities, creative cities—these are some of the frameworks introduced that respond to opportunities, issues, and impact of technology on urban life. This impact is situated on many different levels. Optimisation and interconnection of urban infrastructure is one way that technology has had an impact on the planning and management of cities, allowing public transport, resource planning and traffic to be approached in more flexible and responsive ways. The datafication of the city—both through city-wide ‘big data’ collection via sensor networks and localised, distributed data collection by mobile devices and social media platforms—enables new ways of seeing and understanding emergent urban patterns. These systems typically manifest as city management and control systems used by local government or corporations to manage resources, or as services—often location-based and accessible via apps—that allow citizens to interact with the city more efficiently. This agenda of optimisation and control is the central narrative of smart cities. They are often seen as complex systems that may be centrally controlled, making the city appear to be smart as it delivers utility and function via mobility and connectivity. Smart cities are typically driven by rules representing underlying and established systems of governance. As a result, assumptions and expectations of citizens are embedded in the programming of rules and systems for the smart city. Usually the rules focus on productivity and codifying behaviour—defining and rewarding optimal ways of being in the city for citizens as the right or correct way to be. Playable cities emerged in opposition to these systems of control and homogenisation of the city, particularly their reductive approach and focus on utility and function to the exclusion of other ways of being in cities. Rather than ignore rules and systems altogether, playable cities seek to redefine and reimagine technologies and infrastructure with a view to connect them with people and place. Introducing play into the mix opens up possibilities rather than closes them off, resulting in a heterogeneous approach representative of the diversity of citizens and urban environments typically found in cities today. Rules and systems may be hacked and rewritten in playable cities that place people rather than function as the central narrative. While there are two decades of technologically mediated urban play exploring these possibilities originating in the design of pervasive games and locative media, the concept of the playable city become more widely recognised when introduced by the Watershed Pervasive Media Studio [9] in 2012, situating it in dialogue with smart cities. Seven years after the emergence of the term, do playable cities augment or challenge current thinking around smart city design? Playable cities appropriate smart cities infrastructure to engage people with their city and with one another. The strategy takes advantage of the increase in play literacies and the cultural currency of games characteristic of this century. Visitors,

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residents and workers in playable cities may become part of the conversation around urban design through community and ownership—a way of ‘hacking’ urban space and using the city as a living laboratory. To explore these ideas, initial findings from a one-year study investigating the relationship between playable and smart cities will be analysed, drawing upon interviews with over thirty artists, designers, producers, architects working with urban environments to develop and present projects for ‘citizens of play’. Play in public space can critique the dominant ways of thinking about smart cities, opening up the city as playground, making it hackable and mutable. These two ideas, the worldview that comes with seeing the ‘smart city’ as a hackable system and the strategies that come with a playful attitude, set the scene for playful citizens. This way of being builds on the pre-digital history of playable cities and introduces new strategies for playful citizens to engage with multiple points of tension to disrupt the public spaces of the current iteration of the modern city. This analysis develops three aspects that emerge as dominant strategies in playable cities, and that provide useful lenses for looking at smart cities—appropriation, datafication, and conversation. Appropriation of public space is typically associated with play of different kinds. Playful renaming and recontextualising of places can draw attention to assumptions and existing rules or social expectations previously taken for granted. Play in a space at varying scales—ranging from individuals to large groups—will have an impact not only on those immersed in play but bystanders who observe small or large shifts in behaviour. Arguments have been made for the transformative nature of play in public space [12], and the affordances of public space to allow or encourage play [14]. In some cases, play may be spontaneous, although typically strategies employed in playable cities are situated interventions that direct play to a large extent. These different strategies of appropriation are of interest—particularly when they engage with urban infrastructure and its role in the city. Ubiquitous computing [5] is central to many visions of the smart city. Early smart cities typically involved the installation of sensors and actuators that would collect and act on data. More recently, widespread adoption of smart phones, social media, and geolocated services has resulted in multiple layers of datafication [7] of cities. These datasets are imperfect and disconnected—they are often closed, proprietary systems—but enough data is often captured and shared to represent collective flows and patterns of people in cities. Local government often initiate open data platforms that share data collected by sensors, and hashtags on social media platforms searched and correlated to other datasets. As a result, the datafication of the city is messy and inconsistent but still makes tangible and visible activity and patterns in the city previously inaccessible. This raises challenges and concerns, particularly around privacy and surveillance, but also creative opportunities and possibility. One of the key playable cities strategies based on co-creation is civic conversation, typically across a diverse range of disciplines, stakeholders, communities and voices. Rather than rely on extracting insight from data analysis or govern the city through technology, an iterative, participatory approach is adopted that aims to start conversations about the city through play—and to follow these through. Data may still come into the mix via bespoke methods of data collection or novel forms of

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analysis but it is not relied upon—or automated. In playable cities, different ways of seeing or being in the city may be explored, experienced, and articulated—although it is a time-consuming approach with inconsistent results. Sometimes, all that achieved is play—a problem may not be solved or identified—which is valuable in itself as play has its own intrinsic social value. Following this introduction, both smart cities and playable cities are articulated and defined further to provide context for the discussion and analysis of these three themes. Previous points of engagement between playable and smart cities is reviewed, including recent discussion of the various generations of smart cities and strategies for co-creation emerging in playful approaches to urban planning. Each of the three themes is then analysed in relation to responses recorded in interviews with participants of the study, with a section on each theme. In conclusion, the three themes of appropriation, datafication and conversation are considered in relation to the present relationship between playable and smart cities followed by speculation on future directions and opportunities.

2 Background Over the past two decades, ubiquitous computing started to shift the ways in which cities were managed, planned, experienced and operated, leading to the emergence of the concept of the smart city. Similar to the conception of the modern city at the beginning of the last century, the rise of smart cities has had an impact on many different layers of urban life. Socially and economically, new sets of relations have come into play, however the main focus of smart cities has been resource management and infrastructure. As a result, they have been criticised for being overly controlling and disengaged from citizens. To draw upon two examples from videogames, typically smart cities adopt a SimCity1 view that is top-down and focussed on the overall system of the city, rather than a Grand Theft Auto (or to use a more recent example, the city hacking game Watch Dogs2 ) point-of-view that is situated on the streets of the city itself—the point-of-view of a citizen. As many smart city initiatives are often led by corporations and manufacturers of technology, the city-wide SimCity point-of-view relates to their role as system operators and administrators. In this scenario, lost in the abstraction is the actuality of lived experience—what is happening on the street, how people relate to the city itself. To provide a counterpoint to this approach, in 2012 the Pervasive Media Studio in Bristol initiated the Playable City [15] project to develop projects that playfully situate people in relation to smart cities infrastructure. Other definitions of playable cities have emerged, such as the playful city [3] and Nijholt who defines a playable city as one in which citizens have access to existing smart cities infrastructure [11] to develop their own experiences using established systems. Sicart also argues that 1 https://www.ea.com/games/simcity/simcity. 2 https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/game/watch-dogs/.

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we accept that cities are now data producers [13] and the most effective strategy to counter this situation is to adopt a playful attitude to the ways in which we interface with and represent that data. To both address the shortcomings and opportunities presented by earlier definitions of the smart city, a diverse range of approaches have emerged that bring different qualities into focus in cities. Cities are described as responsive, hackable, creative, algorithmic, open, playful, slow, loveable and so on [6]. These approaches bring into focus different aspects of technological change in cities and how it is changing our relationship to them. The scale of activity is equally diverse—many smart cities technologies are driven by big business, while projects like the playable city start at the grass-roots level and attract more stakeholders as they gain momentum. A brief survey of current activity at the Smart Cities Expo3 in Barcelona in 2017 demonstrated four major trends: large corporates selling turn-key smart cities solutions, smaller startups inviting investment in their technology, research labs developing new technologies or approaches, and cities or nations presenting their vision for the smart city by adopting a world fair approach. Playable cities were nowhere—but everywhere at the same time, as many of the visions articulated for engaging citizens advocated for playful or hackable approaches. Three cities are brought into focus to look at our understanding of playable cities now. Bristol, Barcelona and Melbourne are cities with active smart cities development directed by local government, often in collaboration or consultation with research labs based in universities, design studios and start-ups, technology developers and arts organisations. Bristol is home to the Playable City4 project, Barcelona hosts decidim5 a free Open-Source participatory democracy for cities and organizations, and Melbourne has been identified as a ludic city [14] with many pre-digital affordances for play in the city. These three cities are the main sites of investigation and will be articulated as examples of cities working across a spectrum of smart and playful activity exhibiting models and approaches that speak to playable cities now.

3 Smart/Playable Cities To reflect an increasing diversity in approach since their introduction, three generations of smart cities have been identified [2], with cities typically falling into one of the three depending on a couple of key factors related to how technology is integrated and managed. This perspective is defined by approaches to governance rather than technology [10]. First generation smart cities are identified as those to which the playable city typically operates in opposition to, cities that deploy technology as a top-down governance tool, usually directed by corporate interests. Second generation smart cities adopt a different approach. Led by local government, technology 3 http://www.smartcityexpo.com/. 4 https://www.playablecity.com/. 5 https://decidim.org/.

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still plays a central role but rather than adopting a technology-driven approach, the solutions are driven by civic needs although governance may still operate via topdown approach. Cities identified as third generation smart cities adopt a bottom-up approach, implementing systems that are driven equally by citizens, local government and other stakeholders. By way of example, the city of Barcelona has adopted human-centred design processes, strategies for co-creation, and participatory democracy by developing an open source smart cities platform that invites contributions and initiatives from citizens that balance government-led approaches. While not a playable city per se, there exists significant overlap in methodology and approach. This shared interest and overlap between third generation smart cities and playable cities is expressed in a number of different ways. It demonstrates two shifts in smart cities policies over the past seven years: the increasing influence of alternative peopledriven approaches such as playable cities, and the recognition that technology-driven, top-down approaches centred on big data are limited in their impact. Bristol is both a smart city, recognised as the UK’s leading smart city in 2018,6 and a playable city. Barcelona’s Chief Technology Officer, Francesca Bria oversees a smart city built on democratic and community-driven principles. Melbourne has always been a playable city—a ludic city—and its smart city office7 has adopted processes based on open data systems and community consultation. Other cities too, such as Mexico City and Amsterdam, are developing approaches that use the city as working laboratory situating prototypes and experiments with people on the streets. Play in these third generation smart cities is quickly becoming part of the process for exploring the potential and possibilities of ubiquitous technologies. Drawing upon discussion on the smart city as focused on function, utility and control in contrast to the playable city as reimagining urban technologies and their connection to people and place, these cities are sites in which the lines between smart cities and playable cities blur and overlap in complex ways. However, while there are shared interests and opportunities, tensions also exist. Putting play to work can compromise its impact or, at worst, simply be a distraction. Play as spectacle may cover up social issues in a neighbourhood simply by giving the temporary appearance of fun without drawing people into a conversation that may lead to a change in attitude or behaviour within the community. In this scenario, play essentially becomes an exercise in public relations. However, urban play does not have to lead to outcome. Play for the sake of play still has intrinsic value—in terms of social wellbeing for example—without being put to work to solve problems. If playable cities become again simply about driving efficiencies and creating systems of control then we have returned to the first generation of smart cities—with a more human façade. Playable cities work because they bring creativity, connection and conversation into the mix—finding new ways to situate ubiquitous technologies in relation to culture and society rather than adopting solutions determined by technological con6 http://www.bristol.ac.uk/cabot/news/2018/smart-city-award.html. 7 https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au/about-melbourne/melbourne-profile/smart-city/Pages/smart-

city.aspx.

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straints or assumptions. They do this by presenting new ways to interact and play with infrastructure, rules and systems in the city, and by exploring and representing social and cultural dimensions of the city in their design and development. As a result, the process asks different questions about the use of technology in urban play—and positions these in specific contexts rather than attempting to design a generic framework applied uniformly across the entire city. Rather than seeing them as a fixed, closed systems, the democratic use of data presents a plurality of fluid, open systems that support approaches for the co-creation of cities. Within the context of co-creation, strategies of appropriation, datafication and conversation may have impact on people and place—and make both the ubiquitous technologies of smart cities and data they collect more effective at making more liveable and responsive cities. Building on Weiser’s vision for situating ubiquitous technologies, Dourish and Bell articulate how this is already happening in the social approaches to smart cities developing in Singapore and Seoul [5], and the ways in which acknowledging the inherent messiness of ubiquitous technologies opens them up to a broader set of functions and possibilities, as well as recognising a broader range of social contexts. Furthermore, de Waal articulates the technourban imaginary [4] as a concept for exploring these possibilities of cities using it to explore urban ideals such as the city as an operating system, public square or a community of strangers that drive the design of urban media. To demonstrate the ways in which these shifts are taking place the analysis that follows draws upon interviews of those working in cities using the thematic framework of appropriation, datafication, and conversation. Parallels and connections between smart cities and playable cities emerge that show the complex relationship between the two ideas and point to future development and impact across a spectrum including both. As a result, playable cities methodologies are developed that may be adopted in the co-creation of cities—creating places that aspire to be both more efficient and better places to live—and for situating play in public space. In turn, key challenges of playable cities are addressed, first, strategies for inviting adults to play in cities in the first place; second, approaches that maintain a healthy tension between playable and smart cities so that they continue to challenge each other in new ways; and, third, ways to understand and articulate the impact that play may have on cities themselves. Central to these ideas are strategies for inviting adults to play in cities. Play is typically viewed as a childish activity—or as situated in digital spaces and on screens, usually in the home rather than openly performed in public space. Situations that emphasise the cultural value of play, perhaps framing it as art, and those that relate play to aspects of public space itself such as infrastructure, design, community or other qualities are commons strategies that create opportunities for adults to play. Sometimes play is seen as work, and thereby having a purpose, make it relatable to people and providing an excuse for their participation. Overall, these issues impact on the relationship between smart and playable cities as play may provide access to utility and function which in turn provides an invitation to play. This may lead to fluid interaction between the two ideas, in addition to situating public invitations for adults to play.

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4 Playable Cities Now Fourty-three interviews were conducted with creative producers, artists, designers, technologists, urban planners, architects and software developers working with playable cities. Each participant responded to ten interview questions during interviews between thirty and fourty minutes in duration. The focus was on their methodology and practice, and how their work was situated in relation to playable cities or smart cities—or both. The majority of the interviews were completed as part of two residencies in Bristol, at the Watershed Pervasive Media Studio,8 and Barcelona, at the Institute for Advanced Architecture Catalonia (IAAC).9 Bristol is a city that has actively developed the Playable City concept and the Pervasive Media Studio supports many creative people working with this theme. Barcelona has developed innovative smart city policies built on open data and open source platforms for civic participation in the management of the city, with IAAC working across disciplines on speculative design and prototype development in this space. Additional interviews were completed in Copenhagen, Amsterdam and Melbourne—cities that are home to communities exploring the creative potential of playable cities. Earlier, these three cities—Bristol, Barcelona and Melbourne—were identified as sites of active experimentation with playable cities and progressive approaches to smart cities. As a result, the work of creative people working in these cities tends to work across the two ideas—it is for this reason and their establishment as sites of established, ongoing practice in the field that informed the decision to focus interviews at these locations. Of the ten questions, three generated the most diverse and informative responses reflecting the current relationship between playable and smart cities, suggesting themes for further analysis. The first of these asked how the participant makes cities ‘playable’ in their work. Playability as a characteristic of a city is an important distinction here as it differentiates between a playable city and play that is situated in a city. The city—typically its infrastructure—becomes playable thereby shifting the relationship between citizen and city by opening up urban environments to participation and interaction, sometimes reimagining what it could be or changing its meaning entirely. By way of example, in Melbourne a ‘playable art tram’ [8] allows people to read the movement and surface of the tram as a 32.5 m long musical score, creating a more poetic relationship with public transport infrastructure. Following on from this, participants were asked to talk about ways in which they create invitations for adults to play. While play is a part of daily life for a child, adults are typically more reluctant to play—especially in public—and so the right situation, context or trigger becomes important in sparking inspiration for adults to play. A second theme emerged around a question that asked directly whether playable cities challenge or augment smart cities policies. In the seven years since the Bristol Playable City project was conceived in response to the lack of consideration for peo8 https://www.watershed.co.uk/studio/. 9 https://iaac.net/.

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ple and place in smart cities driven by technological and corporate interests, other definitions and approaches to smart cities have emerged. Some of these use methodologies and concepts that sound a lot like playable cities—bottom-up systems, civic conversation and engagement, and playful approaches to interacting with technology and data. Impact is central to the third theme, with participants talking about the impact of their work on public space. The role of play in appropriating, transforming and taking over public space was important to many of the projects discussed. Impact can relate to a citizen’s experience or connection to a place—or how the meaning of a place is changed. Playable cities are explored as a methodology for opening up conversations about a place—what it was, what it could be, what it is now. Each of these three themes will now be analysed in depth, with a focus on relating these ideas to aspects of appropriation, datafication and conversation While responses to questions connected more broadly to these themes, generally strategies for making the city playable involved approaches that employed appropriation, issues and opportunities for datafication emerged around discussion across playable and smart cities, and conversation was often connected to the impact of work on public space. These themes are connected further in the discussion that follows.

4.1 Making Infrastructure Playable Earlier, the concept of appropriation was introduced, particularly as a strategy for transforming or challenging public space—and making infrastructure playable. Making a playable city can mean recognising and celebrating existing urban play activities in the city, developing and supporting new urban play initiatives, and establishing networks to share these with the world. Participants were asked how they make cities ‘playable’ in their work, particularly, ways in which they create invitations for adults to play. Miguel Sicart, a play scholar at the IT University Copenhagen talks about building upon actions and habits that are already present in public space, such as taking a selfie for example, and appropriating those to create alibis for adults to play in daily life. He says that ‘we have to be pragmatic and we have to acknowledge that we need to build on practices that are already there, particularly in public space.’ This normalises play, making it immediately accessible and acceptable, without compromising its capacity for appropriation—moments in the daily life of cities are transformed into something else as well as acting as portals into states of play. Likewise, Tassos Stevens, artistic director of Coney10 in London talks about situating games within the existing codes of public space. In Coney’s ‘secret agent training’ the meaning and experience of existing places and situations is shifted by the superimposition of a narrative situated around missions and objectives. Play is undertaken in secret in that players are given missions and objectives to be completed in everyday, public 10 https://coneyhq.org/.

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spaces without others with whom they share that space being aware that they are playing a game. Giving detailed examples would spoil the game, but players are situated in everyday situations in which they need to negotiate the infrastructure of the city—security guards and surveillance systems for example. Stevens emphasises that ‘actually, people are entirely playing within the kind of set of behaviours that is permitted in the space.’ Adults are more receptive to invitations to play that are familiar, but that also renew aspects of daily life by then making them unfamiliar, experienced with new eyes. In other contexts, playful culture becomes a frame of reference. Simon Evans, a game designer based in Bristol and founder of zombie street survival game 2.8 Hours Later,11 talks about urban play as a cultural product. In the game, the familiar zombie genre is played out in a series of real world encounters. Players are chased through the streets by actors in costume, and if tagged by a zombie they become one themselves. Police and medical personnel also appear, sometimes giving conflicting advice on strategy and direction thereby asking players to judge situations for themselves. He says of the experience the audiences had of 2.8 Hours Later: ‘you buy a ticket and you come and enjoy the experience, in the way that you buy tickets to the theatre or cinema or any of those cultural products.’ Adults seeking experiences that take them to moments of heightened intensity, that then end in a party whose purpose is the ‘transitioning people from that intense experience back, bringing them down and reconnects them to kind of, like, the everyday.’ While players experience another alternate reality, that reality is not separate from their everyday, lived experience and is linked directly back to their daily lives in that it is situated in a familiar environment—the city in which they live. This is linked to what José Luis de Vincente, a curator, writer and researcher based in Barcelona, describes as ‘the cultural logic of immersion’ and how experiences that are situated are perceived, felt and understood in different ways—often ways that engage people more intensely than earlier media forms that are ‘psychologically somehow separated from us by an invisible line.’ Again, the power of the immersive experiences created in public space through play is not only the heightened intensity that they create, but also the ways in which they resonate with the places in which they are situated. He describes the ‘notion of suddenly, really literally, having fiction being a building block of the fabric of the urban: what could that mean, you know?’ Looking and feeling places in cities, framed with that question of what they could be, could mean—rather than what they are. Playable cities often situate interventions in urban space to create invitations to play. Artist gamemaker and director of Now Play This12 in London, Holly Gramazio, is designing processes that orient and invite adults into playful situations (Fig. 1), often using installations and objects by ‘looking at how to use an installation or a thing that exists consistently in the world as a way to invite people to play.’ An

11 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/06/2-8-hours-later-review-rotting-flesh-

zombie. 12 http://nowplaythis.net/.

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Fig. 1 One Easy Step: Matheson Marcault 2016. Photo credit Ben Peter Catchpole

example of this approach in action can be experience in the work One Easy Step13 in which lines and patterns on the ground invite playful movement through a public square drawing attention to mirrored plinths on which playable games are situated for short moments of contemplation. These include a maze that you trace your finger through, an alphabet game where one person points to a letter that’s in place there, and a target where you flip coins. The installation draws attention to the many learned behaviours and situations in cities that seem intuitive or everyday but are, in fact, highly constructed. Playable cities increase people’s expectation for playful experiences, making them more likely to engage with or seek out these experiences. Michiel de Lange, cofounder of the Mobile City14 project at Utrecht in the Netherlands, describes play as a cultural product, stating that ‘playful culture has now become—the current incarnation, reincarnation of playfulness is really in this sort of experience economy.’ This also has the effect of expanding the range of situations and attitudes that people have about play—it becomes something that is part of urban life, a part of the city. However, play is not always designed to be part of the city. Chad Toprak is an artist gamemaker and curator, and director of the Freeplay15 festival in Melbourne. Hovergarden is a public play project that occupies popular public spaces with temporary installations of digital games. These are usually multiplayer games situated on small screens in shared spaces often with novel or experimental game peripherals that invite full body movement and interaction as much as pressing buttons on tapping screens. The mood of the environment is that of a playful social gathering—a 13 http://mathesonmarcault.com/index.php/2016/10/14/787/. 14 http://themobilecity.nl/. 15 http://www.freeplay.net.au/.

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Fig. 2 SuperBARRIO: IAAC 2017

party—which people approach with a playful attitude either as player or spectator. Usually, the games are inclusive and suit a range of different personalities and player types so most people will find a game that they are comfortable with playing in public. It ‘sends the message that the public belongs to the people and that we should all have access to play and that we should play together and play well together.’ Here play is assumed to be an important part of daily life in the city, and something that can occur spontaneously and without permission or preconceived expectations. Building on everyday play literacies, Marco Ingrassia, an architect and academic coordinator at IAAC in Barcelona describes the role of play as an urban design tool in the SuperBARRIO16 project, a digital game designed for co-creation in cities (Fig. 2). Of play literacies, he says that ‘designers can take advantage of these, it can also change the way in which our design happens’ and that this allows citizens also to occupy and experience their city in a different way, in that they are ‘not any more a user, a consumer, but an actor and a protagonist, in a way, who inhabits space.’ This concept may be extended further to allow citizens access to systems for hacking their city. Tomás Díez, an urbanist and Fab Lab Barcelona Director also at IAAC, describes this concept in relation to the Smart Citizen Kit.17 Using this DIY technology citizens can play with their own smart cities data. In this process, the relationship of the digital and physical becomes critical, by emphasising ‘how 16 https://iaac.net/project/superbarrio/. 17 https://smartcitizen.me/.

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technology can mediate and change relationships or can transform urban dynamics, and just by—basically what we’re talking here is about the relationship between the physical and digital information.’ Working as a composer and sound artist, and as director of Circumstance18 in Bristol, Duncan Speakman is concerned with the tendency of ‘mobile technology is very good at connecting us to remote places, but it has a tendency to separate us from our immediate surroundings.’ Using audiowalks in new ways, adopting a ‘playful approach has always been about rethinking those same technologies and using them in a way that forces you to connect with where you are.’ Again, situation and context in the city is hacked through the appropriation of ubiquitous technologies given new meaning through play.

4.2 Relationships Between Data and Play Datafication has emerged as a key issue—and opportunity—for ubiquitous technologies working with geo-located data, including location-based games. One approach to dealing with this is to establish play as central to urban life for people living in cities. and to develop an approach to the city as a platform for play in relation to people-centred smart cities strategies and policies. In relation to this theme, participants were asked to give their opinion on the current relationship between playable and smart cities. Talking generally about smart cities initiatives, Ben Barker, designer and founder of PAN Studio19 in London (Fig. 3) is concerned that ‘it’s almost like we’re kind of co-opting the playable city narrative for the means of the smart city.’ He agrees they are reacting to one another, but ‘not sure if it’s quite a kind of equal or symbiotic relationship.’ Smart cities are still clearly the dominant approach in the adaptation of ubiquitous technologies into cities but are increasingly drawing upon playable cities in the process. Matt Adams, artist and cofounder of Blast Theory20 in Brighton, is also concerned about governing and using play for other agendas in that it can be utilised in an uncritical way with the assumption that making the city more playful is inherently a good thing. Cities may already have playful cultures then when ‘a city has an initiative to become more playful, there is a control mechanism at work which is certain kinds of play is play that we want and certain kinds of play is not the play that we want.’ In this scenario there is ‘a risk of co-option’ that comes with ‘a strong risk of overlooking or circumventing existing forms of playful behaviour that are well entrenched or constantly refreshing and renewing one another.’ Seaside cities such as Brighton are already alive with play that has emerged through the collective activities of the communities who live there, and these existing play practices are at risk of being replaced by constructed play initiatives or being put to work to solve problems for the city. 18 http://wearecircumstance.com/. 19 http://panstudio.co.uk/. 20 https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/.

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Fig. 3 Hello lamp post: Pan Studio 2013

When the Playable City project began as an initiative of the Bristol-based Watershed Pervasive Media Studio in 2012, it was situated as a counterpoint to the smart city. Using technology to connect people opposed the technological determinism and top-down approaches that were common in smart cities at the time. Using the same infrastructure and technology, the Playable City project identified a shift taking place more broadly with experimentation with creative technologies in public space. As these technologies have become more normalised as part of daily urban life and the original tech industry focus of smart cities has largely shifted to focus more on engagement with the end user, the dynamic has shifted between the two concepts. Playable cities have become more about people and the ways in which they interact with urban complexity—including the many technological layers that have become integral to its structure. At the Bristol City Council, Matt Davenport is the open data project21 manager in the City Innovation team. He agrees there are points of difference, in that ‘the idea of a smart city doesn’t, like we say, include the smart citizen, and so a lot of the work around playable city has been around empowering people in the city to be more communal.’ Here there is an acknowledgement that ubiquitous technologies are part of everyday life in cities but the point of focus in their use is critical—the top-down systems approach of citywide control is not only incredibly difficult to achieve, it is also a concept that is inaccessible to citizens and

21 https://opendata.bristol.gov.uk/pages/homepage/.

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hard to relate to daily life. The citizen-based approach of playable cities presents a convenient solution to these problems. Media and cultural theorist, Seth Giddings, at the Winchester School of Art, University of Southhampton considers the relationship between smart and playable cities to be an ‘interesting creative and kind of political project, not only to see what kind of data you could pull in and make—you know, for creative purposes, but also to start—draw people’s attention to the kind of data that is being gathered.’ He suggests play as a way to be critical about the data being gathered in smart cities, as well as a strategy for making sense of that data. Teresa Dillon, artist and researcher and Professor of City Futures at UWE Bristol also takes a critical approach working with the term ‘hackable city.’22 She has a ‘longstanding critical take into smart cities, really, which would come from a point of the lack of public discourse on the topic and also the lack of conversation within local city governments around smart cities’ and says that being aware of those working in the ‘space of urban governance and questions about what it is to be an urban dweller in today’s kind of city contexts.’ Play here is a means to hack the city, and to use play literacies to understand and develop criticality about the increasing datafication of the city. Guillem Camprodon, interaction designer and IAAC Smart Citizen Project Manager (Fig. 4) in Barcelona, doesn’t see the systems and technologies on which smart cities operate as neutral and points out that ‘someone wrote the code and took political decisions while writing the code.’ Further to this, speaking to the particular context of Barcelona, he says that ‘playing is more, “No. We’ll create those rules ourselves. We’ll build them. We’ll play with them,” and that defines better what public space is and what a city is.’ Play is again seen as process for co-creation, and as a way to provide new perspectives on the datafication of cities. This shift in citizen perspective is also important to Albert Cañigueral, multimedia engineer and founder of Consumo Colaborativo in Barcelona. He describes the shift in understanding smart cities as being ‘the traditional view of a smart city is more the sensors, the technology, the black boxes, the system and so on. Yet even in the narrative of the smart city, more and more you have the people in the centre.’ However, he points to the issue of sovereignty and our reliance on existing technologies operated by private corporations in that ‘we are slaves of this technology, and if someone decides to change the terms and conditions, we either agree or lose access’ and as a result there is a ‘debate in the city on how the city should be more empowered with this technology and be more open algorithms, open data, open source, code.’ In practice, looking at the relationship between smart and playable cities from the perspective of research and development in creative technologies the difference can be hard to identify as they both explore the city as a platform for interactive experiences. However, in playable cities the priority is the experience and knowledge gained by citizens in rather than the production of data. While both using the same technological platforms and situations, the way in which they are framed to citizens is different. Ruth Catlow, artist-theorist and curator, and director of Furtherfield23 22 http://www.polarproduce.org/curatorial/hack-the-city/. 23 https://www.furtherfield.org/.

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Fig. 4 Smart Citizen Kit: IAAC 2013

gallery in London, is critical of both smart and playable cities, saying that ‘they both share a mask of innocence. I think playable cities can play into smart city infrastructure very nicely.’ Both ideas share the goal of masking a contemporary urban dystopia, simply using different strategies to do so. For example, play can be put to work to enable smart cities strategies and agendas by making them more palatable and appealing to people, and smart cities may be evoked as a counterpoint to play even when playable cities may have limited social impact or lasting legacy.

4.3 Communities and Impact on Public Spaces Community and collectives are central to the conversational approach that guides the development of playable cities. Building an urban play community in a city is equally important to installing sensors and actuators in shaping the urban environment. To explore this theme, participants were asked to describe the impact that play has had in public spaces they have worked with. Working primarily in the city of Christchurch after it was devastated by earthquakes, Ryan Reynolds describes his work as a cultural activist and cofounder of Gap Filler24 in terms of slow, cumulative change via the ‘cumulative impact of a hundred and some projects now that we’ve delivered over eight years or so’ that has impacted 24 https://gapfiller.org.nz/.

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Fig. 5 Grandstandium: Gap Filler 2014. Photo credit Aaron Campbell

on ‘the identity of this place and the sense of possibility in Christchurch.’ Working with local government, communities and diverse stakeholders connected to places in which they situate their work, they have developed a following and international reputation for their playful approach to a serious situation—that of rebuilding places after they have been destroyed. Their projects include the Dance-O-Mat, a coinoperated public dancefloor, and the Grandstandium, a moveable grandstand with seating and infrastructure for thirty people that moves about different sites within the city (Fig. 5). Their work manifests new possibilities and potential for the city, reactivating existing communities and creating new connections at each site they work with. Mathias Poulsen, director and founder of Counterplay25 in Aarhus, talks about play giving people agency in a similar way. He sees it as ‘an opportunity for you as a citizen to actually create new experiences in the city, and thereby sort of challenging the sort of reign of the municipality or the private companies.’ Again, the focus is on challenging the status quo, on seeing the city as place of potential and possibility rather than a closed system, and that new possibilities are activated by the cumulative actions of people in relation to place. The Playable City project has been adapted to a diverse range of different cities around the world, including Lagos, São Paulo and Seoul. In these different contexts, urban interventions may have impact at different time scales. This happens in the short term via conversations that ask participants to think in different ways about their city, and over a longer period through projects that slowly change perception 25 http://www.counterplay.org/.

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around public space—by returning periodically to the same location or building a play community and collective memory around situated experiences. The Playable City methodology for working with new cities involves workshops that connect diverse groups of stakeholders into conversations about their city that are open-ended and playful, allowing different voices and communities to come into the mix. The process is equally important to the outcome, as the interaction and connection that occurs across community leaders can also lead to larger outcomes and other conversations. Through the annual Playable City Award, the project has supported projects such as Shadowing, public street lights that remember and replay the shadows of people who pass underneath the light, and Stop, Smile, Stroll, a pedestrian crossing that responds to the moods and behaviours of people crossing. Talking about these projects, Simon Johnson, Bristol based game designer and director of Free Ice Cream, remembers places that have situated play and how players ‘experience the place in a way in which they didn’t before and they feel like they’re connected to it and they’re part of that space in this community now.’ Play can create connection to place, and through nonverbal conversation also create connections between people who have shared an experience in that place so that even after a playful city intervention may no longer be active, the place still resonates with players and connects them with others with whom they played together. His previous company, Slingshot, developed 2.8 Hours Later and other city-wide immersive experiences, currently he is adapting this approach to a wide range of contexts, including a playable conference called 2030 Hive Mind. In this game, players compete as policy-makers in the live space of the conference working with and manipulating data visualisations to advance their strategy. In both scenarios, the process of community building is fast-tracked through intensely immersive shared experiences. Mathilde Marengo, architect and Head of Studies at IAAC in Barcelona, also introduces the idea of changing people’s understanding of the city by saying that the ‘biggest impact on the projects that we work on is this—education. So, giving people the opportunity to learn through public space.’ This means encouraging people to think and say ‘you can be critical about your space’ and to consider and see other perspectives. Here the focus is on creating a sense of communal connection and relationship to the city that is responsive and participatory, a concept developed through IAAC’s research in the Active Public Space26 project, an EU funded project exploring ‘smart urban technologies’ and their role in enabling citizen participation in cities. As part of the project, IAAC students developed Poblejoc27 (Fig. 6) in response to the Superilla space in Poblenou, Barcelona. In Barcelona, Superilla (superblocks) have been established to increase public space by closing off roads and slowing traffic in a three-by-three grid of city blocks. Within this space, Poblejoc created an urban game situated around moveable street furniture that asked questions about the potential uses of these newly claimed public spaces. Talking about her work in Canberra, Cathy Hope, founder and coordinator of the Play Activation Network

26 http://activepublicspace.org/. 27 http://www.iaacblog.com/life/poblejoc-activating-the-superilla-public-space/.

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Fig. 6 Poblejoc: IAAC 2016

ACT28 says that ‘play does enable that sort of engagement that makes a much more friendly and engaging connected place. This happens in connection with communities and people where ‘play reminds you that it’s not about outcomes. It’s actually about the process.’ Like Mathilde in Barcelona and Hilary in Bristol, engagement, process, participation and conversation are fundamental to the activation of Canberra through play and the civic conversations that occur as a result. Her approach to the network has closely involved local government in annual symposia that have subsequently shaped the policy and direction of urban renewal projects. By way of example, the 2018 symposium blended presentations from practitioners on their practice with workshops on possible approaches to public spaces in various stages of development within the city of Canberra. Playful culture curator and cofounder of the Playful Arts Festival29 in ‘sHertogenbosch, Zuraida Buter, talks about activating public spaces through play where ‘you see something new or you notice the environment where you’re in all of a sudden, or you notice that you can actually play with the environment.’ In these situations, a conversation with the city becomes possible through play again opening it up as a place of potential and possibility, shifting players perception and experience as a result. During the 2018 edition of the festival, urban interventions included groups of performers who would collectively shape their bodies to fit into tight urban spaces, live action role play situated in every urban life, and conversations with artifi28 https://playactivationnetworkact.net/. 29 https://2018.playfulartsfestival.com/.

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cial intelligence experienced by attaching a smart phone to your head. Talking about her own work and experiences of playful works in cities Katie Day, artistic director of The Other Way Works in Birmingham, says they can ‘change your perception of a space’ and that play can create ‘positive memories of places and positive experience in places, and sort of change perceptions of places, make them feel safer and make them feel friendlier—to feel more ownership of them.’ A sense of ownership is important to establishing communities, and these play communities may carry that feeling to other places in the city resulting in more widespread attitudinal change. By way of example, Bandstand 30 is a series of audio performances that are experience within empty bandstands that respond to local history and developed in conversation with people who spend time in the parks in which the bandstands are situated. The recordings are radio plays that talk to each place, evoking past and future experiences that may take place there. Rosie Poebright, experience architect and creative director of Splash & Ripple in Bristol, also says that play can ‘change your perception of a place afterwards when you’ve played a game there.’ In contrast to previous strategies of slow, cumulative change, education and conversation, and activation through play communities she says that play can transform a space quickly if it makes a bold invitation to play—’it changes the tone of the space immediately, particularly if it is an obvious thing or makes sound or light.’ She describes their work as story experiences in which players may find themselves escaping prison, overthrowing authority or travelling through time—dramatic events that situate the player at the centre of the action. Public spectacles draw people in quickly and connect them through immersion in a large-scale shared experience that, while transitory, still has lasting impact. By way of example, Laura Kriefman, director, producer and artist of Hellion Trace also in Bristol, describes the ways in which people remember and tell stories of her playable city project in which she choreographed a ‘mass crane dance’31 in which three giant cranes performed along the River Avon in Bristol. In this work, the movement of three massive shipping cranes is coordinated with music and light to create a highly visible public spectacle that transforms urban infrastructure, giving it character and poetic meaning through performance. Talking about her process, she says ‘working with local partners has changed the course of work that other individuals have chosen to take, has been a catalyst for change themselves, and what they’ve gone on to do either in their cities.’ This is another of the impacts that come through interdisciplinary collaboration and situating conversation across a diverse range of voices and communities.

30 http://www.theotherwayworks.co.uk/portfolio/bandstand/. 31 http://www.masscranedance.org/.

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5 Conclusion Criticism of smart cities and counterpoints that present alternatives—such as playable cities—have played an important role in changing methodologies and approaches to engaging citizens. Generally, the role of citizens in shaping their city is acknowledged and accepted in these initiatives—even if their processes and systems are experimental or still being established. Playable cities provide a valuable testing ground for other ways of being in the city, making tangible alternative applications of ubiquitous technologies that challenge their accepted role and function in cities. By way of example, the democratic and open access to technologies being experimented with in Barcelona create opportunities for citizen-based data collection via DIY sensor kits. Play with the representation of and feedback to this data creates a situation in which the city operates as a research laboratory—the processes and outcomes are not within a private, closed space but are open, literally on the street. This has immediate impact upon those installing and configuring the citizen-based data collection systems, but—perhaps more importantly—also shapes broader perception of the Barcelona to citizens, who begin to see their city as hackable and mutable. Presentations and showcases by the Barcelona City Council32 at the 2017 Smart City Expo focussed mainly on their open systems that encourage citizen participation and play with smart cities technologies. However, there are significant barriers to access. Appropriating smart cities infrastructure requires specific expertise, and even with this expertise public access is not always enabled for citizens—not all cities adopt the approach that Barcelona has adopted, and a change of government may also result in a change to this policy. More work is required on establishing the value and impact of these experimental approaches so that they become typical of smart cities policies, rather than the exception. Barcelona is also a relatively small city with a population of 1.6 million and the legacy of Cerdà’s [1] early innovation in the science of urbanisation. Could the same strategies be applied in Madrid, which has twice as many people, a very different approach to both urban planning and politics? Looking at urban environments through the lens of the playable city reveals opportunities and possibilities that are missed by sensor networks and datafication. Stevens’ pre-digital analysis of Melbourne as a ‘ludic city’ reveals affordances both unplanned and designed in urban environments that encourage—or, in some cases, discourage—play. Playable cities still exist without technologies, or may be more sophisticated in their design and more meaningful in their engagement with the public when they acknowledge and build upon existing affordances for play in the city. Appropriation strategies were identified as being most effective when they transform or bring new meaning to something that is familiar and everyday, building on locations that are already sites or destinations for play. Play can also take on the role of resistance in this context, there are parts of Melbourne hostile to play that may be challenged or redefined through playful takeover. Stevens compares two main thoroughfares—Swanston Street and Southbank—and the forces that shaped these 32 https://www.barcelona.cat/en/.

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by way of example. Swanston Street has largely evolved in response to citizen activation as the character of Melbourne has changed, while Southbank is a constructed zone governed largely by corporate interests. These differences in urban character, and the policies and interests that have shaped them comes into sharper focus through the lens of playable cities. Contrasting Swanston Street, which has a tram running along its length, and Southbank, which is a pedestrian-only promenade running along the Yarra River, it is the former that feels more playful and open—its mood is very different. While playable cities can highlight existing affordances for play and cultures of playful behaviour in cities, without support or collaboration with the larger forces that shape the urban planning and design of cities they can only have a temporary impact. Reshaping Southbank for example would mean changing the stakeholders who have an interest in the space and who have shaped its form and function based on their investment. In the broader context of inner Melbourne, many streets see more pedestrian traffic than vehicles but are still designed around vehicle access. Cars are one of the biggest barriers to play on the streets—for obvious reasons—and occasionally the idea of closing parts of inner Melbourne to traffic is proposed to the city. If this were to happen, the potential for play would shift radically highlighting new affordances and possibilities. Interdisciplinary collaboration and consultation across diverse stakeholders—big and small, tech-driven and people-driven, creative and bureaucratic—is central to the approach to playable cities in Bristol. Creative producers and technologists build prototypes in the Pervasive Media Studio that are situated in public encounters throughout the city—and other cities in the world—that test new ideas and approaches to connecting citizens and cities. Much of their work is focussed on transforming existing infrastructure by giving it life and character, making its function or purpose known and thereby highlight systems and infrastructure that was previously invisible. A lamp post becomes a conversational partner, street lighting becomes performative, and transportation networks become communication networks. While often these projects begin as bespoke prototypes, many have been adapted to other cities and through this process bring forward points of difference and unique aspects of the urban character of each host city. These conversations about each city are as valuable as the interactive projects themselves, as they bring different stakeholders and communities into contact with one another who may otherwise never cross paths. This is difficult work to deploy at scale and installing a network of autonomous sensors that collect and aggregate data is a much easier alternative. Playable cities reframe the city at a local level one street at a time but need more support for a sustained impact. As before, stories of play connected to locations still change people’s perception of the city but how could more long-term, large-scale interventions into the city be supported? To make playful encounters as natural and spontaneous as possible, many playable city projects avoid the use of smartphones and apps in their design but these could offer scalable approaches to play in cities—although a balance of attention needs to be found between the small screen and the city itself.

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For example, many location-based games, such as Ingress33 and Pokémon GO,34 encode the city into a screen-based representation that removes players from their local context rather than decoding what they see all around them. Technologies such as Augmented Reality (AR) offer scalable approaches to making the city playable but may interfere with design principles of natural interfaces and spontaneous play. However, with considered approaches in development and design, AR may present novel ways to make urban environments playable. Playable cities both challenge and augment smart cities, with some smart cities adopting playable cities methodologies in their approaches to connecting their citizens with ubiquitous technologies. Differences in approach and impact can be seen in Barcelona, Bristol and Melbourne—cities that are home to creative producers, technologists, artists and designers, urban planners and policymakers invested in interdisciplinary and innovative approaches. Within this context, the potential impact of strategies of appropriation, possibilities of datafication, and extension of civic conversation becomes apparent—particularly in relation to the concept of co-creation that is characteristic of ‘smart cities 3.0.’ Playful takeover remains the central—and most visible—strategy for appropriation, but more subtle, embedded approaches may also take hold. Analog and digital modes of play, and everything inbetween become candidates for making the city ‘playable’—providing a range of modalities for interaction and play across the spectrum of mixed realities. Most importantly, appropriation changes the perceived and actual relationship between the citizen and their city—it can become a site of potential and possibility rather than something that is preconceived or predetermined. While smart cities typically try to contain, define and parameterise urban space, playable cities open it up to uncertainty and reimagination. Translating strategies for playful takeover into daily life would change the ways in which people live in cities. One of the ways in which this may be achieved is via playful and poetic interventions into the datafication of cities. While datafication has become ubiquitous, this is largely through the collective messy data aggregated through smartphones rather than networks of sensors and actuators. A number of issues remain in play here, that smart and playable cities may address. First of all, many people are still unaware of the data being collected through their daily lives and they would benefit from increased data literacies. Second, it is still very difficult to combine and aggregate data from different sources—the big data vision of early smart cities technologies is yet to be realised, with a few exceptions. Third, many creative people working with playable cities are sceptical or unaware of how to work with datafication so it remains largely unplayable. The playable cities approach has the potential to play and a critical and educational role in the datafication of cities but has so far remained outside these systems. Datafication may present an opportunity for large-scale urban play previously unexplored for example. Conversation is central to the methodology of the Pervasive Media Studio when working with the Playable City concept. Conversation, consultation and dialogue also 33 https://www.ingress.com/. 34 https://www.pokemongo.com/.

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emerged as important themes when talking with practitioners about their own creative practice in relation to playable cities. As other approaches for citizen engagement have not yielded results within the context of smart cities it has become common that they demonstrate an increasingly interest in engaging with ‘the people’. With few exceptions, those working with playable cities are largely unaware of this impact and those that are have become concerned about the idea being co-opted or corrupted. Underlying motivation and the collective interest of all stakeholders play key roles in shaping and directing civic conversation, with a number of risks. There is a risk of ‘playwashing’, that is using play to cover up or draw attention away from urban issues through temporary installations that create moments of colour and fun. Gamification is another risk, with play introduced as a source of free labour—such as the collection or generation of data. Play that is not critical or not engaged with urban context is another risk and can lead to misunderstandings about the impact that playable cities can have on cities. Conversation, consultation, and community engagement are not intrinsically valuable—it is how and why they are introduced to the city that makes them worthwhile. Regardless, a convergence between smart and playable cities is emerging: smart cities are adopting playable cities methodologies, those working in playable cities are becoming curious and critical about datafication. However, playable cities are still largely absent in the dominant narrative of smart cities when discussing the impact of ubiquitous technologies in cities—despite their influence as an approach to solving issues with citizen engagement and more open-minded civic thinking. Creatives working with playable cities tend to isolate their practice from these smart cities narratives, which further complicates the relationship. Further work on playable cities now—in this moment—and ways in which they can both acknowledge their impact on the broader smart cities narrative and continue to be critical—is needed. Acknowledgements This research was supported by a City of Melbourne Knowledge Fellowship.

References 1. Cerdá I, Guallard V (eds) (2018) General theory of urbanization 1867. Actar D, Spain 2. Cohen B (2015) The 3 generations of smart cities: inside the development of the technology driven city. https://www.fastcompany.com/3047795/the-3-generations-of-smart-cities. Accessed 14 Nov 2018 3. de Lange M (2015) The playful city: using play and games to foster citizen participation. In: Skažauskien˙e A (ed) Social technologies and collective intelligence. Mykolas Romeris University, pp 426–434 4. de Waal, M (2011) The ideas and ideals in urban media theory and design. In: Foth M, Forlano L, Satchell C, Gibbs M (eds) From social butterfly to engaged citizen. MIT Press, pp 5–20 5. Dourish P, Bell G (2014) Divining a digital future: mess and mythology in ubiquitous computing. MIT Press, USA 6. Foth M (2017) We should create cities for slowing down. https://theconversation.com/weshould-create-cities-for-slowing-down-75689. Accessed 14 Nov 2018 7. Galliers RD, Newell S, Shanks G, Topi H (2017) Datafication and its human, organizational and societal effects. J Strateg Inf Syst 26(3):185–190

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8. Innocent T (2018) Take the tram to a more playable city. http://theconversation.com/take-thetram-into-a-more-playable-city-106064. Accessed 17 Feb 2019 9. Leicester G, Sharpe B (2011) Producing the future: understanding Watershed’s role in ecosystems of cultural innovation. https://www.watershed.co.uk/sites/default/files/publications/201103-15/Watershed_IFF_Report_online.pdf. Accessed 14 Sept 2018 10. Meijer A, Bolívar MPR (2016) Governing the smart city: a review of the literature on smart urban governance. Int Rev Admin Sci 82(2):392–408 11. Nijholt A (2017) Towards playful and playable cities. In: Nijholt A (ed) Playable cities: gaming media and social effects. Springer, Singapore, pp 1–20 12. Sicart M (2014) Play matters. MIT Press, USA 13. Sicart M (2016) Play and the city. In: Ackermann J, Rauscher A, Stein D (eds) Playin’ the city: artistic and scientific approaches to playful urban arts. Universität Siegen, pp 26–41 14. Stevens Q (2007) The ludic city: exploring the potential of public spaces. Routledge, UK 15. Watershed (2018) Playable city. https://www.playablecity.com/. Accessed 14 Sept 2018

Reappropriating, Reconfiguring and Augmenting the Smart City Through Play Dale Leorke

Abstract This chapter examines the growing intersection of digital games and the ‘smart city’ model. It explores the various ways that games and playful practices can alternately support, challenge, or counter the push to instrumentalise, optimise, and ‘program’ the city through ubiquitous smart technologies and ‘sentient’ infrastructure. I begin with a brief overview of the smart city model and how digital games figure into its economic and cultural policies. I then examine current debates around how games and play might more broadly contribute to and counteract the smart city approach, through an analysis of different groups and movements that propose themselves as playful ‘alternatives’ to the smart city. I outline three broad conceptual categories into which these alternatives fit, which alternately propose to reappropriate, reconfigure, and augment the smart city. In doing so, I connecting each of these approaches not only to contemporary discourses around urban policy, but also historical and present visions of play in urban space. Keywords Civic engagement · Counterplay · Gamification · Play · Playable city · Psychogeography · Smart city

1 Introduction Since its rise to prominence in the early 2000s, the ‘smart city’ model and its precursors (see [5]) have become the emblem for both techno-utopian dreams and dystopian nightmares of the future city. There is now widespread consensus among urban policymakers in cities around the world about the potential benefits of smart infrastructure, devices, and applications for citizens. Yet countless academics, activists, artists, commentators, designers, and journalists have ruthlessly highlighted the smart city’s flaws and failings. Infrastructural breakdown, perpetually deferred promises of a coming networked future, ubiquitous surveillance, data breaches and hacking, technological obsolescence, and images of incomplete cities with barren streets or urban D. Leorke (B) Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_3

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enclaves designed for an elite few all circulate around the scholarship and media reporting on smart cities (for a summary of these criticisms, see [32]). Smart city developments are being rolled out en masse, from entirely new cities to municipallevel revitalisations of existing suburbs and neighbourhoods. But these developments are inextricably entangled in anxieties and imaginaries about how society will be reshaped by automation, ‘dataficiation’, and shifting patterns of media consumption and production. Within this milieu, game studies and play studies have made a notable intervention into the discourse around smart cities. Responding to criticisms of the smart city as blindly driven by top-down instrumentalism and functionality (e.g. [32, 54, 68]), scholars and commentators have posited games and play as means of making smart cities more palatable to citizens. The ‘Playable City’ movement, originating in Bristol, has become the most prominent fulcrum for debates about how games and playful practices can ‘counter’ the dehumanising effects of smart city technologies, connecting people instead through playful interventions (see [27, 49]: Chap. 6; [56, 62]). But other initiatives—from comparable organisations like Play the City [61] and the Playful City Group [64] to the City of Boston’s New Urban Mechanics department [13]—have equally sought to reconfigure and rethink the smart city’s techno-optimism through games and play. The literature on this topic is steadily growing, with numerous conferences, book collections, journal articles and mainstream media articles dedicated partly or solely to the Playable City and related debates around playfulness in the smart city. To date, though, these largely remain focused on specific case studies and practices, with the exception of work by Nijholt [57, 58], de Lange [15], and others. In this chapter, I aim to build on this work around the broader intersections of games, play, and the smart city by developing a conceptual framework for understanding and contextualising the various existing playful approaches to smart cities. In doing so, I connect these approaches not only to urban policy and practice, but also to historical and contemporary discourses around games and play, from game studies, play studies, media and cultural studies, and related disciplines. My aim, though, is not to exhaustively map out or taxonomise the existing groups and initiatives that advocate a playful approach to the smart city. Instead, I offer three broad categories for understanding how they alternately reappropriate, reconfigure, and augment smart cities—and in the process explore how these subtly and overtly draw on broader discourses and connotations around play and playfulness in society. The first section provides a brief overview of the smart city model, before outlining how digital games have been more concretely incorporated into its economic and cultural agenda, aimed at driving growth in the creative industries and technology sectors. I then turn to the playful approaches that posit themselves as ‘counters’ or ‘alternatives’ to this agenda, drawing on case studies to distinguish between those that seek to reappropriate, reconfigure, or merely augment the smart city. The final section examines how this framework can help further ground these debates within current discourses around games and playfulness more broadly, and in turn offer a deeper and more critical approach to evaluating the impact of playful ‘interventions’ into smart cities.

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2 The ‘Smart City’ Vision The smart city model is now cemented as one of the dominant urban planning paradigms of the first decades of the 21st century. It has been adopted by city planners and governments around the world, with cities from Auckland and Amsterdam to Singapore and Seoul embracing it as a central pillar of their strategies for future development. As Tooran Alizadeh notes, ‘no prevalent or universally accepted acknowledged definition of smart cities exists.’ But the term can be understood as a planning model that capitalises on ubiquitous networked technologies embedded in the urban fabric to ‘enhance [the city’s] liveability, workability and sustainability’ ([1: 70–71]; see also [79]). Although policymakers have enthusiastically embraced the smart city model and its potential for stimulating economic growth and ostensibly improving citizens’ lives, mainstream and scholarly discussions have been much more critical. These criticisms are summarised in Adam Greenfield’s bluntly titled book Against the Smart City [32], which lambasts the corporate ideology behind smart technologies, pedalled to policymakers by tech giants like IBM and Cisco. Greenfield’s work also highlights the perpetually deferred and unfilled potential of ‘canonical’ smart cities. By projecting their arrival into an abstract, always-imminent temporal and spatial elsewhere, he writes, their planners avert the need to provide concrete evidence of their benefits: ‘only by proposing to install generic technologies on generic landscapes in a generic future can advocates avoid running afoul of the knotty complexities that crop up any time actual technologies are deployed in existing places’ [32: 24]. Greenfield’s criticisms centre on large-scale, city-wide developments built from the ground-up with ubiquitous, networked infrastructure in mind, such as Masdar City in the United Arab Emirates, Songdo International Business District in South Korea, and Konza Technology City in Kenya. His critique remains valid six years after the publication of his book, with most of these projects still incomplete or completely abandoned by developers due to lack of investment, corruption scandals, technical complications, or an inability to attract residents (see [59, 65, 81]). But since the early 2010s, the smart city has now become much more widespread and visible through the ‘broader and far more consequential drive to retrofit networked information technologies into existing urban places’ [32: 12]. In particular, cities like Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Chicago, Copenhagen, Montreal, New York, Rio de Janeiro, Seoul, Singapore, and Tallin are leading the way in integrating smart technologies into their existing infrastructure and spaces. Increasingly, these developments take the form of smart ‘districts’, whereby specific neighbourhoods or suburbs are redeveloped with smart infrastructure ‘bolted on’ to their public spaces and buildings [32: 12]. These developments have started to become the subject of more grounded, and empirically and ethnographically informed, studies about their rollout and impact on citizens, businesses, institutions, and the urban environment (e.g. [1, 9, 11, 25, 43, 50]). Despite this growing body of empirical work, the mainstream and academic rhetoric around smart cities remains ambivalent at best. For all their potential bene-

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fits, smart city developments—scholars and commentators ceaselessly point out—are plagued by delays, glitches, technological obsolescence, privacy concerns, unfulfilled and overblown promises, closed architecture, and neoliberal, corporate-driven agendas (e.g. [5, 12, 31, 35, 53, 72, 84]). But the most scathing critiques are reserved for the smart city model’s top-down, instrumental, and functionalist focus. As numerous scholars point out, the smart city is couched in technocratic ideals of urban management and driven by the imperative to make urban life as efficient, functional, and seamless as possible [32, 42, 54, 68]. In the process, smart city visions privilege data-driven decision-making and problem-solving frameworks over the everyday, lived conditions of cities. As Mattern [54] contends in her critique of the Hudson Yards development in New York, policymakers’ faith in data and algorithms as the solution to urban problems comes with many drawbacks. It risks creating determinist solutions to urban problems based on assumptions and flawed methodologies; fails to account for human activities that can’t be quantitively observed or captured; and alienates marginalised populations without access to the technologies and platforms fundamental to digital inclusion and participation [54]. Meanwhile, as Greenfield [32] and Amin [2] both point out, the managerial, technocratic approach to smart cities recalls the topdown, authoritarian, and often destructive nature of modernist urban planning that characterised the first half of the twentieth century, since infamously discredited by Jacobs [40]. In canvassing this literature, I don’t wish to claim that the smart city model is inherently flawed, failed, or beyond redemption. Indeed, as several scholars argue (see [14, 80, 81]), smart city developments have already begun to incorporate these criticisms into their policies and the rhetoric around them. Trencher [80: 118] notes that big vendors like IBM and Cisco have shifted discourses from top-down and automated managerial strategies to embrace narratives of citizen engagement and inclusivity, [suggesting] that the first generation of top-down, techno-economic smart cities is giving way to an emerging model emphasising citizen needs and participation.

Although the criticisms of Greenfield and others outlined above are partly based on an oversimplified rhetorical construct of the smart city, rather than actually implemented projects, they have nonetheless profoundly shaped the academic discourse around smart cities. They have contributed to a vision of the smart city as technocentric, dehumanising, and exclusionary—despite some efforts by technology vendors and policymakers to counter or address these. In the process, this discourse has opened up a whole range of responses and interventions into the smart city—from academia [45], art [26, 70], urban design [6], urban policy [67, 69], and—perhaps most prominently—game design and studies.

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3 Space for Play: Playful ‘Alternatives’ to the Smart City Digital games—and play and playfulness more broadly—already figure into smart city policies in a small but still significant way, primarily as generators of innovation and economic growth. As one of the key ‘creative industries’, digital games are a significant—and continually growing—component of the knowledge sector that most smart cities’ future economic growth is predicated upon. As such, policymakers in smart cities seek to attract game designers, from the headquarters of global game studios to startups producing mobile and indie games, to their spaces. Coworking spaces, innovation hubs, games festivals, game jams, and tax subsidies are all rolled out alongside ubiquitous, high-speed networks to draw in the creative professionals needed to sustain economic growth in service economy-oriented cities positioning themselves as ‘smart’ and ‘creative’ [41]. Meanwhile, city planners develop ‘civic games’ and playful ‘participatory planning’ initiatives that help boost the smart city’s image as ‘transparent’ and ‘open’ to entrepreneurs and its citizens (see [15, 49: Chap. 6, 51]). Furthermore, as Picon [60] points out, smart cities are as much about integrating creativity and culture into their inhabitants’ lifestyles as their economies. They ‘brand’ themselves as fun and creative places to live and work, competing alongside other cities to be awarded the moniker of most ‘liveable’, ‘happy’, or simply ‘best’ city. Picon writes, ‘Art galleries, performance venues, gastronomic restaurants and fashion boutiques all pertain to the ecology that the knowledge economy requires, just as much as sensors, fibre optics and ubiquitous computing’ [60: 45]. In this sense, videogame exhibitions, festivals and conferences like PAX (Penny Arcade Expo), and interactive or playful events like parades and public performances, which have traditionally been supported by cities as an important facet of urban life, remain so in the smart city model. Nonetheless, such initiatives are more likely to appear in ‘creative city’ policies and are scarcely mentioned in smart city strategies that focus more prominently on seamless efficiency and data-driven functionality. Within the smart city visions posited to date, then, there is little room for the types of behaviour and practices—wasteful, non-instrumental, superfluous, unpredictable, or indeed transgressive activities—historically associated with play [10, 38, 48, 52, 73, 74]. Instead, smart city policies are couched in the language of efficiency and productivity: ‘responsive architecture and systems’; platforms that ‘improve sustainability’ and ‘optimise travel’ from A to B; and policies that generate jobs in the knowledge sector based around ‘innovation’, ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘digital disruption’. Games and play are seemingly at odds with this rhetoric centred on efficiency, productivity, and innovation—with the exception of their contribution to its underlying cultural and economic agenda. Since the advent of the Playable City initiative in Bristol in 2012, a growing number of academics, artists, game designers, and urbanists are exploring how games and play might figure less instrumentally within smart city policy and discourse. Rather than simply playing an instrumental role in the smart city, these figures propose that games and play offer a necessary antidote to its top-down, techno-centric, and

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efficiency-driven approach (see [7, 28, 30, 36, 39, 56]. In the remainder of this section, I identify three overarching arguments in this vein, which posit play as alternately reappropriating, reconfiguring, and augmenting the smart city model. Each of these arguments advocate a different degree of engagement and allegiance with the smart city, ranging from an outright rejection of its underlying principles to embracing, and existing alongside, its agenda. In this section, I briefly outline each of these positions in turn. It is important to note, however, that these should not be seen as rigid, discrete categories, but rather sliding scales on a spectrum that indicate the ideological positions of their advocates. What follows is not a taxonomy, but a conceptual framework for understanding the relationship between various playful projects and the smart city model. In the final section, I explore how such ideologies and arguments connect to broader discourses around games and play in contemporary society.

3.1 Reappropriating the Smart City Through Play The first approach is epitomised by the Playable City initiative, which posits itself as a more human-centric ‘counter’ to the smart city [47: n.p.]. Based at the Watershed film and digital media centre in Bristol, U.K., the Playable City funds smallscale interactive installations and artistic projects that playfully transform or disrupt everyday spaces, encouraging people to reflect on the environment around them. The initiative’s website states that it ‘puts people and play at the heart of the future city, re-using city infrastructure and re-appropriating smart city technologies to create connections—person to person, person to city’ [62: n.p.]. Although the initiative began in Bristol, it has since spread to at least eight other cities, with cities as diverse as Austin, Lagos, São Paulo, and Tokyo currently part of its ‘network’ [63]. In addition, each of its funded projects are designed to be temporarily installed in the city of its origin, before touring to other cities both inside and outside this network. By ‘re-using’ and ‘re-appropriating’ smart city technologies, the Playable City initiative positions itself in opposition to the smart city—and particularly its technocratic, instrumental focus. Clare Reddington, creative director of Watershed, says There’s a lot of publicity around smart cities, future cities as big tech providers, but we’re trying to counter some of the difficulties around living in cities. Technology can be isolating; there’s a big drive towards efficiency and this can be unnecessarily screen-based […] We started thinking about play as a way of connecting and of giving the places we work in, live in and travel through a bit of lightness – a way to show that technologies don’t have to be isolating, they can be used for fun. (quoted in [47: n.p.]; see also [36])

This language deliberately frames the Playable City as the binary opposite of the smart city, with play and playful behaviour serving as necessary counterpoints to the ‘isolating’, techno-centric, and screen- and data-driven smart city model. Its projects are deliberately low-tech, designed to be mobile, temporary, and inserted into existing urban spaces. Stop, Smile, Stroll (2016), for instance, seeks to transform crossing the road into a ‘30-second party’ by calculating the mood of pedestrians as

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they wait for the traffic lights to change and playing an appropriate song as they cross. It does this through a selfie-like screen fitted above the walk button, which invites pedestrians to make a face at it and then determines their mood based on whether they are smiling or frowning. As the lights change, the ‘overall mood’ is determined and a song is played over a speaker—for instance, ‘Because I’m Happy’ or ‘Cry Me a River’. Shadowing (2014), meanwhile, is fitted onto street lamps and records people’s shadows as they walk past, then projects these shadows back onto the street with a several-second delay—creating a momentary, uncanny experience for passers-by. And Urbanimals (LAX 2015) projects colourful animals into urban spaces that people can interact with. Other projects, like a giant, street-length waterslide extending through one of Bristol’s main shopping streets, use no digital technology whatsoever (see [7]). Although the rhetoric used by proponents of the Playable City frames it as a ‘counter’ to the smart city, it nonetheless supports the smart city agenda in other ways. As I’ve argued elsewhere [49: 173–175], the Playable City is funded and supported by the British Council, Bristol City Council, and the other cities in which it is based. Although its ideological motivations might contrast with the smart city, it nonetheless indirectly supports the smart city’s underying agenda that I identified earlier, which involves ‘branding’ the city as fun and creative for workers and residents [60]. Furthermore, as Nijholt [57] observes, the small-scale nature of Playable City projects enables them to circulate widely. But they represent only a transitory, fleeting intervention into the spaces they visit, rather than creating a deeper, more transformative impact. Nijholt writes, ‘commercial “playable cities” projects move from one “festival” to another, keeping city politicians, arts councils, and design studios happy’ [57: 17]. Playable City projects to date seldom tackle complex urban issues—diversity, inclusion, inequality, sustainability, alienation, or the privatisation of public space—except in superficial ways, if at all. In the process they risk becoming adverts for the ‘cool’ and ‘trendy’ image of the cities in which they circulate, reinforcing the smart city’s economic agenda rather than proposing a genuine alternative to it. The term ‘Playable City’ itself is a brand, curated and supported by Watershed. But it simultaneously exists as an ideology or framework—playable or playful cities—that exists beyond Watershed and its funding bodies’ control. This is evidenced by the numerous independently organised playable city workshops and book collections like Nijholt [56] and this more recent volume. These workshops, seminars, journal articles, and book chapters are in dialogue with the Playable City and its projects, but also exist alongside them, making the ‘playable city’ both an organisation and a conceptual framework for discussing how games and play can reappropriate and counter the techno-utopianism and technocratic approach of the smart city. Importantly, this reappropriation can be both practical and conceptual. It might involve actually re-using or modifying smart infrastructure, like the street lamps of Shadowing. But it can also be a metaphorical reappropriation, such as projects that subtly comment on smart technologies or pose alternatives to them, without actually repurposing the technologies themselves. Yet ironically, whether practically or

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metaphorically, this reappropriation generally occurs with the approval of smart city planners and city authorities, and its ‘radicality’ is always moderated within acceptable frameworks and regulations. In this sense, I have avoiding terming this approach ‘resisting the smart city through play’, since it is a repurposing or limited reappropriation of the smart city rather than a really fundamental challenge to it. Nonetheless, functioning as a broader conceptual framework, playable city projects might potentially counter the smart city in more political ways—although the potential for this remains to be seen.

3.2 Reconfiguring the Smart City Through Play While the Playable City and both its affiliated and non-affiliated proponents purport to counter or reappropriate the smart city through playful interventions, others have proposed incorporating play more directly into the existing smart city model. This position has been most clearly articulated by Eric Gordon and Stephen Walter, who primarily argue for city planners to rethink, rather than abandon, the smart city’s techno-centric focus. They aim to accomplish this by arguing for what they term ‘meaningful inefficiencies’ to be built into the design of smart city technologies and platforms. They define meaningful inefficiencies as an emerging design paradigm for civic technology, which accommodates the possibility of messiness, disruption, and the playing with boundaries and rules […] meaningful inefficiencies is a way of thinking about civic systems that are open to the affordances of play [30: 246].

Writing particularly in the context of the participatory planning tools that seek to ‘engage’ with citizens of smart cities, they argue for a rethinking of the smart city model that allows for play—including non-productive, wasteful, and unanticipated behaviour [10, 38]. Rather than eliminating wasteful and superfluous activities and anticipating the city’s rhythms then responding to them in real-time, Gordon and Walter argue that smart technologies equally need to provide citizens with ‘the option to play within and with rules, not simply to play out prescribed tasks’ [30: 246]. Unlike proponents of the Playable City, Gordon and Walter do not explicitly frame meaningful inefficiencies as an alternative to the smart city, but rather as a rethinking or reconfiguration of its principles. Meaningful inefficiencies are ‘designed into’ smart city infrastructure and platforms both technologically and conceptually. Smart platforms are rebuilt to allow ‘play, disorder, messiness, and the ability to experiment and fail safely’ in place of a focus on ‘technological efficiency’ [30: 254], which might preclude or eliminate these kinds of behaviour. They write, ‘designing for meaningful inefficiencies is a way of expanding technological civic systems to accommodate more than just the “good user” of systems, but also the marginalized, the emergent, and the playful’ [30: 246]. Gordon is the director of the Engagement Lab at Emerson College, Boston, which has partnered with numerous municipalities in the U.S. and abroad to develop civic

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games for participatory planning initiatives (see [21, 29, 49: Chap. 6]). Like the Playable City, the Engagement Lab distinguishes its approach to smart cities ‘in contrast to technology-centric visions, [placing] people and public value at the center of smart city efforts’ [21: n.p.]. But its smart city projects are conducted directly in partnership with city policymakers and government workers, existing alongside more traditional smart city initiatives. Beta Blocks, for example, was launched in 2019 in partnership with the New Urban Mechanics and architecture firm Supernormal. It is an ‘experimental zone’ that travels around the U.S., consisting of an inflatable installation, exhibition, and activities aimed at encouraging visitors to reflect on the future of cities and propose alternative uses for smart technologies (see [8]). Meanwhile, Walter, a former founding managing director of the Engagement Lab, is now a program director for the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. Named after the hands-on former Mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, the department is described as the city’s ‘civic research and design team’ [13: n.p.]. Its website even has a policy page dedicated specifically to play, listing numerous playful projects, ‘evidence’ of its positive impact, and several definitional principles of play that guide its policy. As the website states, ‘embracing playfulness enables a more connected, resourceful, and resilient Boston’ (City of Boston 2018: n.p.). Both Gordon and Walter thus have unique positions through collaborating directly with the same government departments that are implementing smart city policies, albeit with independent perspectives—as academic and program director of an R&D team, respectively—that allow them to speak from outside this policy position. Their concept of meaningful inefficiencies is a way of reorienting the smart city away from a purely instrumental vision, with play and games integrated into, rather than opposed with, its model. As they put it, Games are built to be inefficient as the player seeks to overcome unnecessary obstacles to reach her goal and to engage in the process of play for itself […] Civic tech, on the other hand, is steeped in the discourse of efficiency, with a laser focus on the instrumentality of activity. We became very aware of the tensions inherent in [this]—wanting to cultivate civic action through play, and at the same time appeal to funders and partners (foundations, municipal governments, and development organizations) to appease their sense of value through efficiency [30: 260].

Gordon and Walter’s approach is therefore more practical by seeking to transform smart city policies from within. It contrasts with the Playable City organisation’s more superficial and problematic approach, which rhetorically poses as a counter to the smart city, even as it is funded and sanctioned by the city itself. This engagement with government process creates, on the one hand, a direct dialogue with policymakers and government workers responsible for implementing smart city policies, creating the potential for more playful, and less efficiency-driven, measures that can be embraced from above. But it also comes with drawbacks. Government agencies might establish experimental departments similar to the New Urban Mechanics for show, but subsequently ignore or overlook their recommendations in order to perceive to be doing something innovative, without actually committing to change. Likewise, they might misunderstand or misinterpret more complex arguments about meaningful inefficiencies, pro-

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ducing failures or negative outcomes that have a ‘cooling effect’ on future attempts at innovation. This means that this approach requires continued engagement with policymakers and government bodies; a genuine desire to collaborate from both sides—the academic or artistic and government; and a willingness to risk failure and learn from it, rather than use it as an excuse to revert back to ‘safer’ smart city strategies.

3.3 Augmenting the Smart City Through Play Lastly, some designers, artists, and technologists have responded to the smart city’s instrumental vision not by challenging it discursively, but simply by arguing for the layering of play and game interfaces within their existing technologies. I distinguish this approach from previous ones, since its proponents do not reject or reconfigure the underlying principles of the smart city. Instead, they accept its core assumptions and ideology, seeking to ‘gamify’ the smart city through playful interfaces and initiatives that peacefully co-exist alongside top-down, efficiency-driven systems. The most prevalent examples of this approach are the countless ‘civic games’ and gamification tools—typically funded by local governments who outsource their design to software designers, tech startups, or academics—that use games and reward systems to encourage citizen participation. These kinds of tools are summarised in a recent article by researchers at the University of Petrosani, Romania, whose own project From Mine to My City enables inhabitants to build their own virtual city [85]. Other civic gamification tools include REXplorer, an early location-based scavenger hunt game to promote Regensburg, Germany as a UNESCO heritage site; the Streetlife EU Project, which uses smartphone apps to gamify public transport use in Berlin, Tampere, and Roverto; and the Magellan platform for city planners to create location-based tourism apps (see [49, 75]). These kinds of projects insert themselves into broader visions of the smart city, taking for granted its already extensively critiqued claims to promote civic engagement, participation, and openness (see [25: Chap. 8]), seeking only to support or improve them. Other initiatives, meanwhile, aim to take advantage of the efficiencies produced by specific smart technologies to introduce play and games into new spaces. Tesla founder Elon Musk, for instance, calls for developers to produce games that utilise the touch screen interfaces and newly available free time of Tesla’s smart cars (see [34]). Other public initiatives and commercial apps exist that similarly aim to utilise smart technologies to gamify everyday practices in the home, hospitals, and children’s playgrounds (see [44, 55, 77]). This third category is less clearly defined than the previous two, without a clear ideological framework—the Playable City or meaningful inefficiencies—behind it. But this is precisely what distinguishes it from the earlier approaches: the lack of an overt motive or ideological drive. Instead, examples of this approach tend to lack the critical, scholarly tone of arguments in favour of reappropriating or reconfiguring the smart city, instead advocating a more neutral augmentation or enhancement of already

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existing smart city policies and technologies. In this sense, they lean more towards a more optimistic, less critical, understanding of the smart city as an inherently positive development in need of some minor tweaking rather than a more fundamental reimagining.

4 Rethinking Smart City Discourse As this survey of the literature on playful approaches to the smart city demonstrates, games and play occupy dual, potentially conflicting, roles within the smart city. On the one hand, game designers are amongst the key beneficiaries of its policy settings, through incubators, grants, and tax breaks put in place by cities to attract developers and other creatives that are necessary for smart cities to achieve economic growth. On the other hand, as organisations like the Playable City demonstrate, games and play can also be used to challenge the smart city’s underpinning assumptions about efficiency and economic growth. Yet even in this rhetorical mode, they do not fundamentally ‘threaten’ the actual smart city policy itself, but still feed into its agenda for boosting creativity and economic growth. Rather than viewing play and the smart city model as binary and discrete realms—play versus instrumentalism—this paper demonstrates that the role of games and play in the smart city is much more nuanced and complex. The approaches taken by game designers, artists, scholars, and commentators that I have outlined here advocate varying degrees of engagement with the smart city, framed alternately as countering, repurposing, and hacking its technologies (reappropriation); or rethinking (reconfiguring) or improving and enhancing (augmenting) its functionalist goals. These approaches each also come with their own rhetorical claims, linking to various discourses around play ranging from notions like counterplay to the discourse of civic engagement and gamification. The Playable City—and the scholarly and mainstream debates that circulate around it—share synergies with the concept of counterplay, a term taken from de Peuter and Dyer-Witheford [16] and reworked by numerous game studies scholars (see [4, 24]). As Thomas Apperley and Michael Dieter note, counterplay is a conceptual framework for understanding in a more complex way how games embody power structures—and for examining how these are both exploited by players from within and assimilated back into game production. They write, Counterplay – and its capture – provide an account of play that emphasizes the oscillation between creativity and control in players [sic] enactments of digital play. As a concept, it underscores the ambiguous relationship between training and practice found in digital games. Counterplay can, accordingly, trace the stakes for the potential for gaming in both dissident and disciplinary dimensions [4: n.p.].

The Playable City connects to the discourse around counterplay quite literally—using play to ‘counter’ the smart city. But less overtly, it also invokes its rhetorical connotations, while simultaneously inheriting the theoretical dilemmas associated with it. Counterplay involves the player positioning themselves against the

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game algorithm or designer, eschewing intended ways of playing and instead acting against, challenging, or subverting the game and gaming culture. But the degree to which these various actions—modding, hacking, exploiting glitches, decontextualising and reframing game objects—are subversive or acting ‘outside’ designers’ intentions is always contested and debatable. As Apperley and Dieter [4: n.p.] put it, ‘not all acts of counterplay can be meaningfully understood as political interventions or entirely empowering for players […] it is precisely the ambivalence of counterplay that makes it an interesting stance to the complexities of digital and networked games.’ Similarly, the extent to which Playable City projects and related initiatives ‘counter’ the intentions of city authorities is questionable, since they always operate within the funding policies, laws, and regulations of the cities in which they take place. Counterplay, then, provides a useful framework for questioning the claims of playable city proponents and understanding how their projects negotiate the limitations of the funding constraints and policy frameworks in which they operate [49: 205–207]. Psychogeography and the work of the Situationist International (S.I.) (see [19]) are other important conceptual and theoretical lineage for approaches to reappropriating the smart city. Although not always cited as an inspiration for every Playable City or related project, the notion of exploring the city in an irrational, purposeless, and spontaneous fashion, diverting people from their ingrained routines and paths through the city, has been central to urban play and art since the 1960s. But particularly since the popularisation of mobile and location-aware technologies in the 1990s, ‘locative media’ artists and location-based game designers—as well as scholars studying them—have sought to connect their practices to the work of the S.I. and related movements like Archigram, Fluxus, and New Games [49: Chap. 3]; cf. [17]. Playable City-funded projects represent the latest iteration of this rhetorical move, albeit in a more low-tech fashion than locative media. Nonetheless, as I’ve argued elsewhere [49: 60–62], these connections are often shallow and superficial, more often resembling uncritical attempts to ‘recuperate’ the practices and ideologies of the S.I. and related movements than a genuine, critical engagement with them (see also [22: Chap. 6, 82]). In contrast to the more artistic tendencies of playable city-inspired projects, approaches to reconfiguring the smart city like those of Gordon and Walter draw more explicitly on discourses around participatory urbanism and civic engagement. Participatory approaches to urban planning date back to the 1960s, following the release of the Skeffington Report, which advocated a greater role for public consultation to counter the top-down, heavy-handed style of modernist urban planning (see [33]). But with the advent of the internet, new forms of ‘e-government’, ‘digital engagement’, and ‘networked participation’ have sprung up in government policy from the local to national levels. Yet although such initiatives often promise greater transparency, access to government resources, and citizen involvement in planning decisions, they can just as easily be reductive, shallow, tokenistic, and exclusionary towards non-digitally literate people.

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As mentioned, the Engagement Lab’s work is situated at the intersection of academia and urban policy, consisting of collaborations between academics and various government agencies and non-profit organisations. By default, the language used to articulate these kinds of projects—at least on their websites and public-facing documentation—more closely resembles that of governmental-driven civic engagement initiatives. But this is not to imply that approaches to reconfiguring the smart city uncritically adopt this rhetoric. The meaningful inefficiencies approach seeks to address some of these shortcomings by introducing opportunities for redundant, wasteful, and playful behaviour in participatory urbanism models, simultaneously improving urban planning or design and educating or emboldening citizens [30: 254]. As such, it mobilises discourses of civic engagement while challenging and rethinking them through playful elements and critical evaluation and reflection in academic papers. But neither do the meaningful inefficiencies or related approaches escape the dilemmas faced by designers of civic engagement tools. As Gabrys [25] argues, civic engagement tools and initiatives are often characterised by an underlying positivism, where ‘participation remains relatively unquestioned as a practice.’ Rather than critically reflecting on the methods and outcomes of such initiatives, ‘they are assumed to be positive and unproblematic contributions to urban life.’ Drawing on Gabrys’ critique of civic engagement apps and tools is useful here, because she makes an argument for greater inclusion of ‘the idiot’ into participatory urbanism. Her notion of the idiot is drawn from Isabelle Stengers [71], via Gilles Deleuze, and frames the figure as a positive force in civic engagement initiatives, someone who ‘troubles the instructions and assumptions of smartness [and] smart cities’ [25: 228]. By allowing citizens to ‘play against’ the system and introduce unanticipated, irrational, and inefficient elements into smart city technologies and initiatives, meaningful inefficiencies goes some way towards incorporating ‘idiotic encounters’ [25: 234], as Gabrys puts it, into participatory urbanism. But it still faces the challenge of translating these inefficiencies into impactful or, indeed, ‘meaningful’ changes—rather than merely generating data that is ignored by policymakers, absorbed into biased and opaque algorithms, or used to reinforce vested interests. As such, approaches to reconfiguring the smart city through play risk resembling the ‘smart city 2.0’ model that I outlined earlier—which assimilates citizen participation into the existing smart city model [80]—rather than cultivating a more extensive revision of its agenda. Lastly, as I’ve already suggested, projects that propose augmenting the smart city through play mirror the broader concept of gamification, which involves introducing playful and game-like mechanics and goals into everyday activities to create incentives for people to complete otherwise onerous, mundane tasks. As such, despite these projects’ ideological neutrality towards the smart city—accepting its core principles without complicating its claims for citizen engagement—gamification itself is an ideologically charged concept, with its evangelists and critics (see [23]). Gamification, and the scholarly discourse around it, thus serve as a useful conceptual framework for critiquing these projects. On one hand, they perpetuate the largely optimistic claims of gamification proponents. On the other hand, they inherit many of the same critiques that have been made of gamification: that it exploits users’ desire for reward and grat-

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Approach Reappropria ng

Reconfiguring

Augmen ng

RepresentaƟve Examples Playable City (organisa on), playable ci es (concept) Meaningful inefficiencies, New Urban Mechanics Streetlife EU, Elon Musk

Conceptual Lineages Counterplay, psychogeography Civic engagement, egovernment, par cipatory planning Gamifica on

Fig. 1 Summary of playful alternatives to the smart city

ification for commercial gain or instrumental goals, rather than fostering a deeper and more complex form of engagement (see [66: Chap. 1]). Such binary arguments around gamification can be limiting, but they provide a means for understanding and critically examining the motivations and impact of playful augmentations to smart city technologies and infrastructure (Fig. 1). By mapping these different playful approaches to the smart city and their conceptual lineages, I aim to provide a theoretical framework for understanding and evaluating the practical implications of various projects and initiatives. But as I mentioned at the outset, this is not a holistic or definitive taxonomy, but rather an indicative spectrum for situating such projects and arguments in relation to the smart city’s agenda. Although the examples I’ve provided exemplify each of these different approaches, other projects and initiatives can easily be placed somewhere between them along this scale. For instance, the Hackable City is a research project based in Amsterdam and, like the Playable City, was initiated in 2012. It similarly claims to reappropriate smart city technologies within the existing regulatory and legal frameworks of city planning. Its advocates state, Hacking can be defined as a process of clever or playful appropriation of existing technologies or infrastructures, and bending the operation of a particular system beyond its intended purposes or restrictions to serve personal or communal goals […] A hacker is both a homo faber and a homo ludens, with a playful and curious outlook on the world [18: 11].

Unlike the Playable City ‘brand’, the Hackable City is framed from its inception as both a ‘research project’—curated by academics and artists—and a ‘normative definition’ that can be taken up and repurposed by others [3: 5]. In this sense, although it shares rhetorical synergies with the Playable City, it is more aligned with a meaningful inefficiencies approach which advocates changing smart city policies from within: ‘it combines top-down smart city technologies with bottom-up “smart citizen” initiatives’, its creators state [3: 5]. Other initiatives, like Play the City in Amsterdam [76], A Playful City in Dublin [37], The Playful City in Washington, DC [64], and The Urban Conga group in Tampa, Florida [78]—among many others—each also propose varying methods for introducing games and playfulness into urban space. On the surface, these three examples all share the Playable City’s scepticism towards the impact of digital technologies on public space and social interaction. But they do not engage directly with the notion of the smart city, mak-

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ing them more ideologically neutral than both the reappropriating and reconfiguring approaches, and more closely aligned with augmenting and gamification approaches. This framework provides one method for understanding where various playful approaches situate themselves in relation to the smart city, and for identifying the underlying discursive claims around play they draw on. But the examples used to illustrate these approaches are not purely theoretical, solely mobilising discourses around play and the impact of technology and urban policy on contemporary society. They are also practical interventions, projects, and toolkits that get implemented within lived spaces. My approach draws on both theory and practice—through case studies of various existing interventions—but can and should be further supplemented through other methods, including interviews with both designers and participants, ethnographic observation, and design research. These methods can test out how closely various projects and initiatives align with the three categories—reappropriating, reconfiguring, and augmenting the smart city through play—and more complexly disentangle and problematise their claims. What I propose here is the beginning, rather than endpoint, for such research. As smart city policies become more widespread and deeply ingrained in urban policy settings, and a growing number of initiatives emerge to counter or modify it, this framework offers a more nuanced examination of the relationship between games, play, and the smart city to date.

5 Conclusion Since the turn of the century, numerous scholars in media and cultural studies have pointed towards the growing co-optation of play by authorities, algorithms, and institutions in the digital era. They identify gamification, the commercialisation of the videogame industry, and the collapsing boundaries between work and play as eroding the capacity for play to retain its transgressive, oppositional qualities (see [20, 46, 52, 83]). For these theorists, play no longer serves as a ‘counter to work’ [83: 16] in an era of ubiquitous ludic interfaces, gamification platforms designed to harvest their users’ data and labour, and algorithms within both virtual and physical spaces that anticipate and account for their users’ every actions. These concerns are only amplified in the context of the smart city model, with its underlying imperative to integrate these systems into every facet of daily life—from the urban environment to private spaces like the smart car and ubiquitously networked ‘smart home’. As Stevens [74] observes, playful behaviour in the urban environment has always been appropriated by city planners for instrumental ends. Yet the smart city’s vision of optimisation and efficiency only intensifies this tendency and extends it into ever more pervasive realms. To what extent will our increasingly smarter (and pervasively surveilled) urban spaces allow for playful, non-instrumental behaviour and games that disrupt the everyday urban environment? And how can such practices and projects be genuinely transgressive, subversive, and cater to diverse communities—rather than simply assimilated back into the smart city’s attempt to brand itself as high-tech and creative?

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In this context, a broader framework is necessary for understanding the role of games and play within the smart city that takes into account both the diverse ways they already figure into the smart city model, as well as these scholarly tensions around the contradictory role of play and its potential for capture and assimilation. This involves acknowledging the various ways that games and play are entangled within the goals of the smart city—through policies for economic growth and initiatives that encourage ‘intended’ and ‘sanctioned’ uses of urban public space and infrastructure. But it also involves exploring avenues for game designers, players, and systems to access the infrastructure, data, and platforms of the smart city in ways that both support the smart city agenda, but can also move beyond its underpinning constraints and imperatives. This chapter presents one step in this direction, drawing on the existing literature around digital games and the smart city to map out how artists, academics, urbanists, and other stakeholders propose to make smart cities more playful and citizen-focused. But in also bringing in theories of counterplay, gamification, participatory urbanism, and psychogeography, I aim to complicate and interrogate the claims made by these groups and projects about their opposition to, or allegiance with, the underlying agenda of the smart city. From divergent approaches like the Playable City to more conciliatory and nuanced ones like meaningful inefficiencies and the Hackable City, each of the examples I’ve engaged with here propose different ways of reappropriating, reconfiguring, or augmenting smart city technologies and policies. But they also come with challenges, dilemmas, and contradictions, inherited from the conceptual lineages they draw on and their attempts to apply them within the context of the smart city. By critically analysing both these various initiatives and their rhetorical claims and connotations, I situate them within a much broader and more complex milieu of debates around play, technology, and society, while providing an avenue for future research on the discourse around and practice of play in smart cities. Acknowledgements I would like to thank my colleagues from the Tampere University Games Seminar for their detailed and helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper; and Jan Švelch for his comments and corrections on this version, although all mistakes and oversights are of course my own. I use Web Archive where possible to capture online references as they appear at the time of writing. Use the full link provided to see the version I am quoting from, or the link within the link to view current and non-archived versions of them.

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Critical Playable Cities Lobna Hassan and Mattia Thibault

Abstract This chapter outlines a specific framework for the creation of critical playable cities. This framework combines three different concepts: DIY urbanism, critical design and urban gamification which are seen as complementary to each other. Cities are complex systems. Various actors often explicitly or implicitly harmonize or collide to shape the landscape of a city and its future. In the past decades, there has been an increased interest in activating citizens as vital actors in shaping urban life. This has taken place through various practical works and research around the paradigms of Playable Cities, DIY Urbanism and Gamification amongst other paradigms. Urban gamification—that is, using play and playfulness to alter our perception of and interactions with city spaces—is specifically emerging as one of the main strategies to activate citizens. Urban gamification alone, however, risks to be disconnected from the urban fabric and its communities. In this chapter we argue that combining it with the grassroot approach of DIY urbanism and the thought-provoking techniques of critical design creates a unique, multi-dimensional approach to designing urban experiences. This chapter, then, aims to explore how play can be used by citizens as a mean for critical reflection and practical re-appropriation of public urban spaces. Keywords Critical playable cities · DIY urbanism · Critical design · Ludicisation · Urban gamification

This chapter has been written together by both authors. For the formal attribution, please considers Sects. 2.1, 2.2, 3.1 and 4 as written by Mattia Thibault and Sects. 1, 2.3 and 3.2 as written by Lobna Hassan. L. Hassan Gamification Group, Faculty of Humanities, University of Turku, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] L. Hassan · M. Thibault (B) Gamification Group, Faculty of Information Technology and Communication Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_4

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1 Introduction Cities are spaces permeated by constant tension and conflict, as inhabitants define and redefine them, while going about their daily living. Citizens, institutions, governments and businesses all compete for the possibility of writing the city, of modifying its forms and uses, of engraving themselves in the urban fabric. It is a quiet conflict, petrified in the city buildings and streets, fought in the everyday use of the urban spaces—which sometimes leads to the creative appropriation of city spaces for, for example, play activities or festivals that inhabitants enjoy [50], or protests, occupations, struggles with the police and even riots, such as those in Paris in 2005 or London in 2011. Playable Cities [9, 44] (see also [51]) proposes a way of easing these struggles by hacking the technology of smart cities and using it to create stronger and healthier communities of citizens. This chapter aims to go one step further and use playfulness as a possible way of dealing with these tensions, channelling the struggles of urban living into creative practices instead of destructive ones. To this end, we propose a new framework for critical playable cities, that adds to the urban and playful components a critical dimension. This framework, more precisely, is built around three elements: the urban setting, a critical perspective and a playful implementation through urban gamification, and offers insight, analytical tools and design directives for how to make cities critically playable.

2 Background 2.1 DIY Urbanism The struggle for the “right to the city” [34] is probably as old as the first human settlement. Citizens’ actions to reclaim and modify the urban spaces have been recently termed “DIY urbanism”, a concept that indicates “small-scale and creative, unauthorized yet intentionally functional and civic-minded ‘contributions’ or ‘improvements’ to urban spaces” [15]. In one of the first studies attempting a critical assessment of DIY urbanism, Finn [19] defines it according to three characteristics: (1) realized and paid for by individuals or small voluntary groups, (2) attempts to emulate or augment official municipal infrastructure in public spaces and (3) the beneficiary (at least rhetorically) of these actions is the general public. According to Finn, most of these actions aim to have a medium/long-term impact and try to solve, at least locally, a urban problem. Nevertheless, DIY urbanism is still a broad term and has been used to indicate a wide set of actions, from simple, isolated activities (like creating murals, or painting a new street crossing) to large projects that require huge budgets (such as the creation of multi-million-dollar parks). Additionally, several alternative or adjacent terms have also been proposed, amongst which are: Tactical Urbanism (see [37]), Guerilla Urbanism, Temporary Urbanism, Pop-Up Urbanism,

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Insurgent Urbanism and many other terms. The exact definition of these actions is still rather vague, although they appear to overlap. In this chapter we do not aim to catalogue these approaches, but instead we focus on the two characteristics they have in common: the self-help, grassroot ideology behind them and the small scale of these interventions—Iveson [30] calls them “micro-spatial urban practices”. Small-scale grassroot urban interventions are not a novelty. In the US, DIY urbanism is rooted in a long tradition of self-help and urban beautification efforts, starting with the municipal art and civic improvement movements of the mid-19th Century [54]. In Europe, the works of the Situationist International (see [6]) are clearly part of the ideological background of DIY urbanism [19]: Guy Debord and Gilles Ivain, for example, underlined the importance of the relationships between the self and space (the so-called psychogeography) and imagined, alternative and playful ways of moving through the city (the dérive) that are still very influential. If DIY urbanism is not a radically new approach its formalization in a stable (although variegated) tactical and ideological framework, however, has been able to give rise to many new projects and to garner a lot of attention and positive coverage by both academia and the press. DIY urbanism activities comprise several techniques aiming at making cities and neighbourhoods more liveable, beautiful and social. Amongst these techniques are: “chair bombing” (i.e. creation of self-made benches in response to a lack of seating); “DIY wayfinding” (projects that create street signs indicating paths or places of interest to supplement what has been provided by municipalities); “paint bombing” (such as the creation of an unauthorized bike lane painted directly on the city streets); “guerrilla gardening” (which involves planting unauthorized gardens in city parks); and “seed bombing” (which entails the creation of small “bombs” full of seeds, compost and powdered clay that are thrown over fences or into vacant spaces and left to bloom). The terminology is often related to warfare, probably indicating the proactive nature of the actions and reflecting the idea that they constitute some sort of struggle against urban degradation. These actions are often “innovative, sophisticated, and low-cost solutions to difficult or unaddressed urban problems” [19, 381–382], however, they are not immune to criticism. On the one hand, such actions have been accused of obstructing orderly urban management. It has been pointed out that DIY urbanisms working as a sort of “vigilante urbanism” can very well interfere with city life, just as vigilante justice vexes law enforcement officials (ibid., 382). On the other hand, other criticisms target the relationships between DIY urbanism actions and the communities themselves. The fact that these actions are organised and implemented by citizens, does not necessarily mean that they are born out of community-based, participatory processes—at the contrary, they often circumvent the mechanisms of representation put in place to this end by planners in many cities. Moreover, while DIY urbanists brand themselves as non-experts and city-hackers [12, 219] capable of going beyond urban planning regulations disconnected from the lives of ordinary citizens, (a rhetoric suspiciously similar to those of many pseudoscientific theories), practitioners hardly consider themselves “radical” and hardly express any desire to upend local authorities [14]. Some of them even offer their projects as

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solutions to forms of informality and marginality such as squatting, graffiti and vandalism, claiming to have a productive economical value. In these cases, DIY urbanists end up siding with building owners and city officials and offering them protection against potential marginalised users [11]. DIY urbanism, then, intentionally or unintentionally, can be used to claim one’s opposition to traditional decision-makers, while still serving the “élite” and causing a sort of “hipster gentrification”. Many DIY Urbanism advocates, like Aurash Khawarzad, repudiate these tactics and hope for a “post-hipster” version of this practice, able to focus on community building and on being inclusive and diverse. In order to do so, we believe that DIY urbanism needs a critical component.

2.2 Critical Design The lack of a critical dimension is probably the most relevant flaw of most approaches to DIY urbanism. While aiming to improve urban life, only rarely do these projects question or challenge everyday reality; generally they do accept most social norms. This issue, however, may be addressed by joining forces with critical design. Critical design theory revolves around the idea that, instead of reinforcing the status quo, design should challenge it. While affirmative design perpetuates lifestyles, social norms and cultural stereotypes, critical design offers alternative and poetic takes on everyday objects, allowing its users to explore new modes of interaction with their environment. This idea is rooted in several avant-garde movements that were active in the 1960s and especially in the radical design period, originated by the 1966 exhibition Superarchitettura in Pistoia (Italy), oriented towards the creation of counter-design with a strong political and experimental nature. Radical design constituted an attempt of modifying modernism through utopian projects that challenged the contemporary idea of good taste [7]. This movement greatly influenced several designers and theorists, such as Daniel Weil and Ezio Manzini [39], whose works, in turn, were the basis for the conceptualisation of critical design. The concept of “critical design” was first introduced by Anthony Dunne in his book Hertzian Tales [16]: a work dedicated to relocating electronic products from a mere rhetoric of innovation for its own sake, to a broader context, involving critical thinking and the aesthetic role of these objects in everyday life. According to Dunne, mainstream design maintains a society of passive consumers by producing goods that propagandise desires and needs stimulated by others. He suggests that, instead, design research should use aesthetics to draw attention to how products limit our experience of the world and expose us to criticisms of hidden social and psychological mechanisms (Ibid. xvi). Dunne’s book, rich in examples, outlines different techniques to achieve this estrangement. For example, the author focuses on how user-friendly design that attempts to make things more familiar to users, ends up hindering any sort of sensible scepticism or critical thinking towards electronic objects. He calls, therefore, for

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user-unfriendliness (not user-hostility!) which, counteracts the familiarity created by routine modes of perception and therefore serves a poetic function. Finally, Dunne focuses on objects that are in between prototypes and products, which, by their speculative nature invite viewers to imagine their possible uses and contexts of use. Such objects represent outcomes of open-ended design, that is, the creation of objects that challenge the users and viewers to engage with them in interpretative and imaginative process that can also be a highly creative path for critical design. These objects can be realized through conceptual design (and therefore be “fictional” in the sense that they don’t “work”) and, although sometimes overtly satirical or whimsical, they can be very successful in engaging viewers, proving that people can understand and relate to the narrative behind these objects without the need of using them [16]. The objects created by critical design are not self-contained: their use—or the modelling of their use: a scenario of use in the mind—let their users discover new ways of conceptualizing reality. According to Dunne “when these props are introduced to everyday life as a ‘virus’, subverting it, people can participate in the story, exploring the boundaries between what it is and what might be” (Ibid. 67). The basic idea, therefore, is that design can—and should—have functions other than simply imagining basic solutions: it can be the basis for a wider reflection on our society and its possible alternatives. A practical example concerning urban spaces is the Tower of Winds (1986) by the Japanese architect Toyo Ito. Its function is that of an exhaust air outlet for the underground system. Nevertheless, Ito designed it as an interactive landmark, the capacity of which changes during the day. While appearing solid during the day, after dark the structure of aluminium seems to dissolve revealing a glowing, colourful structure underneath. The lights of the Tower of Winds change colour and intensity according to the noise levels in their surrounding vicinity, thus creating a connection between architecture and soundscape. This reactive installation, on the one hand, is able to give meaning to an architectural element independent of its function and, on the other hand, offers a critical commentary on sound pollution in city spaces by creating a poetic, interactive connection with the surrounding environment. The idea of critical design was rather successful and was continued by several designers and thinkers along Anthony Dunne himself, including Fiona Raby [17], Sterling [52] Ratto [47] and many others. Critical design soon exceeded the borders of electronic products and, with time has been applied to several different fields. In Speculative Everything [18], Dunne gathered an impressive list of fascinating examples of critical design, spanning from kitchenware to biological experiments, from mobility to reproduction, from fashion to electronics and so on and so forth. One of the most interesting projects presented in the book is Belief Systems a 2009 work by Bernd Hopfengarten. The project is encapsulated in a short video showing different concept-design scenarios based on the common idea of a technology able to perfectly read human emotions in micro facial expressions. In that imagined world, machine-readable humans deal, in their experience of urban spaces, with advertisement billboards that react to their emotions and change the advertised products accordingly; sales machines that auto-select the products desired by the

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consumers by rapidly showing them an array of possibilities and analysing their unconscious, micro expressions in response to the presented products; and public parks with toys that help children memorise the colours that the machines associate with each universal emotion. In that world, some people try to learn how to control their involuntary muscles movements, hoping to avoid being read by the machines. This is a case of dystopian design, that is, the depiction, throughout an imaginary product, of a grim reality that will work as a cautionary tale. While many efforts are focused on creating programs capable of recognising and reading human facial expressions thanks to machine learning, Belief Systems, already ten years ago, tried to warn us about what could be the consequences of such a technology. Critical design can be very powerful, but also quite unsettling and disruptive. By challenging the status quo, it can propose ideas that most people will find disturbing. For example, I wanna deliver a shark, a 2012 project by Ai Hasegawa imagines a way of satisfying the impulse to give birth when there is no desire of motherhood: that of delivering an animal of an endangered species, as one of the smallest kinds of sharks. Teddy Bear Blood Bag Radio (designed by Dunne and Raby in 2004) consists in a set made by a radio and a blood kit: it is meant to be used by children, in a grim future where most energy resources are depleted, in order to extract some blood from the family pet and use it to fuel the radio. While we do not question the efficacy of creating discomfort in the audience in order to spark intellectual reflections, we believe that strongly disturbing content is not a particularly desirable feature in design for urban spaces. While in the context of an exhibition, the attendees will be psychologically prepared to encounter weird and unsettling artefacts, we feel that urban passers-by, unaware of the context of the product, might be alienated by it, instead of involved. This would only result in additional semiotic conflict around the use of public spaces. Nonetheless, in the face of global and large societal challenges facing contemporary cities, there is often a need to spark critical reflections on how individuals live life and make choices that impact not just themselves but their society and the whole planet. This raises the need for critical design, however one that engages rather than alienates, the citizens. A playful implementation of critical design in urban environments, we believe, would be enough to mitigate its disruptive and unsettling nature, without weakening its critical component. Play and critical thinking are not in any way opposites but often complementary: as a matter of fact, Flanagan [20] focused her work on outlining a design methodology for critical play, underlining how the subversive and radical nature of play can be used within the thought-provoking strategies of critical design. While full of captivating suggestions, the chapter of her book focusing explicitly on urban spaces—entitled Artists’ locative games—deals mostly with projects aiming at participants with an elevated artistic education and in which play is often a secondary factor. For creating a truly playful and inclusive framework for critical playable cities, then, we will need a perspective that focuses on the engaging and motivating qualities of play and how they can be translated to non-game contexts. Fortunately, much research on this area already exists: in the field of gamification [28].

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2.3 Gamification Play has always been a cardinal aspect of human cultures and societies. Humans most probably started to play far before they started to speak, as the fact that most animals also do play seems to suggest [3]. While non-hegemonic forms of play have been deemed frivolous for a long time [53], today something is changing: games, toys and everything surrounding them seems to have become a cultural obsession [45]. The process that brought about this new prestige of games has been named the ludicisation of culture [5]—alternative terms are ludification [46] or gamification of culture. Games that were once perceived solely as a pastime activity for children or an obsession of teenage boys—such as digital games or modern board games—are slowly becoming mainstream and being seamlessly introduced to society in new and perhaps more accessible forms such as in forms of mobile games and casual games [31]. Research started to emerge to highlight the cognitive, affective and social benefits games offer [21] as well as motivational benefits [48]. It was hence unsurprising that the ludicisation of culture coincided with intentional efforts to gamify: that is, to transform activities through game design [28, 42]. While ludicisation is a cultural trend, something out of our direct control, gamification has a prescriptive character: it advocates for a deliberate transformation of services and activities in order to make them more “game-like” and therefore more attractive and engaging for the members of a ludicising society. This translates, for example, in traditional classrooms and education being reformed to be more enjoyable, self-purposeful and fun [38]. Similar efforts have been observed in the workplace to ensure employee wellbeing and improved productivity [36]. In the urban context; several research and projects have been seen to use gameful design to educate individuals about their communities [8], engage citizens in governance [2] and facilitate the integration of minorities [49]. Nonetheless, many of these initial initiatives to gamify blindly relied on the intentional utilization of game elements in serious contexts [13, 23]. Such gamification often materialized in the introduction of aspects that are thought to be unique to games (game elements), such as points, leaderboards, badges or avatars, as an addon layer to non-game activities in hopes of making such non-game activities more gameful and engaging. This gave rise to what is now referred to as the “rhetoric of gamification”: the embellishment of activities with some game elements to make them appear as gameful or engaging without proper attention to the psychology of game design or to how activities can be to made more sel-purposeful [33]. While initially rather popular, criticism of gamified designs has been targeted at such rhetoric introduction of game elements to existing activities, accusing it of merely creating a layer of complexity and using gamification in an unsustainable pursuit of extrinsic rewards [4, 24, 25, 29]. The understanding of gamification in terms of introducing game elements to nongaming context, even when implemented in legitimate ways [33], has also been problematic on a larger scale, as no clear understanding exists as to what game elements are [13, 24, 28]. Games are about the holistic assemblage of game elements,

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dynamics and experiences [31] rather than the existence or lack thereof of certain design elements or features. Proponents of gamification maintain that gamification is about the end experiences and outcomes that it aims to induce such as in terms of gamefulness, motivation [28] or in terms of user benefit [27]. In this chapter we define urban gamification, then, as the introduction of playfulness to urban contexts that are, traditionally, considered “serious”. When hosting playful activities, urban spaces are gamified, that is, they are (briefly) transformed to playgrounds, that systematically change the perceptions, actions and interactions of the citizens involved in the activities with the city [56]. In urban environments, then, the ludicisation of culture is most notably embodied by several urban gamification initiatives that aim to create social, enjoyable and engaging public spaces. Perhaps a significant effort to highlight in this regard is the musical staircases part of the Fun Theory project carried out by Volkswagen in the year 2009 to explore not only how public spaces and artefacts can be redesigned to be more ludic and playful, but also if such re-design can be consciously utilized towards positively impacting the lives of individuals and cities [55]. One of the experimental designs tested by Fun Theory was the development of musical staircases that play musical notes once a foot is stepped on them. The intention of such work was to see if the experience of playing music by climbing “innocently looking” stairs could move individuals out of the use of escalators and towards climbing stairs, in the process positively affecting their physical fitness levels and possibly the collective health of the urban space. The experiment showed that the utilization of such stairs did lead to an increased number of individuals choosing to climb the stairs rather than take escalators. Nonetheless, questions remained about the validity and sustainability of such initiatives and whether individuals would continue to use the musical stairs over the escalators on the long run and whether cities can actively maintain and service such initiatives. On the other hand, also simple mobile games such Pokémon Go have significantly (and perhaps unintentionally) transformed public spaces towards becoming enjoyable and collective spaces [43] and have even impacted individuals to believe that the game has transformed their mental, physical and social well-being [32].

3 Making Playable Cities Critical 3.1 A Framework for Critical Playable Cities Our framework is based on the conceptual and design toolboxes of DIY urbanism, critical design and gamification. It consists of using the qualities of play (it being safe, engaging, intrinsically motivated and involving make-believe) in actions of city re-appropriation that encourage critical thinking. The resulting actions are to be bottom-up, creative and playful urban co-productions that challenge the status quo. The key feature of our framework is that its three components—DIY urbanism,

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Fig. 1 Schema illustrating the synergies between the three components of the critical playable cities’ framework

critical design and urban gamification—when working in synergy, overcome the issues that they raise if applied singularly (Fig. 1). DIY urbanism offers tactics for re-appropriation of city spaces that, however, may risk excluding already marginalised people. DIY urbanism lacks a critical dimension, and has a reactive nature related to immediate needs. While this can still offer creative solutions, it cannot promote long-term change [30]. On the other hand, urban gamification can have a positive effect on urban spaces without necessarily negating the spaces to others. With this we are not advocating for graffiti or squatting but suggesting that these practices are symptomatic of social issues that will not be resolved by pushing away already fragile marginalized groups. Play, on the other hand, can work as a sort of reverse broken-windows effect [58]: playful situations can potentially change the attitude of citizens (marginalised groups included) towards the city in a positive way—at least for a period of time. Nonetheless, play and urban gamification are not necessarily tools for reflection on status quo. The inclusion of critical design in critical urban gamification, on the other hand, may foster critical thinking around the use of urban spaces enabling the creation of political awareness and therefore the promotion of changes to paradigms of potentially long-term impact. The powerful imaginary of critical design, on the other hand, is often unknown to the general public, closed in expositions and limited to a circle of experts. In some cases, it can attract public attention, in particular when it is encapsulated in sci-fi narratives such as Black Mirror (by Charlie Brooker, 2011). In these cases, however, critical design is always global, and never local. Implementing critical design in local, urban space would allow more people to encounter it face to face, to interact with it and, possibly, to be fascinated and inspired by it, although, that, on the other hand, would anchor the project to a specific environment.

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Nevertheless, urban critical design by itself, as we have mentioned, risks being counterproductive. It’s unsettling nature, once taken out of context, might be too disruptive and, therefore, misunderstood. Adding a playful frame of interpretation to its actions should be able to defuse stronger reactions to critical actions. Such, is the case, for example, of flash mobs, which work exactly thanks to the interpretative disorientation of the passers-by who, at first, are confronted with some bizarre and puzzling event, but then, after the context is understood, become spectators and participate in the playful activity [56]. The goal of gamification and most gameful or playful approaches is to induce positive, enjoyable experiences in the individuals who interact with these designs [22]. Empirical research has shown that such designs provide users benefits and increase their interaction with the gamified artefacts (e.g. [27]). Within our framework for Critical Playable Cities, the assumption is that the playful, enjoyable positive nature of urban play and gamification would perhaps water down the unsettling nature of critical design. The outcome would be processes, artefacts, and experiences that induce reflection on urban life without extensively unsettling individuals who interact with such designs. The nature of DIY Urbanism being bottom-up would allow such initiatives to freely come from average individuals rather than from an authority, further strengthening the idea that engagement with these designs is voluntary and self-purposeful, in line with the essential aspects of play that create positive experiences. This framework offers a toolbox to understand and eventually design and implement actions of urban gamification, nevertheless much of their effectiveness will still depend on the quality of the design and implementation. Several handbooks can provide useful insight on how to design critical urban gamification, for examples Deterding [10], Morschheuser et al. [42] and Flanagan [20]. The outcomes, however, may vary depending on designers’ skill, users, use contexts and many hard to account for environmental factors [26]. In the next paragraphs, we illustrate some brief examples of activities that can be understood within the framework of Critical Playable Cities. As the concept was introduced for the first time in this chapter, we are dealing with ante litteram examples. These are projects and activities that all contain the three elements of a(n); urban setting, critical perspective and playful implementation but were not backed by the framework we have just outlined: nevertheless, we believe that these examples should be able to demonstrate its potential.

3.2 Examples One of the most famous examples of city re-appropriation is parkour. This activity is sometimes considered a form of DIY urbanism [19] although atypical, as it does not require any material change in the city spaces. Parkour was born in Evry an artificial city near Paris, as a response to a specific idea of urban planning. Evry was built in the 1970s for hosting immigrants and it was designed with very little attention to

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its inhabitants: upon completion the city was lacking all the infrastructures needed to create a cohesive community. Parkour, then, was born as a form of rebellion against power and its writings of the city. As Evry was the product of a top-down urbanist ideology, the city, unsurprisingly, was perceived by its own inhabitants as an imposition, a vexation. While this caused social tensions - made more bitter by the racial and class diversity of its inhabitants - that often entailed violence, some of Evry’s denizens, reacted to this imposition in an unusual way: with a practice of urban appropriation that had a strong playful component. Parkour is an acrobatic alternative to the prescribed ways of crossing the city spaces and it defines a new way of moving within the city: a way that is not practical but critical and playful. Parkour criticizes the urban ideology behind the construction of the French banlieues and transforms the city to a playground where creativity and free-movement are used to re-shape the perception and use of public spaces [35]. Maybe we cannot define parkour as an organic form of critical urban gamification, but all the elements we have outlined are well present in this activity. Parkour is the grass-root manifestation of a critical stance on the use of urban spaces. It is born in the city and is about the city. As the citizens of Evry could not physically remove the obstacles that State-sponsored architects had put on them, they had to recur to play to invent a new way of interacting with these obstacles. The obstacles are transformed in supports of an acrobatic movement which is, at the same time, a dialectic statement directed at city planners, one, which is also able to involve every, confused, bystander [1]. Another relevant example is Park(ing) day, an activity sometimes considered as DIY urbanism [37], despite its brevity. This sort of civil festivity was born in 2005 in San Francisco, promoted by the art and design collective Rebar. That year, members of the collective rented a metered municipal parking space for two hours, but instead of parking cars, they created a small urban park in it. The concept was quite successful and in 2006 the experiment was recreated in 162 cities, in 35 countries: a total of 975 temporary pop-up parks were erected for a few hours. Since then, similar experiments are held the third Friday of September of every year. The pop-up parks of park(ing) day last only for a few hours, and for only one day a year. Hence, they clearly do not aim at directly changing urban spaces but rather to “generate critical debate around how public space is created and allocated, and to improve the quality of the urban human habitat”. The DIY urbanism dimension, undermined by the ephemeral nature of the project, is balanced by its attempt to create a moment of shared critical reflection, which will involve both the people participating in the action, and all the surprised passers-by. This is because Park(ing) day also has a strong playful component as there is a dose of pretend play in it. On the one hand its pop-up parks are in fact “masks” applied on the parking lot, and not real, sustainable parks. on the other hand, the participants that chill, meditate or play guitar in the parks are also, in part pretending, as they are aware of the situation. Finally, park(ing) day also proposes some sort of make believe to the passers-by, challenging them to wonder how it would be to have more green spaces in the city. Our last example is a fully-fledged game: Cruel 2 B kind; an experimental urban game created by Jane McGonigal and Ian Bogost in 2006 for the Come Out and

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Play event in New York City. It is a urban pervasive game [41]: it is played on the city streets, mixed with everyday life, therefore transforms traditionally nonplayful moments and spaces into occasion for play and is an intriguing example of urban gamification (according to our definition in paragraph 2.3). The game is mostly analogue, a mobile phone is used to receive instruction and communicate with the game masters. In the game the players, who do not know each other, are divided in several teams of two individuals and are scattered throughout the city. Their objective is to find other players and to “kill” them using “weapons”: various acts of kindness assigned to them by the game masters. If a player or a team are killed, they will have to join the team that killed them, therefore forming larger and larger teams. However, as players do not know their targets, they will often walk the city complimenting complete strangers on their shoes, or pretending to mistake them for celebrities, spreading kindness around. This is, in fact, a precise objective of the game: “Will innocents be caught in the cross-fire? Oh, yes. But when your secret weapon is a random act of kindness, it’s only cruel to be kind to other players” [40]. Urban games, by definition, use the city spaces as their playground. Pokémon Go players (developed by Niantic in 2016) are compelled to move across the city with their phone in order to proceed with the game. Cruel 2 B Kind, however, does something more: by requiring players to interact with strangers it actually transforms the city to a playground, a space of play for everyone who is there. In this sense, it is a form of game-based ephemeral DIY urbanism. The idea of spreading kindness, then, adds to the game a critical dimension, as all the people directly or indirectly involved in the game will be led to consider how an increase in acts of kindness in the public spaces would change the life of citizens.

4 Conclusions The aim of this chapter was to build a framework that makes use of the strengths of DIY urbanism, critical design and urban gamification (combining them in a way that addresses most of their weaknesses). Such a framework is useful to study, to analyse but also eventually to design actions capable of channelling (at least in part) the semiotic and social conflict that permeates cities in peaceful and creative ways. The three examples we have overviewed seem rather encouraging from this perspective. They propose ways of gamifying three different kinds of activities—crossing the city, occupying urban spaces and interacting with other citizens—so to make strong statements about the use of public spaces and the corrosion of local communities. All these activities use play as a way of proposing alternatives, that, because of them being “just pretend” (Park(ing) day and Cruel 2 B kind) or “for fun” (parkour), are perceived as not threatening while, at the same time, strongly criticise the status quo of urban planning and interactions in the city. These actions, therefore, are able to reappropriate city spaces while avoiding to be openly confrontational and hostile to city officials and law enforcement. This

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does not diminish the social and political relevance of their battle: at the contrary, it makes them useful tools for fighting for the right to city for two reasons. On the one hand, because they are used to criticise the top-down decisions of the municipalities and to propose bottom-up, grassroot alternative agendas. On the other hand, because their very implementation is already a way of modifying urban life, of reshaping the interactions between citizens and between active players and passers-by. While three examples might not be enough to operationalise Critical Playable Cities, we believe that this framework, combined with other attempts to systematize urban gamification (e.g. [57]), can be a solid platform for future research on the topic. Acknowledgements

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No 793835. This work was also supported by the Finnish Foundation for Economic Education (grants:. 12-6385 and 14-7824), and the Finnish Cultural Foundation (grant: 00190298).

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11. Deslandes A (2012) What do pop-up shops and homelessness have in common? The Global Urbanist. https://www.globalurbanist.com/2012/02/14/diy-urbanism-homelessness 12. Deslandes A (2014) Exemplary amateurism: thoughts on DIY urbanism. Cult Stud Rev 19(1):216–227. https://doi.org/10.5130/csr.v19i1.2481 13. Deterding S, Dixon D, Khaled R, Nacke L (2011) From game design elements to gamefulness: defining gamification. In: Proceedings of the 15th international academic MindTrek conference on envisioning future media environments - MindTrek ’11. ACM, pp 9–15. https://doi.org/10. 1145/2181037.2181040 14. Douglas GCC (2011) Do-it-yourself urban design: ‘improving’ the city through unauthorized, creative contributions. Unpublished manuscript presented in the Regular Session on Popular Culture at the American Sociological Association annual conference, Las Vegas, NV, 21 Aug 2011 15. Douglas GCC (2014) Do-it-yourself urban design: the social practice of informal improvement through unauthorized alteration. City Community 13(1):5–25 16. Dunne A (1999) Hertzian tales. MIT Press, Cambridge 17. Dunne A, Raby F (2001) Design noir: the secret life of electronic objects. Birkhäuser, Springer Nature Switzerland 18. Dunne A, Raby F (2013) Speculative everything: design, fiction, and social dreaming. MIT press, Cambridge 19. Finn D (2014) DIY urbanism: implications for cities. J Urbanism Int Res Placemaking Urban Sustain 7(4):381–398 20. Flanagan M (2009) Critical play: radical game design. MIT Press, Cambridge 21. Granic I, Lobel A, Engels RC (2014) The benefits of playing video games. Am Psychol 69(1):66 22. Hamari J (2019) Gamification. Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (in press) 23. Hamari J, Koivisto J, Sarsa H (2014) Does gamification work?—a literature review of empirical studies on gamification. In: Proceedings of the 47th Hawaii international conference on system sciences (HICSS), IEEE, pp 3025–3034. https://doi.org/10.1109/hicss.2014.377 24. Hassan L (2018) Means to gameful ends: how should gamification be designed? Doctoral dissertation, Hanken School of Economics 25. Hassan L (2017) Governments should play games: towards a framework for the gamification of civic engagement platforms. Simul Gaming 48(2):249–267. https://doi.org/10.1177/ 1046878116683581 26. Hassan L, Morschheuser B, Alexan N, Hamari J (2018) First-hand experience of why gamification projects fail and what to do about it. In: Proceedings of the 2nd international GamiFIN conference, pp 141–150 27. Hassan L, Dias A, Hamari J (2019) How motivational feedback increases user’s benefits and continued use: a study on gamification, quantified-self and social networking. Int J Inf Manage 46:151–162 28. Huotari K, Hamari J (2017) A definition for gamification: anchoring gamification in the service marketing literature. Electron Markets 27(1):21–31 29. Hyrynsalmi S, Smed J, Kimppa KK (2017) The dark side of gamification: how we should stop worrying and study also the negative impacts of bringing game design elements to everywhere. In: Proceedings of the 1st international GamiFIN conference, pp 105–110 30. Iveson K (2013) Cities within the city: do-it-yourself urbanism and the right to the city. Int J Urban Reg Res 37(3):941–956 31. Juul J (2010) A casual revolution: reinventing video games and their players. MIT press, Cambridge 32. Koivisto J, Malik A, Gurkan B, Hamari J (2019) Getting healthy by catching them all: a study on the relationship between player orientations and health benefits in an augmented reality game. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Hawaii international conference on systems sciences, Maui, USA 33. Landers RN (2019) Gamification misunderstood: how badly executed and rhetorical gamification obscures its transformative potential. J Manage Inquiry 28(2):137–140. https://doi.org/ 10.1177/1056492618790913

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34. Lefebvre H (1968) Le Droit à La Ville. Anthropos, Paris 35. Leone M (2009) Le Parkour sémiotique. Pratiche urbane di invenzione della naturalità. In: Bonadei R (ed) NaturaleArtificiale. Il palinsesto urbano. Lubrina, Bergamo 36. Lepper MR, Henderlong J (2000) Turning play into work and work into play: 25 years of research on intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation. In: Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Academic Press, pp 257–307 37. Lydon M (ed) (2012) Tactical urbanism, vol 1, n.d. issuu.com/streetplanscollaborative/docs /tactical_urbanism_vol.1 38. Malone TW (1981) Toward a theory of intrinsically motivating instruction. Cogn Sci 5(4):333–369. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15516709cog0504_2 39. Manzini E (1986) The material of invention. Arcadia, Milan 40. McGonigal J, Bogost I (2006) Cruel 2 B Kind. www.comeoutandplay.org/2006/08/06/cruel-2b-kind/ 41. Montola M, Stenros J, Waern A (2009) Pervasive games. Theory and design. Morgan Kaufmann Game Design Books, San Francisco 42. Morschheuser B, Hassan L, Werder K, Hamari J (2018) How to design gamification? A method for engineering gamified software. Inf Softw Technol 95:219–237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j. infsof.2017.10.015 43. Mäyrä F (2017) Pokémon GO: entering the ludic society. Mobile Media & Communication 5(1):47–50 44. Nijholt A (2017) Playable cities: the city as a digital playground. Springer. https://doi.org/10. 1007/978-981-10-1962-3_1 45. Ortoleva P (2012) Dal Sesso al Gioco, un’Ossessione per il XXI Secolo?. Espress edizioni, Turin 46. Raessens J (2006) Playful identities, or the ludification of culture. Games Cult 1(1): 52–57. Retrieved from http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1555412005281779 47. Ratto M (2011) Critical making: conceptual and material studies in technology and social life. Inf Soc 27(4):252–260 48. Ryan RM, Rigby CS, Przybylski A (2006) The motivational pull of video games: a selfdetermination theory approach. Motiv Emot 30(4):344–360 49. Salomoni P, Prandi C, Roccetti M, Nisi V, Nunes NJ (2015) Crowdsourcing urban accessibility: some preliminary experiences with results. In Proceedings of the 11th biannual conference on Italian SIGCHI Chapter. ACM, pp 130–133. https://doi.org/10.1145/2808435.2808443 50. Sicart M (2014) Play matters. MIT Press, Cambridge 51. Stevens Q (2007) The ludic city: exploring the potential of public spaces. Routledge, New York 52. Sterling B (2005) Shaping things. MIT Press, Cambridge 53. Sutton-Smith B (1997) The ambiguity of play. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 54. Talen E (2012) Do-it-yourself urbanism: a history. White paper. Tempe University School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning 55. Taylor E, Brook JR, Moran M, Stieb DM, Angle RP, Karman D, Krzyzanowski J, McMillan A, Stevens S, Young J, Piché E (2013) Air quality management: Canadian perspectives on a global issue, pp 379–388 56. Thibault M (2019a) Re-interpreting cities with play urban semiotics and gamification. Springer, Cham, pp 276–285. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-06134-0_32 57. Thibault M (2019b) Towards a typology of urban gamification. In: Proceedings of HICSS 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/59588 58. Wilson GQ, Kelling GL (1982) Broken windows. Atlantic Monthly, March, pp 29–38

The Sustainable Playable City: Making Way for the Playful Citizen Miriam Börjesson Rivera, Tina Ringenson and Daniel Pargman

Abstract To play is a legitimate need of urban citizens, and it is therefore important to enable play in cities and to plan for making cities playable. The playable city is not dependent on the digital technologies offered by the smart city. The playable city “happens” when a city offers suitable (playful) affordances and citizens engage in and make use of them. This ultimately implies that also ‘non-smart’ cities can be playable (and may indeed already be so). In this chapter we explore the intersection of playable and sustainable cities. We argue that the playable city can be placed within the realm of what the sustainable city should be and should aim for. The issue of whether this is achieved by applying digital technologies thus becomes decentred, even though digital technologies at the same time could open up for new and exciting possibilities. Key is to ensure that the playable city is a sustainable city and we should therefore aim for designing and building sustainable playable cities. Keywords Sustainable cities · Playable cities · Slow cities · Pokémon GO

1 Introduction It is possible to imagine a city that permits or encourages play—a playable city—that is simultaneously unsustainable. We have seen several such imaginaries: The 1988 anime movie Akira shows motorcycle gangs racing against each other in a game that is dangerous both for themselves and for others, against the background of an otherwise dystopian 2019 Neo-Tokyo cityscape. In the science fiction books series (and later movies) about the Hunger Games’, the citizens of Panem who are fortunate enough to live in The Capitol enjoy luxurious lives of conspicuous playfulness—but M. Börjesson Rivera (B) · D. Pargman Media Technology and Interaction Design, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] T. Ringenson Strategic Sustainability Studies, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_5

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their lifestyle is supported by the slavery of the majority of citizens, as well as of an unsustainable use of resources. Likewise, one can imagine cities that are sustainable (or at least less unsustainable) in terms of resource use, but that are not playable. A city that is exclusively built for efficient use land and transports and with all public spaces catering to (fast) bicycle traffic could be such a vision. The 2017 television series A Handmaid’s Tale, based on Margaret Atwood’s book from 1985, updates the original narrative by adding a radically decreased environmental footprint as a consequence of the policies of an oppressive, isolationist theocratic regime. There are however cities that could be regarded as precursors with regards to sustainability and therefore often score high on different sustainability ranking systems [42]. Examples of such cities are Vienna, Stockholm, Sydney and Paris [42, p. 264]. Besides environmental indicators, these sustainability ranking systems typically include a wide range of indicators that measure social sustainability and economic productivity [3, 9, 26, 42]. However, while the precise notion of what is and what is not sustainable—how exactly to define sustainability—can be discussed or contested [10, 19, 28, 46, 52], it should be uncontroversial to state that societies that will rapidly lead to their own destruction are by definition unsustainable and undesirable. We therefore argue that the playable city should also be a sustainable city. Furthermore, the adoption of any definition of sustainability that does not narrowly focus solely on ecological sustainability but that also includes social aspects of sustainability implies that a sustainable city should permit or encourage play. Play is here conceived as an important element that increases the quality of life of urban dwellers of all ages. Playfulness (le ludique) is indeed proposed by Lefebvre [35] as a gathering principle in his seminal book “Le droit à la ville”, “The right to the city”. Playfulness, according to Lefebvre [35], is the common and fundamental/underlying quality that unites activities such as sports, theatre, as well as festivals and the play of children and youth and that the space for play has always co-existed alongside other spaces. It could also be argued that many factors that make a city playable, such as having city environments that can be enjoyed playfully without fear of (car) traffic-related accidents, go hand in hand with notions of ecological and social sustainability. In this paper we explore the intersection of playable and sustainable cities. While we do not shy away from discussions of the tensions that can appear between these two visions, we have chosen to concentrate on the space where these two visions align and on how they could support each other.

2 Background In this section we will do two things. First we provide a summary and discussion of the main concepts we work with in this text; playable cities, sustainability, and smart

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cities. We also discuss and analyse the intersection of and the relationship between ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’ cities, as well as between ‘smart’ and ‘playful’ cities.

2.1 Playable Cities We argue that play is one of many legitimate needs of citizens, just as they have a need for security, access to transportation, access to nature and access to cultural experiences. Just as it is important to plan the city so that it fulfils goals related to security, transportation, natural and cultural experiences, so is it equally important to plan for making cities playable and to enable play in cities. The idea of prioritising people’s needs first is captured by West [63]: The real essence of a city is its people […] but the emphasis of those who think about cities, such as planners, architects, economists, politicians, and policy makers, is primarily focused on their physicality rather than on the people who inhabit them and how they interact with one another. It is all too often forgotten that the whole point of a city is to bring people together, to facilitate interaction, and thereby to create ideas and wealth, to enhance innovative thinking and encourage entrepreneurship and cultural activity by taking advantage of the extraordinary opportunities that the diversity of a great city offers. [63, p. 252]

To define and understand what play actually is, is nevertheless elusive. Or as play theorist Sutton-Smith states: “We all play occasionally, and we all know what playing feels like. But when it comes to making theoretical statements about what play is, we fall into silliness” [59, p. 1]. Following Woodyer [65] the two main ways in which play has been understood are ‘play as utilitarian’ and ‘play as noninstrumental’. The former view implies that play is beneficial and important for the physical, social and cognitive development of children (cf. [4, 50, 62]). The latter positions play “in opposition to seriousness, morality and productive work, and the social relations these value structures reproduce” [65, p. 314]. Huizinga [30] defines play as a free, voluntary activity, outside of ‘real life’, connected with no material interest, innately structured spatially and temporally, structured by rules, whereas Caillois goes even further and describe play as “an occasion of pure waste: waste of time, energy, ingenuity, skill and often of money” [11, p. 5]. Looking at play in the context of urban environments, Stevens [58] states that play is a “non-instrumental social behaviour” (p. 805) and proposes a four-part working definition of play in urban public spaces (p. 806): • Actions lacking clear instrumental benefits • Separation from everyday experience (either spatially through boundaries, or socially through rules or special roles) • A four-part typology of the forms playful activities take: competition, chance, simulation, and vertigo (from [11] • Exploratory encounters with strangers. Drawing on this definition, a playable city would be a city that enables such actions. Such a definition would slightly differ from more techno-centred views of

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what the playable city could and/or should be (e.g. examples discussed by Innocent this volume, [38, 64]. We argue that techno-centred perspectives run the risk of obscuring core qualities and goals of the playable city—irrespective of whether that city is digital, whether that city is smart or whether that city is none of the above. We suggest that the playable city “happens” when a city offers suitable (playful) affordances and citizens engage in and make use of them. This ultimately implies that also ‘non-smart’ cities can be playable, and may indeed already be so. The many neighbourhood groups in Barcelona and in other Catalonian cities that (for example weekly or biweekly) practice to form human towers (“castillos”) at public events is an example of a nondigital but decidedly playful activity that unites people from different genders, ages, and social classes (see Fig. 1). While a playful city can be non-digital, additional affordances and new opportunities for play can naturally be provided through the use of ICT. Examples of playful installations that use digital technologies can be found among the Playable City1 projects. Elsewhere, the playable city as an emerging concept has been studied and understood as the development of ubiquitous and location-based games [14], as a way to engage citizens with data [64], as a way for citizens to appropriate installed

Fig. 1 A human tower with younger children climbing up to form the very highest level. Picture by calafellvalo, licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0. Available at: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ 33818912@N00/27980978511 1 www.playablecity.com.

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smart technology for playful purposes [38], as a way to cater to both tourists’ and inhabitants interests [36], etc. The playable city, as we see it, is a vision of the city that makes room for play, playfulness and games as a fundamental goal of city-making. This stretches far beyond making room for designated areas for play (primarily focused on children’s needs). The playable city is an inclusive vision where citizens of all ages are allowed and encouraged to engage with their environment in playful ways. This view of the playable city also places it within the realm of what the socially sustainable city should be and should aim for. The issue of whether this is achieved by applying digital technologies thus becomes decentred, even though digital technologies at the same time could open up for new and exciting possibilities.

2.2 Sustainability When we discuss sustainability, we do so from an understanding that a sustainable city is a city where people live fulfilling lives within the planetary boundaries [52]. This is a normative vision that is based on staying within the carrying capacity of the earth in terms of material throughput [49] and on the necessity of keeping the earth systems stable ([52], Rockström et al. 2015). As such, it differs from the majority of sustainability matrices of indicators used in the ranking of sustainable cities, since these often assign equal or more weight to indicators that assess more conventional indicators, such as economic growth and business attractiveness [42]. From a view that puts primacy on ecological sustainability, “unsustainable cities” are highly undesirable since they undermine the conditions for future cities to exist and thrive. Climate change has been identified as a core boundary which, if transgressed, could drive the Earth system into a new and strongly undesirable state [57]. At the COP21 meeting in December 2015, the countries of the world united around a new climate agreement, the Paris Agreement. With the Paris Agreement, the nations of the world pledged to take powerful action to limit global warming to 1.5° (compared to pre-industrial levels). Under the leadership of Johan Rockström at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, an international team of researchers have thereafter formulated a “Carbon Law” that establishes that in order to reach this goal, carbon emissions from all cities (and by extension from all nations, all sectors of industry, all organisations, all households etc.) have to be reduced by 50% each decade between 2020 and 2050 [53]. The full societal implications of tackling climate change are hard to overestimate, but it is here enough to state that sustainability is one of, if not the premier challenge of the 21st century and it should be taken into account in all thinking and in all areas. That means that any thinking about present or future playable cities should also take sustainability into account; while playable cities are desirable, sustainable cities are necessary. Resource depletion is another sustainability challenge that should be mentioned in this context. ICTs have short life cycles and the rapid development of new tech-

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nologies make fully functional systems obsolete at a quick pace [51]. Most raw materials used in ICTs are finite resources, such as copper, aluminium, and gold [41, 45]. Many of these are extracted under poor and hazardous conditions [15, 33] or are “conflict minerals” associated with financing civil conflict in the regions where they are extracted [21]. This means that all types of digital technologies contribute to the depletion of resources and many to serious human conflicts. That is a fact that must be taken into consideration in the design and development of these technologies and applications; we need to economise with resources and treat ICTs as valuable in themselves, rather than as disposable products. As mentioned above, sustainability as a concept typically includes also other aspects, for example social and economic perspectives. The concept of economic sustainability in particular tends to divide people. Some primarily understand economic sustainability it in terms of safeguarding continued economic growth, others understand it in terms of economic growth that does not simultaneously challenge social or environmental aspects of sustainability, and yet others understand it to be included as part of social sustainability [32]. Exactly what should be included in the concept of social sustainability has also been discussed, but the term generally tends to focus on assuring general human well-being. Kate Raworth’s concept of “doughnut economics” (see Fig. 2) has recently gained ground as a way to conceptually com-

Fig. 2 “Doughnut economics” by Raworth [47, 48] delineating “a safe and just space for humanity”. Available at: http://www.kateraworth.com/doughnut

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bine desirable social aspects (e.g. health, education, gender equality, social equity etc.) that function as a “floor” with planetary boundaries (CO2 emissions, biosphere integrity, land-system change etc.) that function as a “ceiling”. The conclusion is that humanity should strive to live in the space between the “floor” and “ceiling” and Raworth’s model thus extends the ideas of planetary boundaries, e.g. “a safe space for humanity” [52], into “a safe and just space for humanity” [46–48]. In the context of this chapter, we suggest that the doughnut could function as a conceptual and inspirational framework for the playable city. One implication is that initiatives that fall under the playable cities umbrella should strive to fit themselves into this “safe and just space”. That is, to not contribute to overstepping the ceiling of planetary boundaries and simultaneously contribute to (or at least not undermine) reaching the foundation of what constitutes life’s essentials. In a long-term perspective, one potential result could be that also environmental and social effects are taken into consideration in playable cities projects, such as whether attracting long-distance tourists really is desirable2 or whether projects/installations are accessible to all citizens no matter their digital literacy or access to necessary equipment (requiring the latest smartphone) etc. (see further [39]).

2.3 Smart Cities The term “smart city” has become a multi-faceted and elusive term that encompasses many different definitions that are not always compatible [25]. As pointed out by e.g. Kitchin et al. [34], the urban and the digital have been entwined since the birth of digital computing, and increasingly so as computers, digital systems and networks have been applied to implemented in several sectors within urban planning and administration. The term ‘smart city’ emerged in the 1990s [1] and now also encompasses people and community needs in addition to the application of ICTs to cities (ibid.). Vanolo [61] describes the smart city as “an urban imaginary combining the concept of ‘green cities’ with technological futurism and giving a name to techno-centric visions of the city of tomorrow” (p. 894). Söderström et al. [60] argue that the dominant narratives about smart cities, as told by big IT corporations, at first glance seems to be about contributing to efficient and sustainable cities but “primarily [is] a strategic tool for gaining a dominant position in a huge market” (p. 316). Most visions of the smart city assume that digital technologies are central to address and solve epochal challenges related to cities and urbanization that we are and will continue to face during the 21st century [51]. Albino et al. [1] provide an extensive review of definitions, dimensions, and indicators of smart cities, and conclude that since definitions of what constitutes a smart city differ, assessments and comparisons between cities (as well as comparisons between various criteria and frameworks that are used to evaluate smart cities) easily becomes very complex. This 2 The

answer to such a question would in effect always be “no”.

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does not necessarily mean that there is a need to provide a unifying framework and Albino et al. [1] argue that although “cities have different visions and priorities for achieving their objectives, they must promote an integrated development of different aspects, both hard and soft” (p.18). More critical readings of the smart city discourse state that the smart city promotes the view of the citizen as a consumer—a view that denies the political subjectivity (and agency) of citizens and that fails to address complex long-term issues (for example related to urban planning) by offering ready-made, sellable systems and solutions that might or might not be appropriate for the intended purposes and where the providers of said solutions are free of accountability [24, 25, 60]. By lacking a well-defined conceptual core, the idea of the smart city can also be used to support any conceivable agenda [61]. Furthermore, the ‘smart city’ in many ways presupposes that citizens “have to be willing to adapt to, and to live in, smart cities” [61, p. 893], thereby making the citizens themselves responsible to become a ‘smart citizen’ and by extension thus marginalising those parts of the population who for different reasons can’t adapt.

2.3.1

Smart Sustainable Cities

While some understand “smart” to by definition encompass sustainability, e.g. efficient = smart = sustainable (see [23]. This view, we argue, represents a perspective that could be defined as weak sustainability, that is, a perspective where smart technology optimise and make operations and flows in the city more efficient, but where hoped-for or assumed (but actually only potential) sustainability effects are more or less considered to be bonuses rather than the main goal. As such, it is a perspective that is grounded within the existing paradigm of continuous business as usual (including continuous economic growth). Others suggest that we should differ between ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’, thus opening up a space for discussing smart-butunsustainable aspects of smart cities [31], and, there is an emerging interest from researchers as well as from cities and corporations to define (and discuss) what the smart sustainable city is, including how it could come about and the ways smartness could serve sustainability. According to Bibri and Krogstie [7], the smart sustainable city “is used to denote a city that is supported by a pervasive presence and a massive use of ICT, which, in connection with various urban domains and systems and how these intricately interrelate, enables cities to become more sustainable and to provide citizens with a better quality of life” (p. 193). Höjer and Wangel [31] argue that the smart sustainable city is an aggregate concept and that all of the constituent concepts (smart, sustainable and city) are important in their own right. However, by connecting ‘smart’ to ‘sustainable’, there is an opportunity to apply the concept of smart sustainable cities as a common framework for encouraging urban development in certain (sustainable) rather than other (less sustainable or unsustainable) directions. “Sustainable development” has been defined in many different ways, but the most frequently quoted definition comes from the Brundtland Report [10]: “Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising

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the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”. Höjer and Wangel [31] draws from this definition to propose that a smart sustainable city is a city which meets the needs of its present inhabitants without compromising the ability for other people or future generations to meet their needs and without exceeding local or planetary environmental limitations, and, where all of this is supported by ICT. This view of the smart sustainable city can thus be seen as promoting a strong sustainability perspective, e.g. a perspective that elevates sustainability as the overarching goal and only at that point asks how this goal could be reached by applying smart technologies. The strong sustainability perspective thus fundamentally differs from the more timid, weak sustainability perspective. The latter represents the current mainstream take on sustainable cities and that perspective is also promoted by the majority of stakeholders who either has a commercial interest in the smart city or who for various reasons shy away from the idea that a sustainable city might require a more radical break rather than it representing a challenge that can be met with existing tools and within the current paradigm. Some even argue that this latter approach risk undermining sustainability rather than supporting it [51].

2.3.2

Smart Playable Cities

Similarly to how Höjer and Wangel [31] see sustainability as a worthwhile aim and smartness as a possible means to reach it, we suggest that playfulness should be an aim of cities, and smartness as a possible means to reach it. We also suggest that smart does not by definition mean playable and that smartness may indeed at times undermine playability. Many visions of the future city in general, and the smart city in particular, are (still) articulated within a modernist paradigm that gives preference to techno-optimism, progress and efficiency. The smart city is envisioned as an “efficient machine” that optimises flow and operations in terms of e.g. transport flows (and thereby, flows of people), waste flows, energy use etc. (see e.g. [8, 56]). There is often a focus on automation, control, and surveillance and it is not unusual that visions of the smart city run the risk of creating a place where inhabitants are cast as passive recipients of the goods offered by local government and commercial actors in a public-private partnership. The playable city could potentially be a subversive in relation to such visions of future smart cities as it invites its inhabitants to relate to the city in active and creative ways (cf. [38]). Within this context, there is therefore an opportunity to re-articulate the playable city as subversion and enacted playfulness as an act of resistance against the automated-and-efficient smart city.

3 Exploring the Sustainable Playable City The playable city could also be understood to be part of the call for ‘the right to the smart city’ raised by e.g. Kitchin et al. [34], or even ‘the right to the sustainable

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smart city’ [29]. Both concepts build on, and further develop, Lefebvre’s concept, The Right to the City, which in turn articulates the idea that space in the city should be shaped according to the needs of its inhabitants [35]. ‘The right to the city’ has been promoted and enacted by many different social movements during the last decade [43]. The most commonly used interpretation of that concept has, according to Purcell, nevertheless been firmly placed within a liberal-democratic framework where it has been envisioned as a right that is (or should or will be) legally granted to individual citizens. This interpretation differs from Lefebvre’s original idea in important respects though because Lefebvre went further in his original call and propagated a highly radical vision in which inhabitants take urban space as their own, appropriating what is rightfully theirs and thereby contesting the regime of property rights [43]. Following Lefebvre, the playable city could thus be a call to reappropriate an urban space where play and playful activities currently are discouraged, forbidden or where they have been made impossible. The amount of space occupied e.g. by motor traffic in cities could from this perspective be reappropriated for better use by a larger proportion of the city population The strong-sustainable city is also subversive in relation to visions of future smart city as an efficient machine. While the smart-city-as-an-efficient-machine (e.g. the weak-sustainability city) might be optimised to decrease energy flows and carbon emissions, such visions exclusively function within the current business as usual paradigm. This means that while such cities are envisioned as less energy-, carbon-, resource- and waste-intensive, they are still not effective (and radical) enough. A weak sustainability perspective, with its focus on small incremental change, is “less unsustainable”, but only a strong sustainability perspective is compatible with the Paris agreement. To adhere to the Carbon Law (see above) and decrease carbon emissions by 50% between 2020 and 2030 and then again in the next decade (and yet again in the following decade) is not possible only by fiddling around within the current paradigm. If for example transportation is a large source of carbon emissions that needs to be halved every decade, it is not nearly enough to think of solutions only within the current paradigm, e.g. in terms of more efficient cars, a higher proportion of electric cars, self-driving cars etc. A strong-sustainability city, as apart from weaksustainability city, will instead think of solutions to these tough goals in terms of decreasing traffic in absolute terms. We thus suggest that playable cities and sustainable cities can and should be aligned in their opposition to smart city as an efficient machine. We would not want to propagate visions of playable-but-unsustainable cities, nor do we want our cities to become sustainable-but-unplayable. Much would thus be gained by investigating and resolving potential points of conflict and formulating a vision of exactly what a sustainable playable city is and what characterises such a city. Such a conjoined vision would be stronger than what any of the two concepts (playable cities and sustainable cities) are on their own. Central to such a vision is to problematize the (outsized) role of the car in contemporary cities.

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3.1 The Car as a Natural Fact In an article problematizing traditional HCI discourse and its implications for effective sustainability applications, Dourish [18] makes the argument that ‘the market’ is regarded as a natural rather than a social fact. Dourish argues that “Market models so dominate our daily experience that they appear as natural mechanisms” and that we therefore have a hard time thinking of solutions that challenge or upset this framing [18, p. 2]. Dourish further argues that from this perspective, sustainability becomes a concern of the individual, and that all proposed solutions are compatible within this framing, e.g. often are formulated in terms of individuals making informed choices [18]. In a similar vein, sociologists Sheller and Urry [54] state that cities “remain primarily rooted in and defined by automobility as much as by newer technologies” [54, p. 737]. However, they lament, “sociology’s view of urban life has failed to consider the overwhelming impact of the automobile in transforming the time-space scapes of the modern urban/suburban dweller” [54, p. 738] and that characteristics of the car (noise, smell, movement, etc.) have been deemed as inconsequential to understanding city life. Drawing on Dourish [18] and Sheller and Urry [54] we argue that cars have been ‘naturalised’ in the context of playable cities to the extent that they are viewed as natural facts rather than as something that it is possible to have opinions about, discuss and ultimately change. Our ‘blindness’ to discuss the role of the car and its implications for playable and sustainable cities can possibly be amended by “making strange” [6], i.e. by consciously defamiliarizing oneself from what one usually takes for granted. Defamiliarizing oneself from the notion of the car as a natural fact would reveal a range of problems with cars that has negative implications for playable cities, for sustainable cities or for both, e.g.: • Cars are dangerous (for pedestrians, for children, for other cars etc. Faster cars are more dangerous yet) • Cars require a lot of space in the city (for parking along streets, parking spaces and garages and by demanding roads. Faster cars need more road per car) • Cars make the city inaccessible (for those who can’t drive, e.g. the old, the young, the disabled) • Cars represent inequity (as some cannot afford to have cars) • Cars drain public resources (as many costs are externalised and budgets could have been spent in ways that would have benefitted all citizens) • Cars pollute (both through particles and through CO2 emissions).

3.2 Challenging the Car as a Natural Fact One particular way that playable and sustainable can be seen as aligned is when it comes to issues of land-use, transport planning and the prioritised role that motorised

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transport have in today’s cities. The sustainable mobility paradigm [5] instead offers an alternative set of transport planning principles and a shift in how streets are viewed (from streets as road to streets as space). That paradigm thus turns the current hierarchy upside down and place sustainable (slow) modes of transportation (e.g. pedestrians and cyclists) at the top. Prioritising pedestrians and choosing to regard the street as “a space for people, green modes and public transport” [5, p. 75] and thereby effectively challenging the car norm [27] almost perfectly aligns with ideas of re-imagining streets, squares and parks as sites for city dwellers of all ages and as spaces where playful activities can take place. Pedestrians’ lack of speed is unanimously regarded not only as an asset but as a prerequisite for spontaneous play. This argument can be related to Carroll et al. [12] who conclude that changes of how public space is used has led to limited civic access to the city for children and adults alike. These developments are especially damning for children, they argue, as children are particularly marginalized due to how urban spaces are designed. Children in today’s cities are therefore both underrepresented in the use of urban space as well as seen as being out of place in the city’s public spaces. Carroll et al. [12] conclude that children lose out in terms of “spatial justice” and that what is needed is “a shift from attempts to confine children’s play to a few child-specific spaces, to re-imagining streets squares, and parks as sites for children as well as adults.” (ibid. p. 4). This requires urban spaces that are not only inviting to engage with in a playful manner, but also urban spaces that are safe and inclusive. If the sustainable mobility paradigm were to be operationalised in terms of not only transport planning but also from an urban planning perspective, we can thus see how the city could become more playable as well as more sustainable by facilitating a shift that includes a re-imagination of how we use streets. Aldred and Woodcock [2] state that “Automobility promises the annihilation of distance, but prioritises some people’s journeys at the expense of others’ [2, p. 494]. They also conclude that car economy redistributes space and that the people losing the most ends up being children, disabled, and people in poor neighbourhoods. A similar point is made by Nijholt [39] in his critique of Playable Cities projects. Nijholt points out that there are large groups of citizens that are not taken into account in Playable Cities initiatives, such as children, the elderly or disabled persons. He goes on to assert that not only do many projects have short time spans before they disappear, but children have also disappeared from the streets. “Streets are owned by cars, drivers have to be kept happy and public spaces or playgrounds do not allow children’s initiatives that go beyond the risk-free pre-canned play and recreation facilities that they offer and have to be obeyed” [39, p. 19]. This observation is also what initiated the bottom-up, direct-action initiative, Playing Out (https://playingout.net), which interestingly enough originated in Bristol, the home town of Playable Cities. Playing Out is an initiative that promotes children’s use of streets by temporarily closing off residential streets and making space for play. The initiative has since its start in 2009 helped the council develop a ‘Temporary Play Street’ policy which has spread to over 50 other British cities [20]. Returning to Stevens [58] definition of play in urban public spaces (see “Playable cities” above), we argue that his definition is founded on the assumption that

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play is something that fits particularly well with pedestrian (e.g. slow) activities. Both “actions lacking clear instrumental benefits” and “exploratory encounters with strangers” would be either less meaningful or otherwise potentially dangerous if performed as we drive our cars. The least that can be said is that play as defined by Stevens [58] requires some form of speed limitation(s). This positions motorised transport modes, such as automobility, as less compatible or flat-out incompatible with the goals of a playable sustainable city. Further, the majority, if not all, of the examples of playful interactions referenced in Stevens [58], Donoff and Bridgman [17], Carroll et al. [12] and Pyyry and Tani [44] can be said to emanate from an understanding of playful interactions as bodily sensory experiences that are social. This implies that the playable city must be a city that is experienced slowly and directly. Certain aspects of the playable city can in this sense also be related to ideas of the slow city.

3.3 Slow and Sustainable as Playable The Slow City Movement originated in Italy and is closely tied to the Slow Food Movement where both these movements promote sustainability and conviviality. The starting point of the Slow Movement is a discontent with globalisation but the Slow City Movement more specifically “aims to protect and enhance urban liveability and quality of life.” [37, p. 322]. These particular aims are highly relevant for playable cities projects. There are specific criteria that a city must fulfil to be able to qualify as a Slow City, it here suffices to point out that slowing down makes sense both from a playable and from a sustainable perspective. As we pointed out above, an overall slow pace of moving through the city enables playfulness. A focus on the local context, which underlines/permeates the Slow movement, is also a common denominator for playable cities projects. One example is Hello Lamp Post3 which has been implemented in various cities around the world, but where each implementation is locally grounded and answers to specific and locally situated requests. Another example is how Pokémon GO, a global game, is played locally in the near outdoor environment. Another aspect of playing that emerges in the literature is “hanging out”. Carroll et al. [12] include “hanging out” as part of what encompasses free play. Similarly, Pyyry and Tani [44] highlight how “hanging out”, both offline and online, is an elementary part of young people’s lives and, consequently, that spaces for “hanging out” act as gathering places but also as “active agents in young people’s affectual everyday geographies” (p. 5). Hanging out also relates to non-instrumentality and to Stevens’ [58] definition of play in urban spaces as “actions lacking clear instrumental benefits” (see further “Playable cities” above). This and other forms of playability are enabled in slow cities.

3 www.hellolamppost.co.uk.

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3.4 Playable and Sustainable—The Case of Pokémon GO We here use Pokémon GO to discuss how playable and sustainable could align. Pokémon GO is a mobile AR game where the “map wielding treasure hunter” player [16] walks around outdoors to chase, catch, train and fight Pokémon’s either alone or together with others [55]. Playing Pokémon GO encourages you to walk around with (seemingly) no purpose and no particular destination, but includes reasons to congregate with others at certain times and in certain places. Pokémon GO thus fulfils all the criteria of Stevens’ [58] definition of play in urban public spaces (see “Playable cities” above); it induces actions that lack clear instrumental benefits, encourages exploratory encounters with strangers, is separated from everyday experience, fulfils several forms of playful activities, mainly competition, simulation and chance. Walking in itself has several “positive side effects” such as increased health, engaging with the local environment and other (local) players, thereby (potentially) developing a stronger sense of community and sense of place, which in turn are ways of strengthening or enhancing social sustainability. An interesting characteristic of Pokémon GO is that even though you are walking, you are usually not on your way to somewhere in particular. This means that walking isn’t a transportation mode in the way it is understood in urban planning. Playing, playing games, and playfulness thus adheres to other ‘rules’ (if you will) than what is measured and treasured in ‘the real world’ (as well as in mainstream visions of smart city as an efficient machine). Pyyry and Tani [44] for example defend “the importance of young people’s right to spend time and engage with their urban surroundings without ready-made plans: their right to dwell with the city” (p.11).

4 Making the Sustainable Playable City Zoning of the city space is (still) an underlying guideline in mainstream urban planning practices. This has implications for how urban space is divided, as it entails planning and building designated areas for various activities; play areas for children, sports fields for sports, sidewalks for pedestrians, roads for motorised traffic and parking spaces for cars. Activities are supposed to “stay in their places” and are thus implicitly prohibited elsewhere. We argue that this script should be inverted; play should be allowed anywhere except in ‘unsuitable’ places and the number of such places should be minimized. This also implies that contested areas where conflicts could occur such as between play and foot or bicycle transportation could be alleviated by appropriating space that is today set aside for cars. It also means that playful use of the city should not be restrained and that play furthermore should be encouraged. It should also be possible to play and to dwell in places without needing to consume as well as to play without the risk of being hit by a vehicle. We began this chapter by querying how playable and sustainable may align. The answer, we believe, lies in enabling and encouraging mobility at a slow pace and by enabling

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and encouraging play in all spaces. We also believe that actors within the field of playable cities (researchers, designers and playful city dwellers) have an important role to play, and that they thus both could and should engage in these issues.

4.1 Playable but Unsustainable? We acknowledge that there could be a potential conflict between playability and sustainability in cities. There is an interesting tension between the hyperlocal and everyday dimensions of play and playfulness, and the tendency of using playable cities as a marketing device, where ‘playable’ (as a label and as a practice) becomes yet another way of benchmarking the city and attract visitors and tourists. The aforementioned human towers of Barcelona (Catalonia) is an example of this. While there is absolutely nothing that unsustainable about playful competition between neighbourhood teams, human towers are also marketed in tourist guides as a reason for visiting Barcelona. Pokémon GO represents another example of how the local and global can be interrelated within play. Pokémon GO is in for most players a hyperlocal cotidian practice; players go out to nearby areas and hunt for their daily catch of Pokémon’s. But the developer, Niantic, also arranges huge global Pokémon GO events as part of branding and marketing logics. Pokémon GO players from all over the world travel to such events to meet other players from all over the world and to catch rare specialevent Pokémon’s. Three such global events were held in 2017 (in Japan, the US and Europe) and the fact that many visitors arrive by air (oftentimes with intercontinental flights) is obviously extremely bad from a sustainability perspective. As stated earlier, the Paris agreement means that the 93 countries of the world have committed to making necessary efforts to make sure that the global temperature does not rise above 2° compared to pre-industrial levels. This agreement has been operationalised through the Global carbon law [53], which states that in order to fulfil the Paris agreement, we need to drastically reduce carbon emissions. It is therefore crucial that we create conditions for individuals, households, neighbourhoods, cities, and countries to reduce their CO2 emissions by 50% per decade between now and 2050. This must, consequently, also apply to smart city advocates, as well as to researchers and designers within the field of playable cities. So how can playful interactions and games in the playable city be planned and designed to support these goals? We argue that our contribution must be to actively work for more playable and sustainable cities. Such cities must decrease the space for shopping malls and traffic and instead offer less resource intensive opportunities for enjoying “life between buildings” [22].

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4.2 Sustainable by Coincidence or by Design? It is interesting to note that many aspects of Pokémon GO are designed in such a way that they to a high degree align with sustainability goals (even if this possibly or probably is an “accidental” and unintended side effect of the game design). There are for example no ‘pokéstops’ along highways, and if you move ‘too fast’ (e.g. travel by car instead of walking), you cannot score in the game. Instead you get additional benefits in the game when you get to know and play together with people in your neighbourhood [40]. Many also play Pokémon GO together with other family members [55]. All of that is in line with environmental and social sustainability goals, e.g. to promote less travelling and less car use and to promote public health and local cohesiveness. But could sustainability become a more important criterion in the design of these types of games and in the design of playable cities? In what ways could for example Pokémon GO be redesigned to better align with sustainability goals? In other words, how could playable cities in general and Pokémon GO in particular be redesigned to promote playful interactions and sustainable activities while simultaneously reducing carbon emissions by curbing unsustainable activities? This perspective implies that sustainability should be elevated and defined as a key design criterion for all forms of playable cities designs so that a playable city also effectively becomes a sustainable city. Below are some examples from literature and a tentative outline of how sustainability as a key design criterion could be approached.

4.3 Designing for Sustainability and Playability In a study on the effects of Pokémon GO on places and movement [13], one finding was that there is indeed some danger associated with playing Pokémon Go in the city. “The most serious implication of player’s reduced environmental awareness is when they come into conflict with road traffic.” (s. 1187). Interestingly and very much in line with regarding the car as a natural fact (see above), the suggested implications for design are quite disappointing and suggests a range of measures from avoiding placement of game content in near proximity to busy roads to having the system notifying players who find themselves in dangerous areas (near busy roads) by freezing the system-making the game temporarily unavailable. These proposed solutions, in our opinion, tiptoes around the real problem by failing to reflect upon or even to acknowledge the fact that busy roads, vast tracts of space given to road traffic in cities and fundamental problems of safety are possible to “hack” (fix, amend) as soon as it is acknowledged that the car is not a natural fact [18] that we need to design “around”. An alternative and more radical design option would turn such design options on their head by considering ways of reducing the speed on busy roads, reducing the number of busy roads or of giving preference to players by finding ways of “freezing” the traffic system.

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We further suggest that Pokémon GO could be redesigned to not only prevent players from playing while driving, but also to prevent players from stacking into a car to cruise between different parts of town to play (a common practice during special events). It is also exceedingly easy to problematize recurring Pokémon GO mega events that many people choose to fly to. Other suggestions for redesigning Pokémon GO could include rewards for playing in your immediate surroundings (e.g. for repeatedly playing in the same area) or for playing together with the same group of players. Moving around to play in different locations (in the city or in the world) could be disincentivized by reducing scoring or the frequency of Pokémon encounters (possibly to zero), e.g. an initial paucity of Pokémon’s when you arrive to a new place and start to play. These changes would actively promote locally situated playing practices and make the game more rewarding for those who are less mobile and who move around in the same environs every day (for example children) while decreasing the benefit for “Pokémon tourism”. As already mentioned, Pokémon GO already takes into consideration several aspects that can be seen as sustainable including making it impossible to play Pokémon GO when moving at speeds that significantly exceeds normal pedestrian speed. In their exploration of neo-cartographic approaches to making maps for playful and gameful experiences, Coulton et al. [14] point out that digital maps in games and elsewhere have as of lately been based on the Google Maps service—whose primary function is to be a road atlas. They argue that this is inappropriate because if the maps are used for an entirely different purpose, then the map/mapping service should be designed with that particular purpose in mind. However, in their examples of alternative maps that are designed for play and for playful pedestrian exploration, also Coulton et al. tend to view car traffic as a ‘natural fact’ that can only be dealt with by avoidance. In one of the showcased maps, trafficked roads along with water was marked as “hazards” and were drawn in red. In another map the same trafficked road is given a playful ‘lava’ texture to signify danger. Motorized traffic, which is the underlying safety issue, is however never questioned. Coulton et al. [14] claim to take inspiration from the Situationist notions of ‘detournement’ and ‘dérive’ “in order to remap the city for play” (p. 160), but their remapping efforts never strays beyond current limitations for pedestrians. There is great potential of using these types of approaches in a more radical way by e.g. remapping cities and re-appropriating space that is currently off limits for play. The city and its characteristic features such as traffic and different modes of transportation are revealed implicitly in Wolff et al. [64] who describes different attempts to engage citizens with smart city data through gamification. In a project to develop MotionMap, an app intended to demonstrate ‘Cloud enabled mobility’, the developers used an “urban gaming strategy” and let users provide data of their movements. However, the design of the game Turing’s Treasure is oblivious to the realities of how citizens experience the actual city. The original game design by Wolff et al. [64] was not only based on the play feature of Waze, an app for car users, but was initially designed with car users in mind. However, the features most requested by game participants were features useful for pedestrians and cyclists, including “road reports generated through automated and crowdsourcing methods”

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(p. 58) that in turn could help users to plan alternative routes and to ride more safely in problematic sections (ibid.). We see a potential for using this type of gamified approach to citizen engagement with data in a much more radical way. It could potentially be of great use in the transitions that cities need to make in order to fulfil set climate and sustainability goals. In this paper we have examined the intersection of playable and sustainable cities and we have specifically explored how these two visions could be aligned. We furthermore believe that not only can these two visions be aligned, but that they effectively could support each other. Our recommendation is therefore that researchers and practitioners who today work towards one of these visions should come together and work towards creating sustainable playable cities—cities that are accessible, attractive, joyful and fun for all citizens who live there.

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From Smart City to Smart Engagement: Exploring Digital and Physical Interactions for Playful City-Making Joel Fredericks

Abstract Drawing on the collective knowledge, skills and creativity from a variety of top-down and bottom-up stakeholders is required to address the needs, wants and aspirations of people in the 21st century city. Collaboration and interaction in the citymaking process is a key driver for both, the acquisition of skills and knowledge, as well as creativity and innovation. Novel ideas, specific skill sets and knowledge that contribute towards innovation, collaboration and creativity are increasingly based at the intersection of fields, disciplines and cultures. Government organisations and private enterprise have acknowledged that the involvement of both top-down and bottom-up stakeholders from a diverse range of backgrounds and cultures achieves more equitable city-making outcomes and supports communities in pursuing local identity and self-governance. This book chapter proposes to present a critical review of projects and installations that deployed situated digital technologies within public spaces, as a mechanism to engage passers-by into playful interactions. Additionally, examples of physical installations will also be discussed, such as urban art projects, yarn bombing and parkour that adopted DIY and guerrilla tactics to engage people in public spaces. Using the insights derived from the review, the book chapter will present a smart engagement framework for playful city-making consisting of digital and physical mechanisms for greater collaboration. Keywords Smart engagement · Community engagement · Middle-Out engagement · Hybrid · Playful cities

J. Fredericks (B) Design Lab, Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_6

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1 Introduction Cities and regional centres are faced with various social, cultural, political and environmental complexities. Affected by increasing demands, cities around the world are placed under pressure to carefully manage existing public assets and space, as well as designing and developing public infrastructure that is required to service a variety of urban dwellers needs. Over the past decade a variety of smart cities initiatives have been introduced to create efficiency within cities and regional centres with the intention to foster a smart economy, smart mobility, a smart environment, smart people, smart living and smart governance [15]. The objective of these ‘smart approaches’ is to advance regional competitiveness, improve transport networks, boost information and communication technology (ICT) economics, streamline public services and enhance human and social capital for greater participation of urban dwellers. While these smart cities initiatives have contributed to progressive improvements of city governance and public infrastructure, they are however, predominately driven by techno-centric, top-down approaches that often overlook other human needs [4, 51]. On one hand, the growing pervasiveness of ICTs and the internet of things (IoT) within urban environments has provided new opportunities for urban dwellers to interact, access information, and communicate with each other. On the other hand, these types of technologies that drive smart innovation are also limited to the types of interactions people feel comfortable with, therefore not engaging a variety of demographics. Urban dwellers are also challenged by a myriad of digital media competing for their attention, such as urban screens, digital billboards and media facades. This type of ‘digital urban spamming’ can cause a disconnection between urban dwellers and smart technologies. Smart cities initiatives need to transcend from a model of smart technology for the automation of public services and collection of data, to a smart engagement approach that connects, engages and empowers communities through playful interactions incorporating digital and physical mechanisms. This book chapter takes the format of a conceptual essay presenting a critical self-reflection of digital and physical installations in public spaces for the purpose of community engagement. Community engagement is the process of either informing or collaborating with a variety of stakeholders, such as government agencies, private enterprise, community organisations and everyday people in decision-making around governance, policy, infrastructure and lifestyle [30, 32]. Community engagement can be facilitated within a local context and can also form part of a largescale engagement program for national and international projects. Building on the notion of ‘smart engagement’ the chapter discusses the use of digital and physical mechanisms to engage urban dwellers for playful city-making. The concept of city-making is to design and create liveable and public spaces, foster cultural practices and enhance community identity for urban dwellers across all demographics. In the next section, the chapter will position the role of playful city-making within the context of collaborative community engagement. The concepts of middle-out engagement and hybridity will be discussed, which outline the benefits of ‘collec-

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tive knowledge’ from a variety of stakeholders for the acquisition of localised skills and information, as well as creativity and innovation. This is followed by a critical review of situated digital technologies deployed within public spaces, and examples of physical interactions, such as DIY and guerrilla tactics, yarn bombing, parkour and urban art projects that engaged passers-by and local communities into playful interactions. Using the insights derived from the review, the chapter will present a smart engagement framework for playful city-making consisting of digital and physical mechanisms that can: (1) match the context of the urban environment; (2) addresses the needs and behaviour of urban dwellers; and, (3) foster engagement and playfulness in public spaces.

2 Middle-Out Engagement and Hybridity for Collaboration Drawing on the collective knowledge, skills and creativity of urban dwellers would help address the needs, wants and aspirations of people in the city-making process. Implementing approaches, such as middle-out engagement and hybridity for citymaking would be a key driver for both, the acquisition of skills and knowledge, as well as creativity and innovation. It is this approach that informs the notion of smart engagement for creative and playful interactions in the city-making process. Middle-out engagement draws on the collective knowledge of all actors to provide greater opportunities for more inclusive and collaborative community engagement processes. This approach supports the integration of objectives from top-down decision makers (e.g. government organisations, private enterprise) with those of the everyday people (e.g. represented through citizens and community groups) from the bottom, meeting somewhere in the middle [30, 31]. The middle-out concept has been used by researchers and industry professionals in computing, engineering, biochemistry, and biological and social sciences. Middle-out assumes that there is knowledge from higher and lower information channels that can collectively come together and meet in the middle [54]. Digitally Augmented Pop-up [31] is an example of a middle-out project incorporating top-down and bottom-up stakeholders in the design, implementation and deployment of a localised community engagement program (Fig. 1). The engagement agenda was initially directed from the top-down, however the objective was to also include local knowledge (bottom-up) from people who lived, worked and socialised within the area. A series of informal meetings were conducted with a variety of top-down and bottom-up stakeholders in order to identify people’s needs, wants and aspirations but to also forge relationships and begin a co-design process. Following this, a series of workshops were conducted with stakeholders to design the engagement program and develop the engagement activities. Employing design thinking methods, workshop participants interacted with the proposed engagement activities through experience prototyping and bodystorming techniques [83]. This

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Fig. 1 Digitally augmented pop-up Fredericks et al. [32]

allowed the participants to provide feedback around the designs and how the engagement activities could be adapted to fit within the context of the local community. The project was deployed across a variety of socially diverse locations, where participants had the opportunity to interact with engagement activities, which had been contextually designed around the engagement topic. Evaluations of the study showed that a middle-out approach enabled top-down and bottom-up stakeholders to communicate their ideas, integrate their objectives and be involved in the design, implementation and deployment of the community engagement program. The middle-out engagement concept is broadly regarded as a solution to the decreasing levels of confidence towards government organisations and private enterprise as a way to encourage engagement and collaboration from both top-down and bottom-up stakeholders. Essentially the concept aims to leverage on each other’s existing expertise, assets and resources to achieve equitable and better outcomes within cities. Hybridity has been examined in the context of post-colonialism, cultural globalisation, multi-cultural identities and the politics of anti-racism. According to Rubdy and Alsgoff [76] the concept of hybridity is “…intrinsically linked to the notion of identity for multicultural individuals and the present volume examines the ways in which language choice represents varying degrees of multiple identities and mixed cultural origins” [76, p. 3]. Wiethoff and Hoggenmüller [92], employed a hybrid approach through the deployment of hybrid media architecture that displayed real-time information within public environments (Fig. 2). The study investigated the use of ambient displays, which are more integrated and non-intrusive, as opposed to high resolution advertising displays that demand constant attention and often fail to continually capture the attention of urban dwellers. The objective of the study was to use ambient displays to learn about urban dwellers and their identities, their habits in public environments, and their preferences and behavioural patterns. Ambient displays were deployed in a variety of environments within the context of work or leisure situations to identify people’s perceptions and reactions to the real-time data displayed. Evaluations of

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Fig. 2 Hybrid media architecture. Credit Hoggenmüller [44]

the study showed that ambient hybrid media displays were successful in presenting real-time data to different audiences. The hybrid approach also has the potential to integrate data visualisations through ambient media architecture that engages a variety of urban dwellers, as an alternative to the high-resolution media architecture deployed in cities, that causes display blindness or becomes digital urban spamming. The concept of hybridity has been described as diverse because it aims to include intercultural mixtures and permits the inclusion of modern forms of hybridisation [84]. This is particularly topical within the context of smart engagement and citymaking as the urban fabric of cities encompasses new forms of technology and the way in which people interact with it. City-making within the framework of smart cities is emerging as a key issue for researchers, educators, private enterprise and others, as government policy increasingly seeks to address many social, economic and environmental issues faced by cities on a global scale. Implementing the concepts of middle-out and hybridity for playful city-making provides opportunities to engage people who are physically and socially excluded. These include: (1) physical limitations, such as people living with disabilities—e.g. motor, vision and sound; elderly people—e.g. physical frailty, cognitive function; children—e.g. heights affecting their ability to reach, colour perception and cognitive function. (2) social limitations, such as disadvantaged youth and women—e.g. homelessness, domestic violence; people identifying as LGBTQIA—e.g. acceptance, violence, equality rights; refugees—e.g. displacement, trauma; migrants—e.g. acceptance, community; and Indigenous people—inequality, health, land rights. Including a diverse range of demographics has the ability to identify practical, sensitive, innovative and playful city-making solutions to support participation and interaction for disadvantaged communities in urban and regional areas, investigate the role of digital inclusion, and create solutions for sustaining diverse inclusion for the future [42].

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3 The Current Community Engagement Climate Cities across the world have a rich history of culture, traditions and social behaviours that are juxtaposed by rules, social conventions and laws [11, 61]. If we were to jumpback or jump-forward in time we would observe that cities are forever evolving and changing as a result of contemporary influences, environmental factors, social changes and political agendas. However, what we could learn from the past and potentially implement for the future is the value of local knowledge and experience. The process of community engagement, which is generally undertaken by topdown stakeholders, such as government agencies and private enterprise aims to obtain public feedback and opinions on the planning and development of infrastructure within the built environment. Governments across the developed world legislate that formal community engagement be undertaken to inform communities about proposed infrastructure developments, environmental assessments and legislative changes [40, 50, 68]. Within the context of most westernised countries, such as Australia, Europe, Canada and the United States, the overall engagement during the city-making process can often be reduced to informing people only, therefore limiting community input from a variety of bottom-up stakeholders [41, 52, 53, 62, 65]. This is often attributed to political agendas of elected representatives, private enterprise business interests and profits, and bureaucratic power-brokers [10, 17, 45]. Existing methods widely used to facilitate localised community engagement, such as town hall meetings, focus groups, citizens juries, public hearings, surveys and online platforms [74, 75, 89] often restrict engagement to a small sample of demographics within local communities. This causes a significant disparity as opinions and input from within the wider community, including time poor citizens, younger people, immigrants, refugees, people with disabilities and culturally and linguistically diverse people are not considered and included during the engagement process. It has been argued by many engagement practitioners and academics that current methods and activities are top-down, outdated, non-inclusive, fragment communities and rarely achieve equitable and genuine outcomes [23, 46, 50, 55, 75, 78]. According to Abelson et al. [1] community engagement needs to distance itself from passive information sharing to fostering active and engaged citizen participation. A common theme within the community engagement debate is the need for new approaches that emphasise collaboration and deliberation between topdown and bottom-up stakeholders. Employing a collaborative and playful approach that involves a variety of demographics and stakeholders can enhance the overall engagement process and spread the responsibility and ownership of decision making [28, 66].

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4 Digital Engagement for City-Making In the current digital age, existing technologies used within urban environments offer significant opportunities to encourage more creative and playful interactions in the city-making process [26]. In particular, focusing on engagement and interaction with urban dwellers around localised community topics, themes and ideas. This has been achieved using specific approaches, such as virtual environments [38, 39], augmented reality [3, 67], urban screens [79], media façades [7], projections [86], and distributed voting systems [43, 58, 80, 87]. In recent years, alternative methods have been employed for interactive, playful and engaging activities within public spaces. These contemporary approaches have inspired participation and interaction through temporary installations in the form of situated digital technologies, that is technologies embedded within public spaces for engaging urban dwellers around community topics. This is also commonly referred to as pop-up urbanism [34], tactical urbanism [59], DIY urbanism [9, 14], guerrilla urbanism [12], temporary urbanism [24], and insurgent urbanism [47]. Situated digital technologies are often deployed in public spaces as information kiosks, pop-up shops, food trucks, farmer’s markets, and interactive installations. These can be either temporary in nature or more permanent installations used as mechanisms to attract the attention of passers-by. In particular, temporary situated digital technologies have been used for participation in public spaces with the intention to attract people and promote playful interaction. Dance-O-Mat [36], created by a local collective of artists, designers and academics, was a temporary situated intervention, which was located in several urban spaces following the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand (Fig. 3). Consisting of a makeshift dancefloor controlled by a coin-operated ex-laundromat washing machine, and equipped with lights and speakers, the installation was deployed as part of a community-driven initiative to utilise temporarily vacant urban spaces [90]. People wanting to interact simply inserted a coin into the washing machine, plugged their smartphone in and chose a soundtrack to play, allowing them to dance publicly for 30 min. The informal nature and situatedness of the installation allowed urban dwellers to determine their own level of interaction and negotiation of the space. Dance-O-Mat was successful in bringing communities together, encouraging playful interactions, and creating a sense of ownership within urban spaces impacted by a devastating natural disaster. Caldwell et al. [13] developed the InstaBooth (Fig. 4), which was deployed to engage people through a combination of situated digital and physical interaction and visualisation channels. The intention of this approach was to enabled urban dwellers to participate and provide feedback through a channel that they felt comfortable using, whether it be digital of physical. The interaction channels were designed in a way that encouraged participants to be creative and playful through physicals drawings, which were then displayed as digital visualisations, and digital channels that inspired people to interact in order to see their results displayed.

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Fig. 3 Dance-O-Mat. Credit Kinghorn, via Flickr [57]

Fig. 4 InstaBooth. Credit Caldwell et al. [13]

Similarly, Fredericks et al. [32] developed Pop-Spot (Fig. 5), which also deployed situated digital and physical channels within public spaces to encourage urban dwellers to interact around community related topics. The interaction channels consisted of a mechanical drawing robot that displayed participants results with happy and sad emoji faces; a selfie app to answer engagement questions, which encouraged participants to be creative and playful with their pictures. The pictures were also displayed on a large LED screen were participants could see their responses, and in some cases, people took pictures of their selfie responses. Additionally, a freehand chalkboard was also used for participants to write responses or draw pictures. The project demonstrated that using a combination digital and physical interaction channels has the ability to create a narrative that encourages playful engagement from passers-by and a greater cross-section of the local community. The mixed reality (MR) tent is an example of a situated installation used as an onsite participatory workshop space for urban planning projects in Paris, France [88] (Fig. 6). Merging real and virtual worlds, the MR tent consisted of traditional urban planning tools combined with virtual interactions, in order to visualise proposed

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Fig. 5 Pop-spot Fredericks et al. [32]

Fig. 6 MR Tent. Credit Valerie et al. (2009)

urban designs, which were located on the development site. A variety of stakeholders were recruited as participants based on their professional background and association to the project, which is different to other situated installations, which investigated in situ and organic interactions from passers-by. The interactive components embedded into the MR tent however, created an environment, which fostered open discussion, collaborative planning, multimodal interaction and individual expression from novice and expert users. What these approaches have in common is the application of digital technologies to improve the use and experience of existing urban infrastructure and to provide new opportunities for connecting, engaging and interacting with urban dwellers in cities [8, 18, 82]. In the following section the book chapter will now turn to reviewing examples of physical installations deployed in public spaces through DIY and guerrilla movements and urban art projects.

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5 Physical Engagement Grassroots movements championed by local communities are increasingly taking matters into their own hands with growing evidence of bottom-up approaches to citymaking experienced around the world. Such movements are in response to political decisions, imposed restrictions, proposed changes, social transformation and new opportunities in contemporary society. Taking ownership of public spaces for community activism has allowed people to voice their discontent, show power in numbers and to ultimately stand-up against top-down decision-makers. Throughout time, public spaces have been used by urban dwellers as a place to congregate, socialise, or, in many cases, mobilise and express oneself, both peacefully and with force against authorities. Public spaces can act as a platform, where people can be seen and heard. Human actions in public spaces can be associated with theatrical performances. This therefore implies that playful interactions creates publicness, where the action is offered up for examination by those passing by or within the space [49].

5.1 DIY for Playful Community Activism DIY and guerrilla movements [9, 14, 12, 60, 70] generally championed by bottomup activists challenge conventional rules, regulations and traditional mindsets. The characteristics of these movements encompass a range of bespoke design interventions for the purpose of appropriating public space. The intention is to create a sense of place to improve quality and experience, increase social cohesion, inspire urban innovation, enhance bottom-up community interactions, and foster community driven activism [27]. With the intention of making a statement and raising awareness around localised issues a number of small-scale interventions have hacked local communities through interactive and playful installations. The #WeLiveHere20171 project in Sydney, Australia was a temporary light installation within a public housing precinct. The project involved residents who were protesting the demolition and redevelopment of the precinct, which would see over two thousand people moved to alternative public housing. Up to five hundred residents participated by placing coloured mood lights in their windows to express how they felt about the proposed redevelopment and to send a clear message of protest to the government (Fig. 7). The aim of the project was to bring the wider community together, ensure people’s stories were told, and to highlight that vulnerable communities were affected by urban renewal projects [63]. The project encouraged local residents and surrounding neighbourhoods to congregate within the local streets to view the light installations. Not only did the installations bring people together it also created a sense of playfulness surrounding the precinct as local residents celebrated their community through this unique storytelling process. 1 http://www.welivehere2017.com.au.

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Fig. 7 #WeLiveHere2017 project. Credit Wholohan [91]

Fig. 8 Vote YES. Credit Foth and Turner [29]

A bottom-up community driven example of DIY activism in public spaces could be seen during the Australian marriage equality postal survey in 2017. ‘YES’ campaigners hacked public spaces through ‘playful’ DIY chalk rainbow crossings and ‘VOTE YES’ markings in front of post boxes and rallies in public spaces [37, 77] (Fig. 8). In some cases, these DIY undertakings were classed as controversial, an act of bullying, or viewed as pushing a one-sided agenda towards those not in favour of the ‘YES’ campaign. The act of creating these rainbow crossings in public spaces made the campaign playful and fun by raising awareness around the topic. Urban dwellers exposed to these DIY creations who were either in favour or against the marriage equality campaign posted on social media platforms and expressed their opinions and feelings. Irrespective of individual beliefs or political preferences, the ‘YES’ campaign’s playful hacking of public spaces through DIY activism was successful in bringing not only the LGBTQIA community together, but also people from various cultures, backgrounds and walks of life. Yarn bombing is a type of community activism, which employs colourful exhibitions of knitted, crouched or weaved yarn, rather than paint or chalk (Fig. 9). Often

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Fig. 9 Yarn bombing. Credit Wiredforlego, via Flickr [93]

considered illegal, this bottom-up approach is intended to reclaim urban features in retaliation to top-down political, economic and consumerist consumption within urban environments [64]. Guerrilla gardening is viewed as another form of bottomup community-driven activism by bringing urban dwellers together for a collective cause [72]. Community groups or individuals target public or private spaces either neglected or poorly designed, in order to illegally transform the space by planting vegetation without permission [2]. Tracey [85] argues that guerrilla gardening fosters community activism by merging into a larger movement of living things, “No longer a passive consumer, you become what has never been needed more: an active citizen engaged in your environment” [85, p. 1]. Drawing on aspects of open performances where public space is used as a canvas for artistic expression, parkour is an urban play-form, which creatively re-interprets the use of traditional urban furniture and structures for physical interactions [27]. Rawlinson and Guaralda [71] point out that parkour deliberately uses obstacles for creative expression and ownership of public spaces, therefore producing experiences, which empower spatial equality. Like the DIY and guerrilla movements, ‘insurgent public spaces’ is another example of community-driven activism, where urban dwellers take ownership of public spaces that are regulated, controlled and maintained entirely by the top-down [47]. An example of this was seen in 2008, when a group of students protesting against police brutality occupied a prominent public square in Taipei, Taiwan. In a defiant act against top-down government control the students created their own liveable village, complete with cooking facilities, classrooms, urban garden and sleeping quarters. According to Hou [47] “The rubric of ‘insurgent public space’ provides a way for us to define and articulate these expressions of alternative social and spatial relationships” [47, p. 12]. These bottom-up community-driven movements focus on alternative expressions, activities and relationships within public spaces. What these examples highlight are the opportunities afforded to playful community activists through the occupation of public spaces. In many cases, these movements are deemed illegal or classed as a public nuisance. However, it is the ownership of public space and disruption caused

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Fig. 10 Slumlord project. Credit Barnes, via Flickr [6]

to authorities, which have produced outcomes, forged alliances and, in some cases, informed change.

5.2 Urban Art for Playful Engagement Championed by street artists and local communities, many cities and townships around the world have seen a variety of small and large-scale urban art projects. Urban art is a creative expression of social, political and localised views through the exhibition of artistic works in public spaces and entire neighbourhoods [69]. Originating as a bottom-up community driven movement, urban art began at a neighbourhood level to address local issues and communicate messages of discontent to authorities. Thanks to the social phenomenon of photo-sharing, popularised through social media platforms [33], urban art has become a global movement allowing artists to track each other’s work, establish connections and collaborate with local communities [19]. The Slumlord Project in Baltimore, USA was an urban art project initiated by street artists to rejuvenate communities affected by neglected and abandoned buildings, high rates of crime and social exclusion (Fig. 10). The project was promoted as an ‘unsanctioned public art festival’, where artists were invited to curate installations within local communities to draw the attention of the local government, private investors and companies, in order to raise awareness around the respective issues [73]. Working in collaboration with local communities, street artists were able to curate their installations based on the input and feedback of the people, who live there. The project successfully raised awareness around the issue, prompted action from property owners and the local government, and encouraged local communities to get involved. Several large-scale urban art projects have been installed across entire neighbourhoods and regions with the intention of storytelling, celebrating local environments, collaborating with communities and encouraging urban revitalisation. A neighbourhood devastated during Hurricane Katrina in 2008 and a victim of several years of disinvestment from the local government was used as a canvas for an urban art project

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Fig. 11 Ian Strange final act. Credit Kingham, via Flickr [56]

in New Orleans, USA. Motivated by a local artist, and curated in collaboration with other artists and local residents, a block of desolated houses was transformed into an urban art installation. Each specific work represented a political statement around the impacts the hurricane had on the local community, as well as the much-needed investment required. Drawing crowds from across the USA, the project effectively highlighted the poignant realities of poverty and devastation engulfed by the local community. Australian artist Ian Strange developed a large-scale urban art project spanning across six different cities in the USA affected by the global financial crisis. The project, coined Suburban, consisted of eight interventions incorporating abandoned suburban homes. Working in collaboration with film crews, volunteers and local communities the project produced interventions, which visually articulated the symbol of a conventional home, as well as the hidden truths, which lay behind the walls [16]. Suburban questioned the stability of the built environment by highlighting its vulnerabilities, and how it impacts the communities that live within it. The overall project contributed towards reinvigorating local communities through creative contributions, which revitalised desolated suburbs [48]. Building on his investigation into the suburban home, Strange developed the urban art project Final Act (Fig. 11), which transformed four suburban homes ravaged by the 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand [5]. Based on the success of the Suburban project, Strange was commissioned by Canterbury Museum to curate a project, which tells a story about these homes, and to create a ‘last action’ before their demolition. The project was part of a wider collaboration between local residents, community groups and volunteers, who produced light-based installations within the four homes [21]. Final Act was a celebration of ‘home’, it created a sense of life and spirt and visualised a story, which can be read locally and universally around the ‘home’ and how it is perceived as an icon. The PUBLIC Silo Trail in regional Western Australia is an example of a largescale urban art project traversing across a regional heartland (Fig. 12). The project exhibited a series of national and international artworks on four 35-meter-high grain storage silos on agricultural farms. Working closely with local businesses, farmers

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Fig. 12 Public Silo trail. Credit Deano [20]

and communities, the project aimed to enhance cultural tourism, build relationships between townships, and encourage economic growth [25]. The project was successful in gathering and revealing local stories by connecting a network of regional towns through a large-scale urban art project. Since the launch of this project in 2015, the organisers have been contacted by hundreds of community members suggesting other regional locations, which would benefit from these types of urban art projects [22]. Different to the community-driven activism discussed earlier, these urban art projects are examples of alternative approaches to appropriating public spaces and engaging local communities. Motivated by collaborating with a variety of stakeholders, these examples demonstrate the value of playful storytelling through creative expression.

6 Smart Engagement Framework Linking to the previous examples of situated digital technologies and physical urban interventions this section now presents a smart engagement framework for playful city-making 2 . The works previously discussed found that digital and physical installations located in public spaces provides opportunities to encourage passers-by to stop and interact. For example, giving people a reason to play promotes interaction and reduces fear of social embarrassment [81]. These types of installations can be appropriated towards the specific needs and objectives of demographics to engage people and encourage playful behaviour. Wouters et al. [94] investigated how people interact with public interactive systems, specifically focussing on the honeypot effect. The study analysed physical body movements that influenced sound effects, music and projected visualisations. As a result, the study produced a ‘Honeypot Model’ as a mechanism to inform contextual, spatial and social aspects that influence engagement with public interactive 2 Adapted

from the Middle-Out Engagement framework [35, p. 214]

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Fig. 13 Smart engagement framework for playful city-making

systems. More importantly in the context of passive observations—where passers-by notice the playfulness of people interacting with the technology, and also engaging with other people, therefore capable of creating curiosity and prompting people into engaging in the activity. The framework will further build on this model, which can be used as a guide for top-down and bottom-up stakeholders to design and deploy digital and physical installations across various locations and demographics for playful city-making. The framework consists of three components: Community Engagement; Urban intervention; and Decision Making (Fig. 13). Each stage is made up of different concepts that require consideration when designing and deploying digital and physical installations. Each of the stages often inform each other and do not necessarily occur in a linear process, instead they are encouraged to be developed in parallel in order to tailor the engagement to the specific location and objectives. Community Engagement—The first stage focuses on the objectives, context and demographics using a middle-out approach. This includes: • Collaboration between top-down and bottom-up stakeholders; • Understanding the local context of the deployment, demographics and the engagement objectives; • Raising awareness through community networks.

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Urban Intervention—The second stage takes into consideration the deployment location, design elements and digital and physical interactions using a hybrid approach. This includes: • Location, deployment timing and the duration of the study; • Designing engagement activities that have a clear direction; • Digital inputs and outputs that encourage playful interaction and display the results through a digital channel; • Physical inputs and outputs that encourage creative interactions and draw the attention of passers-by; • Hybrid interactions that combine both digital and physical interactions for a digitally augmented experience; • The types of playful interactions observed during the deployment; • The discovery of recurring themes arising from participant contributions. Decision Making—The third stage identifies the results of the deployment and contribution from stakeholders in order to collaborate on key decisions for citymaking. This includes: • Lower the barriers between top-down stakeholders (government agencies, private enterprise) and bottom-up grassroots movements (local citizens, community organisations) by enabling an open, approachable, safe and informal channel, which is credible and trustworthy; • Set the context of the city-making topics in collaboration with a variety of stakeholders, and offering participants the chance to provide opinions and feedback on the spot; • Integrate new approaches for further collaboration—casting a wider net across top and bottom stakeholders and collectively bringing people together; • Create community ownership—similar to the DIY or guerrilla approaches, by bridging the gap between top and bottom contributions and by removing the stigma associated with community-driven action; • Create greater levels of transparency for the city-making process; encouraging partnerships between all stakeholders, where all parties are accountable; offering real-time access to localised discussion; and visualisation of the aggregated engagement data.

7 Smart Engagement to Inform Playful City Making The examples discussed throughout this chapter have delineated the opportunities associated with the use of situated digital technologies and physical installations, in order to encourage playful interactions in the city-making process. This can also translate into wider city-making strategies and initiatives by facilitating a dialogue between top-down and bottom-up stakeholders. There are significant opportunities for situated digital technologies and physical installations to enable a smartengagement approach to city-making, where conversations are either: initiated by

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government agencies (directly or via support of the private sector), but designed and rolled out in continuous cooperation with local communities; or initiated by local communities, but supported by top-down stakeholders. Smart engagement has the potential to play a vital role in facilitating the community engagement process—and consequently encouraging participation from urban dwellers—namely in three key ways: 1. By lowering the barriers between government and communities—opening a direct, approachable, safe and sufficiently informal, yet credible and trustworthy channel for community dialogue; 2. By setting the context of the topics discussed, offering urban dwellers the chance of literally stepping into the discussion—and towards the decision-making process; 3. By improving the overall transparency of the city-making process and accountability of all parties involved—by offering clearer and up-to-date access to realtime discussion status, poll results and opinions expressed through dynamic visualisation of the data collected through digital, physical or hybrid channels. By combining a smart engagement approach with the three factors above, situated digital technologies, physical installations and hybrid channels used for community engagement for playful city-making has the potential to go far beyond traditional or commissioned deployments, such as online platforms and urban media art. This therefore points towards opportunities for future research, which evaluates the longterm impact as these approaches become more commonplace. Investigating their effects on a larger scale and over a longer period of time will identify the extent to which the broader community dialogue impacts on the future of human-centred cities. The framework also has the potential of being applied across various contexts and scales beyond playful city-making. This may include any type of engagement, which involves mediation between different groups of people in the decision-making process. As contemporary society continues to explore ‘smart approaches’ (i.e. smart cities, smart urbanism, smart communities) and ‘smart learning’ (i.e. artificial intelligence, machine learning), there are significant opportunities to further enhance collaboration through smart engagement. The blending of digital and physical interactions truly provides a digitally augmented experience, which may engage wider cross-sections of society, increase collaboration, and foster more inclusiveness during any type of engagement process. By offering this framework, which focuses on collaboration amongst a variety of stakeholders for playful city-making, rather than simply focusing on one-sided agendas, it is the intention that the framework will contribute towards future research efforts within the playful city’s arena.

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Part II

Designing and Experimenting with Playfulness in Urban Environments

Beta Blocks: Inviting Playful Community Exploration of Smart City Technologies in Boston, USA Sean Peacock, John Harlow and Eric Gordon

Abstract Cities are increasingly becoming tech playgrounds. In partnership with civic and government institutions, tech companies are deploying ‘smart’ technologies in the urban environment, in the name of improving the everyday experience of cities. But for playgrounds, there is often little room for those who live and work in cities to experiment and play with these technologies before or after they are deployed. In this chapter, we draw inspiration from exemplary projects and previous work in detailing a pilot participatory smart city project called Beta Blocks, taking place in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. Facilitating participatory imagination with residents for a future Boston, Beta Blocks invites communities to explore and play with smart city technologies through four key components. First, a physical installation exhibited at different locations across the city. Second, community-designed experiments with smart tech in three neighborhoods in the city. Third, a structured exploration program to design these experiments. Fourth, direct engagement with a number of community organizations and tech companies to foster productive relationships during and after the project. Keywords Participatory smart cities · Playable cities · Urban experimentation · Civic engagement · Right to the city

1 Introduction Cities are dynamic entities constituted by active, fluid processes [12]. As early as the 1960s, urbanists recognized cities as comprising a complex social and physical fabric reflecting the ever-changing practices of their inhabitants [18]. Today, change remains codified in cities as formalized processes of urban design lead to repeated S. Peacock (B) Open Lab, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK e-mail: [email protected] J. Harlow · E. Gordon Engagement Lab, Emerson College, Boston, MA, USA © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_7

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modifications and regeneration of the public realm. Beyond these processes, cities remain important locations for experimentation, improvisation and appropriation of the public realm for all manner of social, political and cultural ends [13, 17, 19]. One of the most sweeping experiments we are witnessing in cities is the integration of ‘smart’ digital technologies in the public realm, where digital sensors, monitors, and screens connected to the ‘internet of things’ are deployed at the municipal scale [7, 10]. These smart technologies can materialize as new street furniture and city infrastructure, but can also be hidden from plain sight—for example, as sensors built into parking meters, lighting columns, and traffic lights. Such technologies invite a wealth of new possibilities for enhancing the experience of the city. However, more often than not, the municipality installs them without the consent—or even knowledge—of its residents [10]. Moreover, while there are a wealth of possibilities for their use, rarely do they serve a ‘civic’ purpose, beyond gathering data to allocate scarce resources and optimize asset management [8, 21]. Scholars have launched criticism at smart technologies—not just for the limited benefits their installation offers to residents [11], but the new threats they pose to privacy and public space [21, 38, 39] and the neoliberal logics and assumptions that often accompany their implementation [15]. Indeed, such technologies are rarely accompanied by anything other than bland and corporatist visions for ‘smart cities’ to become efficient, seamless and machines, fully controllable by already-powerful actors [35]. Increasingly, there have been moves to counter the ‘inevitability’ of smart city visions [16] with approaches that invert the political economy, and open-up the black-box nature of these technologies to experimentation. One such approach is the ‘playable city’, introduced in 2012 in Bristol, UK as a series of creative installations that appropriated digital technology to afford playable interactions with city infrastructure, including pedestrian crossings, lighting columns and stairs [40, 41]. Another approach involves repositioning the city as an ‘urban laboratory,’ discussed by Karvonen and van Heur [20, p. 380] as an opportunity to experiment with “processes and innovative actions” related to the city, e.g. environmental protection, social interaction, academic research, and policy design. This chapter reviews previous work and draws inspiration from exemplary projects to introduce an ongoing participatory smart city project called Beta Blocks. An 18month pilot project for which design work began in the fall of 2018, Beta Blocks is launching to the public in the spring of 2019. This project is taking place in Boston, Massachusetts, a city of 685,000 residents on the east coast of the United States reputed for technological innovation and research. This project involves a series of collaborative experiments with smart city technologies, realized through a partnership of city residents, local government, tech companies and the academy. The sections that follow introduce the project’s aims and objectives with respect to relevant academic work and case studies; introduce the project’s several components; set out current progress made on the project’s implementation; and reflect on how the project is infrastructuring participation with city residents through a series of playful encounters with and around smart tech.

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2 Background Work 2.1 Digital Technologies and the ‘Smart City’ US cities are increasingly turning to ‘smart’ digital technologies for solutions to problems they are facing. This turn is foregrounded by a narrative of increasing technological automation of routine tasks, the ‘datafication’ of civic decision-making, and a steady decrease in local government funding, resources, and capacity following the 2008 Great Recession [24, 25, 38]. In particular, cities are encouraged by the capabilities of sensors, actuators, and monitors to gather vast amounts of data about urban phenomena in quantities human cognition cannot match [32]. Such technologies appear to offer promise for tackling challenges as diverse as waste management, traffic flow, air pollution, energy distribution, physical mobility, economic development, and even social cohesion [10, 32, 37]. These technologies are ‘smart’ because of their association with the discourse and vision surrounding ‘smart cities’, a concept that is quickly becoming ubiquitous in global policy arenas. Scholars identify several common aspirations of smart cities: the integration of technologies into the city fabric, precise sensing of environmental conditions to achieve maximum efficiency of city resources, and an overarching neoliberal logic of urban management [10, 15, 21]. Enabled through continued production and analysis of data, the smart city vision seeks to transform cities into efficient, fully controllable machines: in other words, knowing the previously unknowable, and controlling the previously uncontrollable [32, 37]. Such is the pace of their adoption that cities becoming ‘smart’ is sometimes portrayed as inevitable [16]. Some suggest we are already witnessing ‘feelers’, such as the ubiquity of portable, inexpensive technologies like the smartphone [10]. The dominance of smart cities as an academic and policy discourse has provoked substantial critical interrogation. DiSalvo and Jenkins [5] note that many of the promises surrounding smart cities are “mere rhetoric” oriented at technology companies and city officials, and thus offer little value for ordinary people. Others go further in highlighting significant privacy concerns with smart cities and their top-down imposition on communities without their knowledge [39]. For Hollands [15], smart cities pose an inherent tension between empowering people and empowering neoliberal interests, often only achieving the latter. Suzuki [36] and Sennett [33] concur that smart city visions often do not have a diverse set of people in mind, which raises crucial questions surrounding their ‘right to the city’—that is, their right to participate in decisions that affect them, explicated by Lefebvre [23] and scholars since, e.g. [13]. A recent report co-written by two of the authors of this chapter summarized these concerns in the context of collaborative smart city-making to pose the question: how might we make smart cities “civic” [8]?

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2.2 Smart Cities, Playable Cities The concept of the ‘playable cities’ is gaining traction after being coined in Bristol, UK in 2012 by Watershed, a cultural producer and venue in the city. According to Watershed, the concept aims to “put people and play at the heart of the future city, re-using city infrastructure and re-appropriating smart city technologies” [40, 41]. It unashamedly serves, then, as a direct response to the corporatist and efficiency-driven visions that frequently accompany smart cities [27], by calling for a reimagining of what smart city technologies could mean for people and for cities. In doing so, it seeks to reclaim ‘what technology is good for’ by placing play and experimentation front and center in the smart city discussion. It follows from this line of reasoning, then, that in the playable city, technologies do not always have to be serious or driven by a profit motive [21]. Moreover, they do not always have to be efficient or polished—instead, they can have their “seams” and imperfections exposed [3], and can provide an opportunity for “meaningful inefficiencies” to result from their divergent design [9]. Scholars have since picked up and furthered the concept of the playable city. Anton Nijholt concurs that a playable city challenges the notion that the sole objective of deploying technologies in the public realm is to achieve greater efficiency, positing that they can also be used for “social, entertainment, and fun reasons” [27], p. 1). Rooted in the open-ended potentials afforded by new technologies, he calls for an approach grounded in promoting exploration, experimentation and play with and through smart city technologies [28]. For Nijholt, interaction beyond the purposes intended by the designer of the digital artefact is key to a playable city. Moreover, beyond just experiencing smart city technologies, publics should have a role in shaping them [22]. In other words, residents should be able to go beyond existing, prescribed modes of civic participation and have the “opportunity to hack the city and use the smart city’s data and digital technology for their own purposes” [27], p. 1). This frame also offers potential for engagement with the city by politically marginalized groups, such as children [29, 30]. There are now numerous examples of projects across the world that align themselves with the idea of creating a playable city. In Bristol, a design studio installed an interactive screen on a pedestrian crossing to turn the routine activity of crossing the road into a playful and surprising encounter. ‘Stop Smile Stroll’ used interactive technologies to capture the attention of people waiting to cross the road and sought to connect people with their surroundings, countering the idea that digital technology often leads to the opposite [40, 41]. In Austin, Tokyo, and Bristol, ‘Shadowing’ involved giving city lights the ability to remember movements of those who passed under them (shown in Fig. 1). The project involved augmenting street lights with the ability to record and play back shadows, as an invitation to stop, play and interact with and through technology [4]. Finally, ‘Hello Lamp Post’ sought to animate the public realm by inviting people to converse with street furniture. Brought to seven different cities across the world, the installation encourages passers-by to strike up

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Fig. 1 The ‘Shadowing’ installation in Bristol, UK Credit Watershed (n.d.)

a text-based conversation with lampposts, post boxes and cranes using the SMS application on their phone [14]. All of these examples seek to appropriate mundane and taken-for-granted street furniture encountered in the city for playful ends, with the objective of surprising and delighting passers-by and creating novel and memorable digital interactions in the public realm. While physical expressions of a playful city remain mostly confined to artist installations thus far, the light-touch nature of projects coupled with the novel potential they offer in the context of smart cities suggests hope for implementation of similar initiatives on larger scales by municipalities.

2.3 The Right to Make the Digital City The scholarly work on playable cities resonates with recent calls for the ‘right to the digital city’ [6, 34], building on Lefebvre’ original proclamation. This asserts that in respect to digital technology’s increasing influence on cities, publics should have the right to shape the digital layers of the city in addition to the physical. Ingrid Mulder gives the example of open data to suggest how cities are becoming “playground[s] for innovation, transformation […] and co-production of public services” through experimentation with digital technology [26]. For Mulder, this has to involve residents—crediting the “living lab” approach taken by Rotterdam, the Netherlands as enabling co-creative practices for publics to play a meaningful role in decision making and help shape the city through open data [26, pp. 163–4]. We believe an opportunity remains for novel research in the bridging of the smart city (for instrumental efficiency) and the playable city (for intrinsic enjoyment) through a foregrounding of the ‘right to the digital city.’ In other words, we are interested in how residents might be involved in shaping a smart and playful city, which can serve a useful purpose beyond play, but does not lose sight of the potential for technology to create enjoyable and meaningful urban experiences. In doing

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this, we advocate for venturing beyond bland and corporatist visions of urban futures, while recognizing the need to motivate the participation of a diversity of stakeholders, including technology companies, city government, as well as residents.

3 Taking Inspiration from Three Urban Contexts Here, we wish to investigate, in more detail, our inspirations from other cities that have transgressed traditional smart city visions to imagine creative possibilities with technology in the context of play.

3.1 Playable City Austin (Austin, Texas, USA) In 2018, the Cultural Arts Division of the City of Austin, Texas launched their ‘Playable City Austin’ initiative, funded by the US National Endowment for the Arts. The project engages communities through a series of workshops, presentations, and installations in reimagining how smart technology in the city could work for playful ends. They explicitly draw inspiration from Bristol, UK, in seeking to appropriate the public realm for the purposes of play—and, specifically, “invit[ing] residents to rediscover their environment and connect with the people around them… by re-using City infrastructure, through technology that encourages play” [4]. So far, workshops have sought to contextualize the playable city concept in Austin by inviting local creatives to develop and present “playable interventions at the intersection of art and technology” [4].

3.2 Play the City (Amsterdam, Netherlands) Play the City is a network of technologists, designers and social scientists who seek to experiment with gaming as a method of community engagement in city making. Play the City sits alongside hundreds of organizations and collectives that plug into the Amsterdam Smart City project, a public-private partnership that provides a “platform [for] proactive citizens, innovative companies, knowledge institutions and public authorities to shape the city of the future” [2]. Since 2010, Play the City has developed dozens of games that blend digital and physical assets to invite stakeholders to discuss complex urban issues through the medium of play. They have deployed their games nationally and internationally. One of their most popular games is the ‘Smart Citizen Game’. This game is “about the potential use of citizen data for the making of cities among residents” and involves participants navigating datasets, utopian/dystopian scenarios, and a fictional narrative to interrogate the role of data in imagining alternative city futures [31].

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Fig. 2 Road intersection transformed as part of a pilot Superblock in Poblenou, Barcelona Credit Students of CTPA (2018)

3.3 Superblocks (Barcelona, Spain) Superblocks is a project started in 2016 by the City of Barcelona that seeks to reclaim public spaces gradually lost to cars for pedestrian use. Its tagline ‘Let’s Fill the Streets with Life’ captures the current state of a city where there are few informal green spaces; pollution, noise and immobility is on the rise; and motorized traffic dominates the streets [1]. Drawing inspiration from tactical urbanism approaches, the project implemented experimental interventions to turn intersections into parks, streets into ‘green hubs’, and to prioritize active transit (example intervention shown in Fig. 2). It does not call itself a smart city project, but shares several attributes of such projects, including creatively reimagining public spaces, promoting alternative forms of urban mobility with the help of digital technologies, drawing on a consortium of public-private expertise and configuring more sustainable urban futures [1].

3.4 Summary of Cases These cases serve as inspiring examples of how cities are embedding values of play, public participation and experimentation into city initiatives. They pursue different goals, from placemaking and environmental sustainability to civic education and social cohesion; however, they share a vision of making the city more inclusive, inviting and open to change. Moreover, all of them involve—to varying degrees—the careful consideration and sensitive configuration of digital technologies, to reimagine how they could better serve their respective communities. Together, they draw on the principles of the playable city and challenge conventional smart city visions to put forward a radical, experimental and participatory proposition for remaking the city.

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4 Configuring the Beta Blocks Project For the remainder of this chapter, we provide details of Beta Blocks, our participatory smart city project that launched to the public of Boston in June 2019. Beta Blocks drew inspiration from previous approaches to smart cities and playful cities to plan a series of collaborative experiments with smart city technologies ‘in-the-wild’ and scaffold playful encounters with and around smart tech in the city. However, configuring our project was more than the details of its design; it included the institutional relationships that enabled that design to happen. Managed by the Engagement Lab @ Emerson College, the project is a direct collaboration with private corporations and city government in Boston, and involves significant input from city residents.

4.1 Establishing the Partnership The university partner in the project, Engagement Lab, focuses on play-based engagement for civic learning and action. The Lab is home to two of the authors of this chapter and located in downtown Boston, a short walk from City Hall. We primarily work with government and civil society organizations to design media and tech-based processes that enable a range of stakeholders to participate meaningfully in public life. We have had a long-standing relationship with our City, specifically with the innovative Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics. When that department issued a request for proposals to design a creative process for engaging residents in smart city planning, we were eager to submit, and won the bid for an 18-month pilot project that started work in the fall of 2018.

4.2 Sharing Value What set our proposal apart from the competition was the balance between its function and whimsy. While we set out to design something playful, novel, and delightful, we were careful not to propose a project that would involve tactical urbanism without appropriate scaffolding. This project is a structure for data gathering, experimentation, and insights, with deliberately designed spaces for play within those boundaries—or in other words, the “meaningful inefficiencies” of civic life [9]. Play does not necessarily mean lacking in structure. In fact, it is the successful establishment and communication of boundaries and goals that enable comfortable freedom of thought and movement. Within this paradigm, we developed a triangular value structure that includes city government, technology companies, and publics. The value for city government is input into urban technologies before they are purchased and deployed citywide. Until now, there has not been a mechanism to engage publics in conversations about what

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technologies do, the social and economic costs, and the potential benefits. The value for technology companies is in situ user testing. It is very difficult for technology companies to see their products in action within urban contexts prior to deployment. There has been appetite for companies to cede control to communities to question and experiment with their tech, because there are so few opportunities for this kind of contextualized input into their products. Finally, there is value for publics to engage in conversations about urban technologies and the future of their city, and to be empowered to question and experiment in a playful and proactive (rather than reactive) way. This triangular value structure is key to the sustainability of the project. As citymaking requires collaboration across all three, it is difficult to imagine a process that cannot assure value across these positions. For this reason, we spent considerable time early in our design process on refining and communicating this value to the various stakeholders.

4.3 Preliminary Events Our first experiment with the concept was conducted during the 2018 HUBweek art and technology fair in Boston. We were invited to design an interactive experience as part of an event called the ‘Robot Block Party’, which included about a dozen robotics companies demonstrating their new devices. The event attracted about 300 families and professionals over the course of four hours. For this, we created a card game to motivate questioning about the strengths and weaknesses of robots. When people entered the exhibit space, they were handed a key ring with eight cards on it. Each ‘collectible’ card featured a fictional robot and its strengths and weaknesses. For example, the ‘BFFbot’ “supplies conversation and interaction in an AI-Powered, fully programmable AI platform.” The ‘Just a Van Man’ can “carry anything through any kind of traffic.” Players received decks of cards and were challenged to find a project representative (wearing a hot pink shirt) to find solutions to urban problems (shown in Fig. 3). Each person held a sign representing a different problem, such as “How might we make the city less lonely?”, “How might we make it easier to get around the city?” or “How might we make the city healthier?” Players chose a robot from their collectible cards, and told a story about what it could do to address that problem, in exchange for a keychain token. To win the game, they had to collect five tokens and then return to one of the stations for a mega-robot challenge in which they articulated their own urban problem and combined two or more of the robots in a narrativized solution. Those who completed the game were entered into a raffle to win a ride in an autonomous vehicle. The card game experience demonstrated an appetite among players to imagine new possibilities with technology. Both youth and adults told fantastical stories that captured their fears and desires of a technological future. For example, we asked the prompt, “How might we make learning more fun?” One player responded to this by saying, “I love the fact that [BFFbot] simulates human touch… It’s like having a

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Fig. 3 Public engagement at the ‘Robot Block Party’ event in fall 2018 Credit author’s own

pet I don’t have to pick up… [It could] be great company and would cheer me on.” While these stories do not necessarily serve as direct input into policy decisions, they represent a tenor or attitude about technology that can be helpful in decision-making. Learnings from this event inspired the subsequent design of Beta Blocks, described in the following sections.

5 How Beta Blocks Works In this section, we elaborate on the various components of the Beta Blocks project. In doing so, we connect with inspiration from precedents and previous work, explain our decisions in the design process, and describe our intentions to invite playful and interrogative explorations with smart city tech. Put simply, the purpose of the project is to enable consideration about whether and how technologies appear in the public realm. It takes place in four distinct components. First, a physical installation exhibited at different locations across the city to showcase the project and recruit participants. Second, the installation of technology in three ‘Exploration Zones’ in the city where publics will be invited to experiment with smart tech in partnership with the city and tech companies. Third, a structured exploration program working with residents to design those experiments. Fourth, direct engagement with community organizations and technology companies to foster productive relationships at all stages of the project.

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5.1 The Travelling Exhibit The travelling exhibit is the visual anchor for the project and serves as a point of entry for the majority of participants. The central focus of the exhibit is an inflatable sculpture, measuring 9 ft (2.7 m) at its widest, 17.5 ft (5.3 m) at its longest, and 7 ft (2.1 m) at its tallest point. Amorphous in its shape, it has been sculpted with various extrusions in a deliberate attempt to resist simple definition and invite intrigue around its form (shown in Fig. 4). Its material is a durable, nylon, lavender-colored fabric that can accommodate heavy use in indoor and outdoor conditions. The project’s architectural research firm Supernormal co-designed and constructed the inflatable with a specialist custom inflatable fabricator, and the creative input of the project team. The inflatable invites visitors to engage with programming around its circumference. The striking appearance of the exhibit, combined with the materiality of the inflatable, is a deliberate design provocation, reflecting the shift towards digital technologies as nebulous, ubiquitous, and fraught with uncertainties. Moreover, the physical presence of a highly tactile and visually impactful object challenges the idea of technologies as hidden from plain sight and embedded in communities without public knowledge. The programming for the exhibit comprises five stations: See, Explore, Reflect, Gather and Tinker. See is where visitors enter the exhibit and encounter a scene in miniature form. Displayed on a pedestal with accompanying explanatory text, it positions the scene like a museum artefact for visitors to observe, interpret, and critique. In this way, it represents an accessible, low-effort first encounter with the exhibit and serves to builds knowledge and confidence in visitors to progress to the other stations. Explore asks visitors to engage with their city through the medium of data. To achieve this, Supernormal and the project team designed a ‘Data Exploration’ tool, displayed on tablet computers at this station. This tool introduces visitors to the idea that data can inform civic decision-making, before guiding them through visual-

Fig. 4 CAD image of the inflatable sculpture (left) and play testing of the inflatable sculpture (right) Credit Author’s own

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izations of several datasets on a navigable map of the city. These datasets include demographics, sidewalk conditions, walkability, and issues reported by residents to the City using its ‘311’ (issue reporting) service. Here, they can zoom in on their neighborhood to see data that is relevant to them. Our hope is that this will prompt reflection and discussion about the value of data, present an alternative perspective on their neighborhood and serve as a ‘warm up’ for asking questions in the later stations. Reflect encourages visitors to think about how the data they just experienced may affect them. This is achieved through the medium of play. Specifically, we will ask participants to consider a series of fantastical scenarios we will present and invite them to imagine what types of data (instrumental or whimsical) they would want if, for example, “the floor is made of lava” or there is an impending “zombie apocalypse”. Gather serves as an invitation for visitors to come together to casually discuss their experiences in relation to the civic values signalled through the other stations. This lighter structure offers a break from the more involved programming and provides an opportunity to reflect on the interactions they have had. The exhibit, but particularly this station and the final Tinker station, serves as a touchpoint for recruitment to become a ‘Tech Explorer’, a deeper community engagement experience (i.e. if you have enjoyed the exhibit, why not get more involved with our project?) To this end, we will display postcard invitations to join the Tech Explorers at this station (see the Tech Explorers section below). The final station, Tinker, is an opportunity for visitors to consider how technology and data could be used together to play a role in enhancing their community. Tinker’s activity asks one participant to be the “judge” who leads a group through the exercise. The “judge” asks everyone to choose a technology (e.g. bench, fire hydrant, air quality sensor) from the table, then rolls two six-sided dice to generate a noun and verb from two six-by-six matrices. The players then fill in cards that say: “My tech is a (chosen tech), and it (verb) (noun).” The docent at the exhibit then has the option of adding a “twist” card to the game (e.g. “it’s snowing”, add a second noun, etc.), before players are given two minutes to explain “How and why?” their chosen tech (verb) (noun). After the two minutes, players share their results and the judge chooses a winner, who becomes the judge for the next round. This activity helps make concrete the trend that ‘everything is everything’, with parking meters equipped with cameras and air quality sensors, or streetlights offering Wi-Fi. Additionally, it helps participants think about how and why they might use technologies in a whimsical setting, setting the stage to invite their further participation exploring and experimenting with actual public realm technologies in the ‘Exploration Zones’.

5.2 Exploration Zones The three Exploration Zones are designated areas in the city of Boston (approximately four square blocks each) in which a suite of ‘smart’ technologies will be installed,

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and where the Tech Explorers will implement their experiments (described in the following section). At the time of writing, technology partners include digital signage and an air quality sensor. The areas themselves are diverse in their character, history, and demographic makeup, taking in a residential neighborhood south of the city, a mixed commercial and residential neighborhood in the west of the city, and Boston’s Chinatown district. The City has relaxed permitting requirements in these zones to enable the placement of hardware without additional approvals. Youth-led tours of the Exploration Zones will help facilitate the participation of older residents, explaining the temporarily installed technologies, eliciting possible uses that create public value, and critiquing trade-offs with privacy or other concerns.

5.3 Tech Explorers A key component of the project is working with Tech Explorers. The Tech Explorers will include young people recruited and engaged in a four-week program that intersects with adult input and analysis at a culminating event. Tech Explorers will be recruited through their personal interest in their community, technologies, or city making to design and run experiments with the tech in the designated Exploration Zones. This additional, deeper layer of community engagement will forge partnerships with publics through co-creation of the project that goes beyond passing interest in the exhibit or external events. Tech Explorers will be advertized widely, through a combination of the travelling exhibit, social media channels, and direct community outreach (described in the following section). The intention of this multi-channel approach is to reach a broad range of residents from across the city. After signing up for the project, Tech Explorers will attend several workshops and meetups, facilitated by Engagement Lab, over the course of four weeks. Before the first workshop in each Exploration Zone, we will invite the Tech Explorers to tour the installed technologies on their own, and encourage them to take notes. This will also help facilitate the formation of teams during the first workshop, which centers on how specific technologies or locations in the Exploration Zone could be a platform for experimentation. Teams of Tech Explorers will then design, run, and evaluate experiments using the technologies in their respective Exploration Zone. Participating companies will support the four-week program by co-defining the realm of possibilities for experimentation with their technologies, and enacting interventions necessary for the experiments. Tech Explorers will visit the technology during the course of the experiments to observe impacts on the public realm and collect data. They will then attend an evaluation workshop to assess and discuss their experiments before a final culminating event, during which participating youth will showcase their work to adults for feedback.

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5.4 Community Outreach We see community engagement around the project as crucial for every aspect of this work. At the time of writing, we have reached out to over 60 organisations in the city through email, telephone and face-to-face contact. From this, we have nine partners, ranging from educational organizations, park managers, and community development corporations to commercial organizations, a neighborhood council, and a historical society. Our community engagement is focused primarily in the Exploration Zones, with supporting efforts in the neighborhood hosting the project launch event and with citywide groups and organizations who we expect would find our project relevant to their work, e.g. libraries, youth programs, and civic technology gatherings. With the exception of the launch event, community engagement for the traveling exhibition is less pressing, as we intend to synergize our installations with opportunities to reach large crowds attending other events, including block parties, art walks, and other outdoor events taking place during summer 2019.

5.5 Beyond the Pilot Period Rather than just being a one-off, our hope is that this project becomes an ongoing program in city government. Once all aspects are up and running, the research team plans to meet with government stakeholders to map the current city procurement process, with hopes to identify strategic intervention points for public influence on technology procurement. The wildest success scenario would be the dispersion of Exploration Zones and Tech Explorers across the city, with technology companies required to demo their products in Zones for public experimentation and feedback before they could win a city contract. In that universe, the data tool would become a matching function of crowdsourced community problems (e.g. using the ‘311’ system) with potential technologies of relevance. The research outcomes of Beta Blocks will include understanding the impact of the project on how participants view the city, whether it affects their trust in government, and if it changes perceived efficacy for community problem-solving. Differences between Exploration Zones and exhibition installations will be studied to determine how the project functions across diverse communities. Qualitative research with government participants will tease out any changes in perception or practice of public engagement processes, as well as any impacts on communication within city government about technology procurement.

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6 Concluding Remarks In this chapter, we introduced Beta Blocks, our participatory smart city project in Boston. We did this by reflecting on the inspiration that we have taken from other cities across the world in their efforts to make the public realm ‘smart’ and ‘playable’, and explicating how the project’s four linked components build on these efforts. Common threads running through the exemplary projects we discussed is a willingness to experiment with digital technologies, a desire to challenge the corporatist drivers of these technologies through introducing play, and a commitment to rethink the role that city residents can play in engaging with these technologies. By acknowledging and problematizing the criticisms that smart city projects regularly attract, we hope to be able to tackle them head-on and through our own project rethink what it would mean to weave digital technologies into the public realm. The four components of the Beta Blocks project serve to do this by inviting Boston residents to play and explore with digital technologies for real—challenging the notion that play is just make-believe. Through the partnership we have fostered between the academy, the city, the tech sector and residents, we are able to extend learnings from previous projects to offer meaningful and open-ended possibilities for experimentation with digital technologies before—rather than after—they are implemented. Moreover, the programming designed around our project will scaffold participation in the critique of digital technologies to ensure the project offers maximum value, utility and enjoyment to city residents. We would judge success of our project by the level and nature of engagement with its different elements, and the novel insights that flow from these engagements. Our hope is that the research outcomes would allow us to explore what it would mean for this kind of playful and exploratory engagement process to be rolled out more widely in the form of reconfigured city procurement processes in the city of Boston and deployments of similar engagements in other civic contexts. Through our project, we hope to test the idea that an approach to smart cities with experimentation and play at its heart can offer value to many different interests and understand better how this approach could ultimately rebalance power relations in the realization of smart cities in favour of those ordinarily left out.

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Playful and Playable Lighting in Smart Cities: Towards a Holistic Framework of Design Henrika Pihlajaniemi and Aale Luusua

Abstract In this chapter, we will explore the phenomenon of playful and playable lighting in smart cities. We will describe and discuss participant experiences of playful and playable lighting based on the design and evaluation processes of four case studies. These studies, we argue, provide aspects of participation, communication and self-expression; experiences of the sense of place, meanings and beauty; and activities of play and physical exercise. We will look at these case studies, and the aspects of playfulness and playability, through the lens of both smart city literature and relevant theories, and the practical experiences from the processes, examining also the afterlife of the case studies. We reflect on the presented case studies and their experiential aspects, asking: How can playful and playable lighting be made viable in a city? Finally, we conclude by presenting a design framework which consolidates aspects that, we argue, should be acknowledged, considered and addressed in the design and decision-making processes of smart cities, neighbourhoods and urban places in order to create playful experiences of playable urban lighting in a viable way. Keywords Playable lighting · Playful lighting · Smart city · Adaptive lighting · Interaction · Participation · Design framework

1 Introduction The concept of urban lighting has been in a process of rapid progress during recent years. This phenomenon is closely related to the advancement and implementation of LED light sources, new lighting control technologies and the wider aspirations of H. Pihlajaniemi (B) Oulu School of Architecture, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland e-mail: [email protected] A. Luusua Oulu School of Architecture/INTERACT, University of Oulu, Oulu, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_8

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smart city development. In our research, we have been interested in exploring the change from static lighting to dynamic, adaptive, intelligent, interactive and participatory lighting, and how this influences urban inhabitants’ multifaceted experiences of light in urban spaces and their experiences of the urban environment in general [23, 33]. For example, are these new types of lighting changing the way various kinds of individuals experience and use the city and urban places, and what do we know about the city? In addition, a key question has been how the knowledge and understanding of users’ experiences can guide the design processes in order to create well-being in smart cities. Due to their practice and user oriented nature, the methods we have utilised in our nearly a decade’s worth of research into the subject have been very concrete: firstly designing and building pilot installations in real world settings, i.e. in different kinds of urban environments; secondly, researching various individuals’ experiences with qualitative and participatory methods; and finally, reflecting on the design outcome and design process and analyzing participant data with grounded theory approach and through relevant theories. While our experience has gradually unfolded itself through these design explorations and participant studies, these new non-static lighting installations in urban environments have opened up many aspects of playful behavior and features of playability we now reflect upon in this chapter more carefully. The overall aim in this chapter is to create a design framework for viable playful and playable lighting. This will be achieved through a twofold approach. Firstly, we will illustrate through case studies experiential aspects which are related to use of playful and playable lighting in urban space. Secondly, the reflection of the projects, both at the time of completion and now looking back after some years, has revealed several critical issues and points of pain besides positive experiences. These critical aspects, many of which have been also raised in the literature of smart cities in a wider context, will be scrutinised and discussed in the chapter. The experiential aspects form a fruitful design potential, which with the understanding of the critical design aspects will aid designers and policy makers in integrating playful and playable lighting into future smart cities in a viable way. Playable lighting can be defined as a part of a playable city. Playable city, according to Nijholt [29], refers to a smart city, which opens its processes, infrastructure and data through applications of smart technologies to be modified by the citizens and used in user-based ways to improve the inhabitants’ daily lives in the city. These applications could be implemented in a playful and humorous way. Generally, we could define playable city or playful city as a city which generates well-being by supporting children’s and adults’ play and by allowing them to behave playfully in its places. Play can be considered to relate to six defining features: “spontaneity and intrinsic motivation, lack of practical goal or benefit, actions or thoughts in novel combinations, repetition of thoughts and actions, […] well-being” and behaving and thinking in a spontaneous and flexible manner (Nijholt [29], referring to Bateson and Martin [1]). Continuing from the aforementioned, we could define ‘playful and playable lighting’ as lighting, which, firstly, supports play in cities and playful behaviour of people; secondly, behaves itself playfully; and/or thirdly, allows citizens to modify and use it themselves in a playful way. Additionally, applying the

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Fig. 1 Playful and playable lighting positioned in the conceptual framework of the lighting types based on new lighting control technologies. Illustration adapted from Pihlajaniemi [33: 18]

definitions by Bateson and Martin [1], playful and playable lighting can support actions with spontaneity and intrinsic motivation and it induces actions which may lack practical goal or benefit. Furthermore, it can support novel combinations of actions and thoughts, actions relating to well-being, and spontaneous and flexible behaving and thinking. In order to understand the new concepts of lighting created by the emergence of control technologies, and how they relate to the playful and playable features of lighting, we employ here the categorisation presented in Pihlajaniemi [33: 18] and illustrate the concepts in Fig. 1 and in the following description. Traditionally, artificial lighting has been considered as a static element in nocturnal urban environments: at the cessation of daylight, lights are turned on, and they continue to illuminate steadily through the night, and turned off at sunrise, respectively. With control technologies, dynamic changes are enabled in lighting. When these changes are related and responsive to reference data, lighting is considered to be adaptive. These adaptations may occur to many kinds of data, for example, to presence data or to an idealised model of dynamic changes of the light spectrum and intensity during a day. When these adaptations happen in real-time and are based on analysis of the data, adaptive lighting can be considered intelligent. Further, adaptive and intelligent lighting is interactive, when there is explicit user interaction as part of the adaptation process. This can mean, for example, adjusting lighting with a mobile phone application to suit one’s needs. Additionally, when a user interacts with lighting and creates something meaningful, for example, artistic as an outcome,

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Fig. 2 Even static lighting can sometimes have playful expressions. The Figures project by Sami Huuskonen was designed for Helsinki World Design Capital 2012 event. The movable, humoristic lighting poles are owned by the city of Helsinki and they have adventured in different locations around the city. Photographer Ilpo Aalto, published on courtesy of Tehomet Oy

adaptive and interactive lighting is participatory. Now, continuing further, we add to this conceptualization the notions of playful and playable (Fig. 1). Even static lighting can sometimes express playfulness, as the humoristic luminaire poles of Fig. 2 present. However, the dynamic and adaptive technologies widen the range of possible expressions by introducing playful lighting behaviour into designers’ toolkits. These lighting behaviours can in themselves be playful, bringing enjoyment, visual interest and atmosphere into urban spaces through a dynamic play of light, shadow and colour. This playful lighting can exist without conscious interaction and participation of urban inhabitants. It does not need any effort or input from users of public spaces but can still bring them pleasure or invite them to play or even dance in the streets (Fig. 3). However, playable lighting, we argue, as a form of interactive and participatory lighting, requires people and their playful interaction to exist (Fig. 4). In the following sections, we will first, in Sect. 2, describe and discuss experiences of playful and playable lighting based on the design and/or evaluation processes of four case studies. These cover aspects of participation, communication and selfexpression; experiences of the sense of place, meanings and beauty; and activities of play and physical exercise. In Sect. 3, we will look at the cases and the experiential aspects of playfulness and playability through the lens of both smart city literature and relevant theories and the practical experiences from the processes and the afterlife of the case studies. We reflect on the presented cases and the experiential aspects, asking: How can playful and playable lighting be made viable in a city, especially in the long term? In the final section of the chapter we conclude by presenting a design

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Fig. 3 Playful Lighting. Dynamic lighting in a park route, which has disco-like, playful behaviour with rhythmically changing bright colours. Even though the lighting is not interactive, it can invite people to dance in the streets. Urban Echoes project will be presented as a case study in Sect. 2

Fig. 4 Playable lighting. Participatory light art by John Collingswood engages people to interact with people in another street. Lumo Light Festival 2018, Oulu

framework which collects the aspects, which we argue, should be acknowledged, considered and addressed in the design and decision-making processes of smart cities, neighbourhoods and urban places in order to create playful experiences of playable urban lighting in a viable way.

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2 Experiences of Playful and Playable Lighting in the City 2.1 Communication, Participation and Self-Expression The first case study we will present and discuss is the LightStories project [33, 36], conducted in winter 2011–2012. The pilot project was part of a four-year research project, where we collaborated with the city authorities and lighting companies. The main aim of the research project was to develop methods and design tools for adaptive lighting and to study the city inhabitants’ experiences of new lighting solutions in different kinds of urban environments. We got a suggestion from the representative of the city planning office that we could do something in a pedestrian-oriented street in the city centre, where new lighting with controllable RGB LED strips had been installed in 2009. Despite having a controller unit with many functionalities, the lights had only been on with blue or white light for some years. Only the decorative light elements—RGB LED light strips along the sides of the luminaire poles—were controllable and not the functional street lighting. We were confronted with a problem, which is currently fairly common, where the city had developed a controllable lighting system in an urban space and the authority to use it was more or less undefined: no one had neither a clear responsibility, the will nor the time resources to decide how the lighting was controlled and to perform the necessary actions for controlling it. What would be a meaningful appearance and functionality for the lighting, instead of the static blue light, which was there only because no one had bothered to change it? We came up with an idea of opening up the lights in the public street to city inhabitants’ own control, thus involving citizens to participate in designing the temporary appearance for the street at night-time. Additionally, we were interested in the communicative potential of lighting: how to invite people to express themselves and communicate with the light in a public space and how to support this communication with other media, with electrically published textual narratives? Light has a long history of being a medium of communication, stemming perhaps from the ancient systems of warning fires, which alerted urban inhabitants to approaching invaders from a distance. Today’s cityscape is equipped with lights which signal to us how to behave in traffic, warns us of danger by vehicles, and attract us to consume with their luminous messages. In order to meet our design targets in a playful way, the interaction concept of a web-based design tool, which allowed the users to compose their own lighting design—to play with colours, effects and rhythms—was created. In addition, the LightStories concept included sharing the stories as texts and real-time videos in the web site as well as publishing the texts in the public touch screens, UBI displays, in the city centre (Fig. 5). These screens accompanied by a free wi-fi, PanOulu, were part of Oulu’s smart ubiquitous infrastructure which helped Oulu to be selected into Top Seven Intelligent Community in the World 2012 [30]. In February 2012, the LightStories project was in operation during a period of 25 days. In the test period, 105 user-generated dynamic lighting designs were displayed on the pedestrian-oriented street. The participants’ experiences and feedback

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Fig. 5 LightStories project. A LightStory as seen in a streetscape: a one-hour long animation of the colourful lights composed by a participant. The accompanying textual narratives could be read in public touch screens of the city centre or in the web-page

on the project were collected with an online questionnaire, which was part of the procedure of making a LightStory (a lighting scheme and a published text), and with a semi-structured interview, where volunteer participants were invited. Additionally, the system use data and the LightStories, which had been created, were collected and analysed. A thorough description of the evaluation and analysis of the results is detailed in [36]; in the following, then, we will discuss some of the key findings. According to the participants, LightStories was seen as a fun, interesting, exciting and easy way to involve the citizens with urban lighting and with the design of their own environment. Only a small amount of negative feedback was given; according to these, the participation through LightStories was complicated, boring, or did not meet the participant’s expectations. The participants motivations to participate included both the pure pleasure of playing with light and colour and the pleasure of writing and publishing a story. Some were curious to find out how they could make a LightStory. Other motivations, which came up in the interviews, were the will to send a message to fellow citizens and to have an influence on their own environment and to enhance space visually. Communicating with light and colour was seen as very important and also rewarding, and the tool enabled participants to create a wide variety of unique lighting designs. Many participants visualised parts of their textual narrative through the rhythm and colours of light. With the lighting, participants expressed e.g. feelings, political opinions, memories etc. Even though playing with light was seen as fun by many, the expressed feelings sometimes also had darker tones as they ranged from joy to bereavement. In this way, play as an action is not only for joy, but can be part of a grieving and healing process.

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Several participants used LightStories for greetings, which often marked special dates, or were just meant to bring joy to a close person or to the people of Oulu. Published texts also included shorter greetings and longer stories, which described, for example, a memorable situation in the writer’s personal history (e.g. the memories of a summer holiday in Oulu in the 1950s, a story of two swans which the writer had taken care of throughout one winter), a topical theme (election day), or simply the writer’s current state of mind. The participants had varied attitudes towards the textual part of LightStories: some participants found it very inspiring, an important part of the process, and also useful as aiding the design; however, for some the play with light and colours was the primary part, and writing and publishing something was seen as unimportant, or as even an unpleasant necessity. Overall, the verbal and visual part complemented each other, attracting people with different strengths and abilities, and enabling users to express themselves accordingly. The LightStories project is an example of lighting which is both playful and playable. A passer-by can just enjoy the animations of light on the street, even without knowing the idea of the project. The knowledge, however, turns the passive role into active one, and a street walker or a citizen in general becomes involved with participatory light art as he or she starts wondering what the story behind the lighting is, and perhaps checks it from the website and even wants to participate in the playing and make his or hers own LightStory. Through the act of participation and social creativity, playable lighting can create a more meaningful relationship to an urban area. It can increase participant’s awareness of the area and improve their opinion of it, teaching people to think differently about their environment. In the LightStories case, the playable lighting resulted in a stronger identity for the street in their minds. The playful method for participation could be used to engage people in improving the quality of public urban environments by reporting of places, that need some fixing or improvement, and suggesting actions and solutions for developing the city. This strategy was envisioned in the Ituita-Congonhas Media Cascade project [42]. An example of a participatory demonstration applying playable lighting as projections was the Climate Wall, which was in operation during the climate conference, Beyond Kyoto, and provided citizens of Aarhus with the opportunity to participate in the ongoing climate debate. Passers-by could move projected words on the façade of Ridehuset, and create sentences relating to climate and carbon emission [9, 14].

2.2 Sence of Place, Aesthetic Experience and Meanings The second case study project, Urban Echoes, was a temporary park lighting installation, which was so well-liked that it finally remained functional for two winters (February 2013–May 2015) in the centrally situated park in Oulu, Finland. We had several research aims associated with the project. One starting point was that we were developing a graphical tool for designing adaptive and playful behaviour of lighting, which would react to people’s presence and movements (VirtuAUL by Toni Öster-

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lund and Henrika Pihlajaniemi, published in [31, 32, 37]). The idea was to employ algorithms so that the emerging lighting behaviour would contain features which would be reminiscent of natural light phenomena and surprise and delight users’ of urban spaces, besides supporting functional lighting needs. Thus, we used the park path as a testing zone for different lighting behaviours; in the park, there was no risk of accident with vehicles moving with fast speed. Furthermore, we could compare different adaptive lighting behaviours starting from a very straight-forward logical behaviour to more playful uses of light. For the testing, our park lighting installation was designed as a flexible system programmed to produce both even distributions of light and more uneven distributions consisting of different-sized patches of light on the park pathway and also emphasis on surrounding birch trees. Besides white light, colours were possible due to the RGB LED luminaires. We were interested in studying how the different variations of lighting would change the character of the formerly little-used pathway, and the park users’ experiences of lighting and the urban environment. The park’s central location, coupled with a questionable reputation as a result of some past crime incidents [19], made it an interesting site for our tests. We had an opportunity to study, for example, ways to enhance the experiential quality and the feeling of safety in the park. Furthermore, we continued here studying the theme of communicative lighting. In this case, however, we did not allow people to communicate themselves through light but used the installation to provide urban information in the form of colourful lighting. In the installantion’s default lighting mode, the effect colour of otherwise warm white lighting was indicating the temperature of the air with a colour scale (Fig. 6). Park users also had the possibility to be more active and interact with lighting in order to make it communicate other things. With their smartphones, people could make inquiries about current events in the city (Events mobile service) and the real-time activity levels of several locations in the city centre (Activity mobile service); they received an answer visualized as light playing on surfaces of the park path and trees around. The users could also read the same information in graphical and textual form on their mobile devices and continue to read more detailed information of the events. The third section of the mobile service—Lighting—provided a real-time visualisation of the lights and how much energy they consumed. Park users could access the Urban Echoes mobile service on the spot through scanning the QR codes on site. In the evaluation of park users’ experiences, we employed a mixture of qualitative methods, which we call experience gauging walking interviews, to enable broader knowledge and interpretation of people’s experiences. These were preceded by a preliminary interview. Our participants (15 in walking interviews) consisted of two age groups: young adults (20–29 years) and seniors (over the age of 65). We wanted to compare two clearly different groups, with different abilities to see and move and readiness to use digital technologies. The experience gauging walking interviews were participant observations combined with a semi-structured walking interview carried out on site with researcher-designed lighting scenarios (Fig. 7). We ran 14 different movement-adaptive or dynamic lighting scenarios and two mobile service based communicative lighting schemes while walking the path back and forth and discussing several themes related to lighting with our participants. The evaluation

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Fig. 6 Urban Echoes. The park path with the default lighting indicating the outdoor air temperature with colour coding

Fig. 7 Some of the tested scenarios during experience gauging walking interviews

methods, the lighting scenarios and the results are described in detail in [23, 24, 33]; in the following we will discuss the results from the perspective of playful and playable lighting. The interviewees had generally positive attitudes towards the use of adaptive lighting in park environments, and they saw it as beneficial in many ways. For example, the energy-saving aspect due to the absence of light or lower light levels when the park was unoccupied was seen as a positive value. This value was present in all the movement-adaptive scenarios, but by introducing the scenarios of more playful forms of adaptation after the first two scenarios with a very basic type of lighting, the participants found other new values in the lighting, as well. Interviewees valued many of the playful scenarios for their aesthetic character and the atmosphere they created to the urban nightscape. This was seen especially important in Finland’s climate with its long and dark winter. For them, it was seen to provide a comfort-

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able feeling and add well-being. Only one out of the 15 interviewees did not see this as being relevant and found the playful and aesthetic behaviour unnecessary in the park, but preferred the basic, strictly functional type of lighting. Generally, the only doubts presented by participants towards this type of new lighting technology were about the reliable operation and endurance of intelligent lighting systems and whether possible maintenance problems would cause costs to citizens. The basic purpose of pathway lighting in parks is to enable park users to move safely and comfortably in them. Movement-adaptive behaviour was generally seen as a pleasant and good way of illuminating. Many participants mentioned the importance of anticipative behaviour, i.e. light being always brightened ahead a walker, and not only where a walker is going. Also the perceptible, dynamic changes of light and the use of colours—as long as this type of playful behaviour was not too rapid—were seen as positive features. However, certain colours (yellow and yellowish green) in a scenario of only coloured light lessened the visual perception of the path for some interviewees. In addition, some doubts were expressed concerning whether the lighting would react in a right pace for cyclists, who would be moving with a faster speed than walkers. Movement-adaptive lighting was seen by several participants to enhance the sense of security in the park, and it was associated, for example, with the feeling of light preceding one. Additionally, the fact that movement-responsive light could reveal the presence of possible aggressors, had a positive effect to the sense of security. Interestingly, one participant described how she realised during our walks in different types of lighting that it was not the amount of light which mattered, but the atmosphere and sense of a specific place which was created by playful lighting and the use of coloured light, had a positive influence on the feeling of security. Sense of security was, according to some interviewees, context-related. The quality and familiarity of the environment, the surrounding light levels, activities, and social context, in general, were seen to influence sense of security. In the participants’ answers, playful features of lighting induced aesthetic experiences: the lively, dynamic patterns of light, reactions to one’s own movements, the constellations of small luminaires above the path reminiscent of a starry sky, the illuminated trees, and especially the use of coloured light in the scenarios. The playful lighting scenarios created many associations in the participants minds. Many associations were related to nature, for example, to aurora borealis. Other associations or meanings that emerged were, for instance, rag rug, disco and game-like feelings of moving in a constantly metamorphosing labyrinth. The atmospheres created by adaptive and playful lighting made the park a more meaningful place to the interviewees, and they could give it an own new identity, as was the case also with LightStories. All the interviewees found the idea of connecting information to park lighting interesting and saw positive values in it. The idea of lights communicating the prevailing weather or forecasting it was favoured by many. The legibility of the visualized information provided was an important issue, concerning the Events and Activity services. Supporting information for decoding the message should be on site. Participants presented further ideas for communicating with adaptive lighting, which were

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more participatory, for example, communicating ethical and ecological values—a personal demonstration. Also changing the colours of the park to express personal feelings and to create atmospheres was seen as interesting. Urban Echoes was not clearly playable lighting, as the interaction possibilities and chances to really play with the light were limited. The interaction with movementadaptive lighting of the park could be described as implicit interaction, as the system was responding by adapting the lighting behaviour to users’ needs based on their location, without any explicit effort or command [41]. The participants experienced this implicit interaction generally in a positive way; however, some interviewees were also wishing for more explicit interaction with light through gestures and movements, which would have allowed them to consciously play with lights. Furthermore, many appreciated the mobile-device-based explicit interaction through the Urban Echoes services; nevertheless, also wider interaction possibilities would have been appreciated. Especially the young interviewees envisioned creating designs with park lights and playing and composing with colours in the role of a light-DJ. The installation with playful lighting scenarios changed the character of the Otto Karhi park in terms of park-use. We spent altogether more than fifteen hours walking in the park with the interviewees, which gave us good insight into the changed social context. As indicated in the observations, the park had become a more active place where many spontaneous actions happened, in spite of the harsh winter conditions. The amount of people using the route increased clearly and people were, besides walking and watching the lights play, taking photographs, sitting on the bench, having a picnic, playing with lights, dancing, and staging cosplay (short for costume play). Once in the park, an old lady came to ask who had designed the lights and thanked for how much they delighted her. She told that she walks along the park every day, as she lives near and that she had wiped off the snow from the tree light boxes every time she walks through, so that the lights will not be snowed under. This gesture showed that adaptive and playful lighting can arouse feelings of belonging and positive communal identity, which increases concern over common public environment.

2.3 Play and Exercise Finally, we introduce the theme which is perhaps the most obvious form of experience concerning playable lighting: the play. How to induce actions of play in urban space with the help of light? We discuss here some projects from this perspective. Finland is a country where urban lighting is on and needed mostly when it is cold outside. Especially in northern Finland, where Oulu is located, a warm and dark evening or even night is a rarity. On the other hand, we have long, dark winters with snow coverage, which makes an excellent background for projections of coloured lighting. In the middle of long darkness and coldness, people need playful activities which attract them to spend time outside and physical activities, which make them move and keep them warm. The SnowLight project grew from this background.

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Fig. 8 SnowLight. Bodily interactions with light

Besides enjoying winter sports, snow is a material to build from. During winter months 2013, the Lumimaailma (Snow world) installation—a construction made of snow and ice, was situated on a marked place by the seashore of Oulu. The installation is meant for people—especially children—for climbing and sliding in the snow, and for enjoying the soundscape composed for the event. We created there an interactive and participatory light project, to attract people to use the snow installation during the dark time, as well. Thus, the lighting was physically playable with bodily activities, but had also other participation possibilities, which added other layers of playful use in the installation (Fig. 8). The RGB LED lights of the installation were controllable by visitors through the public touch screen situated on the market place, which allowed the users to choose colours for the lights. In addition, the lighting interacted as animation patterns with people climbing up the wall and sliding down the snow hills. The soundscape also influenced lights in one part of the installation, creating rhythmical alterations of light based on the music. Visitors were encouraged to take photos of the installation and of the interacting people, and to send them to be projected onto the adjacent theatre wall, as well as to be published on the public touch screens. These projections added an extra level to the interactive play of light, as the observers were attracted to join the game and to communicate with light in pictorial format. One aim of the project was to increase the citizens’ use of public touch screens, the smart city infrastructure of that time. We assumed, that the process of seeing real-time interactions with light according to one’s own design in public space, would be rewarding enough experience to attract users to the system [38]. The installation was used by children and their parents also during the dark time, so the lighting made a day-time playable urban space attractive in the evening, as well. The participatory system was also used, and the colours of lights were changed every now and then. However, it is hard to say, how much did the interactive behaviour

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Fig. 9 SnowLight. Climbing wall. The theatre with the wall projections is in the background

Fig. 10 SnowLight. The colour scheme of the installation was regularly changed by the users of the market square

of light while sliding down really add interest to the play and exercise or would the children have gained the same pleasure with static coloured lighting or with playful dynamism of light without any interaction. The photo projection part of the project could not be considered a success: besides the photos by a member of the research group no others were published (Figs. 9 and 10). Within the SenCity research project (2015–2017, www.sencity.fi), we got the chance to study the potential of intelligently controlled lighting and permanent smart city infrastructure for creating active play in an urban environment. The project was based on the idea that, in cities, lighting poles always situate in the locations where people move and act, and thus they offer a network of optimally situated electricity

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supply as well as communication near people. These networks could be employed for installing different kinds of sensors which gain and analyse data in real-time for smart city services. In this way, the intelligent lighting infrastructure could form a service platform—an Internet of Things backbone—in an intelligent city. In the SenCity project, intelligent lighting solutions and user-centric digital services were piloted in different kind of urban environments. Collaboration was done between research partners, companies and six cities of various scales around Finland [35]. Lahti, a city in southern Finland with 120,000 inhabitants, was a partner city in the research project. Lahti’s pilot area was a promenade along the harbour of the lake and it was developed into an active recreational environment for citizens. The area had an interesting history with an important inland harbour, rail traffic, and industry. The old lighting for the route was inefficient and light levels low. Part of the 1.5 km long route located in the middle of the industrial backyard-type area and the lighting conditions made those parts of the route feel uncomfortable and even frightening for users at night. The route was used regularly as a thoroughfare and a recreational route. As part of the development of the area, the old lighting of the route is being gradually replaced with new one, at the same time updating the infrastructure with new features: the lighting will be a combination of LED route lighting with intelligent control and PIR sensors for presence detection, and effect lighting of coloured light projections on ground using RGBW LED spotlights and DMX control. In addition, base stations for a free WiFi connection, web-cameras, loudspeakers and assembly spaces for extra sensors will be integrated in the smart wooden lighting poles developed by the project partners. During the project, we involved city representatives, business partners, and users of the area in a user-centric design and development process, aiming to gain insight from the local people about the present state of the design area and their ideas for its development. The details of the participation process and the resulting designs can be read in [34], nevertheless, here we want to present a design concept for LightGame, which was developed for the Harbour Promenade (Fig. 11), applying the smart infrastructure. In the participation process, a wish to use the lighting in activating children and other visitors in the physical sense came up. The resulting light game application concept developed by the research group was designed to allow gamers to chase dynamically living light dots on the ground and to earn points and rewards basing the interaction with light technologically to GPS location analysis of the mobile devices in the pocket. The principle combined the game activities in the physical real-world settings to augmented reality functions in a mobile phone. The principle has similarities with Pokémon Go game application, which makes players to walk even long distances engaged in the chase of virtual creatures, Pokémons. However, with the LightGame, the players’ actions do not only influence the virtual world by earning points and seeing rewards as augmentations on the mobile phone, but also change the elements in the real world, namely the visible lighting effects. The LightGame project is not yet realised as there has been delays in refurbishing the promenade and constructing the new smart infrastructure.

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Fig. 11 Vision for LightGame in Harbour Promenade, Lahti

Figure 12 summarises experiential aspects of playful and playable lighting that we have identified through the analysis of the four case study projects. In the case of playful lighting, city dwellers’ role can be described as a spectator, whereas with playable lighting, the role can be considered a participant. However, this division is not abrupt but sliding and both roles can coexist. In the figure, also the listed aspects of experience—place, expression, meaning and play—have their subtle variation in relation to playable and playful lighting. These different manifestations of the same experiential feature can exist also in parallel. Play is listed here as one feature of experience in order to emphasise our finding that the experience of playful and playable lighting is multifaceted and not only covers purposeful play or game activities, but playful behaviour or experience can be found in many situations. The LightStories project as an example of playable lighting demonstrated how participation created strong ownership to the streetscape for the people who themselves made their own unique lighting to the street, taking over the smart city infrastructure for their own purposes. Their participation involved self-expression and creating meanings, as they actively played with the design tool composing dynamic expressions of the street lights and published their narratives. However, the LightStories project can be viewed also from the perspective of playful lighting and from the spectator’s role. The streetwalkers could enjoy the playful behaviour of light without participating in or being aware of the project and it was creating a sense of place for them. If they, on the other hand, were familiar with the project, they could check the stories on-line and receive meanings that the participants had created. In Urban Echoes project, which can be considered playful lighting, park users could enjoy aesthetic expressions of light and receive meanings, such as learn about weather of the day. In the interviews, lighting in the park was considered as something

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Fig. 12 Experiential aspects of playful and playable lighting

to come to see for its own sake and to bring friends to enjoy. This spectatorship role was observed in the park many times, as single people, couples and families were witnessed having evening walks there and taking photographs. This brings up the notions of “noctambulisme” [2]—walking around in the city at night for its own sake—and “nocturnal tourism” [28], which are not new but emerged already with the spreading of electric light and illuminated billboards into urban landscapes. Even though Urban Echoes project was not designed as playable lighting in the same sense than LightStories and Snowlight, where users could participate in playing with lights with a design tool or user interface, or like LightGame in Harbour Promenade, where users were envisioned to actively play and interact with moving lights in the urban space, its playful lighting succeeded in changing the behavior of park-users, and inspired them to play with lighting by dancing, for example. The playful lighting changed their behavior to a more spontaneous and playful direction and had an influence on the sense of place in the park, as explained above.

3 Critical Design Issues in the Smart City: Viable Playful and Playable Lighting We have now shown through many examples how playful and playable lighting is related to many positive experiences in urban environments and how it can enrich the urban life, increase well-being and make citizens engage with their environment. In this section, we continue the reflection of the case studies and discuss also with a wider perspective the big question: How to make playful and playable lighting viable?

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Socio-cultural viability: One of the most important and problematic issues when it comes to designing and implementing playful and playable urban lighting, is the issue of cultural fit of the content and mode of interaction that is produced. This is due to the fact that—through control technologies—urban lighting is actually rendered into a medium, i.e. it is able to encode and express cultural content. This begs the design question of what kind of content should be displayed? And how can this content remain relevant in a long-standing installation? As playable lighting needs participants in order to be successful or even exist, a truly viable, long-term installation of playable technology in the city has to solve the issue of cultural relevance; or alternatively, as in the case of lighting festivals and events, make novelty and impermanence an essential, intentional part of the installation. Novelty has always been a factor in our case studies as well. LightStories showed us clearly that media visibility had a crucial influence on participation activity. A permanent installation would not have had the benefit of media interest. Long-standing installations of playable lighting are a remaining design challenge from the point of view of cultural viability. However, based on our work on urban technologies, we argue that a key design strategy to address this issue is to study and consider the cultural continua that are already present in and close to urban spaces, especially those that relate to urban playfulness. For example, a temporary installation that supports dancing in the street is clearly possible also in the cold, snowy conditions of northern Finland, as we saw with Urban Echoes. However, it would form an even more plausible concept for a long-term installation in the urban squares of China, where especially elderly people often gather to socialise and exercise through synchronised group dancing (e.g., [7]). Similarly, there are many practices in the West that are similarly existing cultural practices with long-standing, year-round traditions. SnowLight inspired adults and children to play together in a way that made cultural sense in wintry Finland; snow castles and sledding are activities that never go out of style. This might well be extended to year-round play in urban playgrounds, skate parks, picnics places, etc. Similarly, by moving our attention to animals, we might be able to support the play of dogs and their owners, a growing pastime in Western countries. The design strategy, then, is to recognise these continua of (playful) practice both on national as well as the local level and to design for them. However, these issues are also temporally affected. If the interactive content is permanent, who is responsible for maintaining it? If the content is temporary, whose task is regularly producing the new content or organizing and ordering the process of developing new playful and playable concepts using the infrastructure? In many city organizations, these responsibilities are not clearly defined, or resources are not associated for this work, which leads to underused infrastructures. Returning to our first case study, the seemingly successful LightStories, the current state at the street is rather illustrative in this respect. After the pilot project ended, the lights were set to a white colour for half a year. Then for a light festival in November 2013, a collection of LightStories that people had made was set there as a repeating program, which made the street look playful and colourful again. These colourful animations remain there still, as nobody in the city organization has had the knowledge nor time to do there anything. Passers-by do not remember why the lighting is animated

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like that. Gradually the RGB LEDs, which were purchased at 2009 representing the newest technology of that time, have started to die making the image of the nocturnal streetscape messy and ill maintained. In this way, the technology and playful content, which first upgraded the urban space and its image among city dwellers, is now due to bad maintenance degrading the image of the area. Economic viability: This aspect of technical and content-related maintenance is related to another crucial aspect for playable lighting, i.e. the economic viability of these installations - how can projects be funded in a sustainable way? Again, most of the well-known published projects that present intriguing examples of playable lighting are temporary, usually associated with an event lasting from couple of days to a month; most notably, these take place in light festivals. Cities worldwide are willing to invest public money in light festivals (Fête des Lumières in Lyon, Lights in Allingsås, Lux Helsinki, Glow Festival in Eindhoven, Vivid in Sydney, Luminale in Frankfurt, Valon kaupunki in Jyväskylä, etc.), which repeat year after year, and seem to grow steadily and succeed in attracting many visitors, some local but many even international. The same phenomenon is happening in our own city, Oulu, where Lumo Light Festival (www.ouka.fi/lumo) will have its seventh anniversary in November 2019. Last year, the festival reached 150,000 visitors in its various events [20]. Besides through public and third sector funding, festivals are also often sponsored by the marketing budget of private companies, which gain visibility through the event. The playful and playable lighting installations, which provide entertainment and pleasure for citizens, are realised by artist groups who offer their services as readymade packets for cities to purchase, thus not demanding a great deal of human resources or expertise from the city. In the short term, then, the issue of economic viability seems to have been solved. Once again, the issue, however, becomes more complex and the challenges larger when we think of playful and playable lighting as a permanent part of a city. Many, if not most, cities and communities want to be and be seen as smart cities (e.g. [16]). Lighting, then, can be seen as a part of the smart infrastructure of a city, where lighting poles and data networks become a backbone of the IoT (Internet of Things) infrastructure, where data is collected, analysed and used for different kinds of services. This, of course, offers many possibilities for playful and playable lighting solutions, as was shown in the Harbour promenade case. The question, however, emerges: who should own this infrastructure? How should its purchase be funded? How should it be maintained? Certainly, over the last decades, some very effective business models have sprung up around digital technologies in general. Simply put, the common model in digital services, introduced after the Dot Com bubble in the 1990s, is essentially an exchange where companies provide services, and users generate and provide a constant stream of personal use data for marketing purposes (customer behaviour analysis and prediction). Before this model was invented at Google (and subsequently introduced to Facebook and others) the company nearly toppled, despite its global reach and status as an industry-leader. Zuboff has argued that this novel business model has even created a novel form of capitalism, surveillance capitalism [48]. Can—and should—public infrastructure, such as playful and playable urban lighting, follow these business models where users’ sometimes intensely personal data is exchanged for services? This is a question

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that emerges as urban infrastructures begin to informate [47], i.e. have the capacity to not only deliver information through it, but to also provide information about its use, i.e. to conduct a form of surveillance. This ability to conduct data-led surveillance has been a concern since Clarke [8] coined the term ‘dataveillance’ nearly two decades ago. Thus, to argue for smart city technologies is to argue for an environment where everything is able to informate and conduct dataveillance, urban lighting included. This is an important question in smart city research, and, thus, for the research of playable lighting as well. It is no wonder, then, that critical smart city scholarship has recently focused heavily on the economical basis of smart urban technologies (e.g. [6, 16, 27]). However, it should be noted that this ability is not inherently a part of only market economy; a notable example is China, where dataveillance in public urban places is being heavily pushed by the government [39]. What is important to realise, then, that the necessity to fund playful and playable urban lighting may lead to unintended Trojan horse scenarios, where dataveillance is discreetly incorporated into public places. Ethical viability: The financial and ethical viability aspects of information (i.e. informating) technologies, then, are very closely intertwined through the issue of privacy. One of the main concerns here is that playfulness and playability, attractive qualities across various demographics, might be used to cover up privacy-breaching or otherwise undemocratic practices, intentionally or—as the case may be—unintentionally in the pursuit of offering otherwise viable installations. Other important aspects relating to ethical viability often have to do with inclusivity (e.g. [4]), which may or may not happen at several levels: on societal as well as the everyday level. In our case studies, the aspects of playfulness and playability were crucial in motivating citizens to take an interest in urban lighting and urban places. Thus, we can see a clear potential for the democratic inclusion of everyday citizens in smart city place-making and co-creation through the aspects of playfulness and playability in urban lighting. However, designers should bear in mind that the participation that the playfulness supports should ideally have a genuine, beneficent [45] purpose; at the very least, it should not be used as a token gesture to avert attention away from important issues [6, 27], but rather, to highlight them. Yet this is only one aspect of inclusivity, which takes many forms. As a public good, urban lighting could theoretically be used in a low-threshold manner. Similarly, it should be located equally in problematic and unproblematic urban spaces. Certainly, in the Urban Echoes case our participants’ views of the park, which, as we had priorly mentioned, had an extremely bad reputation as a site of rape incidents [19], improved significantly. This indicates that playful lighting might be a tool that could be utilised to improve places with negative identities. A further issue to consider is the suitability of the installations to many kinds of potential users, including those who are not able-bodied, or may otherwise feel excluded from public urban places. Safety, feeling of security and accessibility must be considered. While all our case studies touched on these issues, especially the senior participants in the Urban Echoes study brought these issues forward on many occasions. These were detailed in [24, 33].

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Material viability: Upkeep of permanent and semi-permanent physical computing infrastructures in a city is a perennial problem, especially due to the vastly differing time scales that are present in urban planning [25]. Issues that have to do with the material viability of playful and playable urban lighting encompass the activities and objects that occupy the same urban spaces as the technologies, and the very real and prosaic issues of material upkeep and climate-resistance (we have explored this from the point of view of other urban technologies in [44]). These are issues of fundamental importance. In our case studies, this was always present, sometimes even humourously: one of our Urban Echoes participants reported that whilst passing through the park previously, she had stopped to clean some accumulated snow off our luminaires that were on the ground. This was kind and touching, but obviously not all individuals do share her community-minded approach. Playful and playable urban lighting should be designed with upkeep in mind, taking into account the natural and human elements, even vandalism. Technological viability: Software updating and maintaining technological functionality in general, is a challenge for long-term installations of playful and playable lighting. As with other smart city technologies, the time-scales of city-making and software-making are vastly different (we have explored this in conjunction with urban displays in [25]). The planning and design processes for public urban places may take years. However, in the world of digital technologies, new software updates, new versions of hardware and even entirely novel devices and systems are released in close step with quarterly business cycles. This puts pressure on any socio-technical systems that utilise digital technologies. This issue can only be addressed through the adequate allocation on resources, leading us, once again, to the aspect of economic viability in the design of these systems. Ecological viability: It has been pointed out by many design scholars that the interdisciplinary field of design is inherently anthropocentric, and that this is also a major underlying factor in the design of smart cities. In the age of climate change and the destruction of species, many scholars in the smart city research community have discussed modes of design that would either take into consideration other life-forms, or even de-centre humans as the focus of design [10, 12, 26]. Indeed, the effect of lighting on humans and other life-forms is profound (cf. Ergonomic viability), and thus, any truly ecologically viable form of playful and playable lighting must consider and support the well-being of the non-humans and the world in which it is placed, whether its site is an urban park, a suburban street, or ski resort in the “wilderness”. Foth and Caldwell [13] have reminded of three critical aspects in this respect in the context of media architecture, which are applicable here: light pollution, energy consumption and e-waste. International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) defines light pollution as inappropriate or excessive use of light, which includes “Glare—excessive brightness that causes visual discomfort, Skyglow—brightening of the night sky over inhabited areas, Light trespass—light falling where it is not intended or needed, [and] Clutter—bright, confusing and excessive groupings of light sources” [17]. In addition to the fact that more than 80% of the world population lives under light-polluted skies [11], light pollution has several negative impacts to wildlife and the ecosystem [13].

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Another ecologically crucial design issue is energy consumption. Even though the change into LED lighting aims to reduce energy consumption, a rebound effect has been discovered: in a study period from 2012 to 2016, Earth’s artificially lit outdoor area grew by 2.2% per year, and the total radiance grew by 1.8% per year [21]. An ecologically viable design for playful and playable lighting must consider methods to decrease both energy consumption and light pollution in the form of skyglow. Again, this design issue relates to time: with the intelligent lighting control technologies it is possible to conceive lighting schemes, which operate only when needed. For example, it is unnecessary to have lights playing along a park route, when no one can see them. In Urban Echoes project, the playfully living light dots appeared on the park route surface as someone was entering the park. If no one was present as monitored by PIR sensors, there was only an evenly distributed route lighting with a low illuminance level not to make the path look dark and uninviting. Even though the intelligent technology often solves problems, it may easily lead to another ones. The smart solutions are composed of, besides LEDs, of many other digital devices, cables, sensors and electronic components. The abundant use of digital technology is gradually leading to rare earth materials depletion and after the material or technological aging of the devices and components, to the unethical dumping of this e-waste to developing countries [13]. Ergonomic viability: Closely relating to the above discussion of the negative influences of light pollution on flora and fauna, we want to continue with still one critical design perspective—ergonomics. Even though ergonomics is often linked to working environments [5], it can be expanded to cover all the situations where people are interacting with machines or artefacts in general [40], in this case, with playable lighting technologies. As a scientific discipline and design field, ergonomics (or human factors) aims to optimise human well-being and make systems and environments compatible with the needs of people [18]. The International Ergonomics Association (IEA) raises up two domains within ergonomics, which are of special interest while designing playable lighting: physical ergonomics and cognitive ergonomics. Zielinska-Dabkowska [46] has discussed many critical aspects of Media Architecture using light in the context of public spaces, which can be applied here in relation to playable lighting. Light has influences, both negative and positive, on human health and well-being. Physiologically ergonomic design prevents, for example, negative effects to safety by glary light sources or visually distracting content in screens. A connection between increase in traffic accidents and the presence of electronic signage and advertisements has been indicated in [15, 43]. The glare is not only an issue of safety, but it can cause visual discomfort for users of the city [3]. Besides glaring light sources, ill-designed dynamism can cause disturbance or even health problems, such as an epileptic seizure. This was an aspect which we took into consideration while testing to find the suitable parameters for light dynamism so that the users could not create stroboscopic effects or other unpleasantly fast changes of lighting while using our LightStories design tool. Furthermore, in the Urban Echoes project, we tested several playful lighting scenarios with our participants. Even though one of the scenarios literally made passers-by to dance thus inducting playful behaviour, it was clearly pronounced in the interviews (by smiling or laughing participants) that

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this kind of hectic dynamisms of bright and highly-saturated, coloured lights—“disco lighting”—could not be considered as a permanent solution, but only for an event or New Year’s celebration etc. This again raises up the question of temporality: whether we design playful or playable lighting solutions for permanence or for temporary, short occasions? It can be seen that the design criteria are slightly different in those cases. In lighting design field, a concept pair sparkle and glare is used to illustrate that even the same absolute brightness of light can cause either positive experience or negative experience, respectively, depending on the context. A bright object, which is beautiful and found meaningful and relevant to the context or situation can be considered attractive and enjoyable and is referred to sparkle [22]. In the same way, tolerance to glare and light disturbance is higher when it is a couple of days’ light festival in question than with permanent installations. Obviously, in Urban Echoes case, we did not choose the disco-light to stay in the park for two winters, but chose deliberately a scenario which offered, besides the pleasure of playful dynamisms of light, visual comfort for the park-goers. Nevertheless, maintaining visual comfort in urban space and prevention of light disturbance to neighbouring apartments are important design issues with temporary installations, as well. Finally, playful and playable lighting should not create excessive cognitive load for urban dwellers of different ages but to create interest, excitement, humour and enjoyment into urban space in a balanced way. It can be refreshing to be involved in playing with light or engaged in solving a riddle of lighting behaviour or a humoristic message in a screen, however, if these repeat every day and in many locations around city, will it turn to a strain? How long does the same joke, even good and clever, make one laugh? As the prices of screens and other media technology products are going down, we are witnessing their spreading into every street corner and side of a square in marketing purposes. Thus, while designing playful and playable lighting applications in already technologically crowded smart cities, it is necessary to consider the impact of each new lighting system and application to the overall image and the legibility of the city [46]. For viable designs, it is crucial to choose the right context for the playful and playable lighting projects and to integrate their design from the initial design steps into the wider design processes of urban space and architecture. Figure 13 summarizes the design aspects that we have discussed in this section. As we noted above, many of the aspects are temporally affected. Even though the aspects are relevant in both temporary (one time or reoccurring) and permanent installations of playable and playful lighting, the design strategies addressing these issues may differ. In the figure, seven design aspects that were scrutinized above, are stretching between the time axis poles temporary and permanent. The features of each aspect, which should be considered in creating design, realisation and maintenance strategies, are gathered along the axis.

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Fig. 13 Design aspects for viable playful and playable lighting

4 Conclusion: Design Framework We first presented, in Fig. 12, the axis between playable and playful lighting, which highlighted the role of the audience of lighting installations, from spectatorship to participation. These were explored in relation to the empirical findings relating to our participants’ experiences, resulting in four bands of experience: place, expression, meaning and play. Within all these experiential aspects, variation could be found depending on whether the installation was playable and engaged urban inhabitants in participation, or whether it was characterised as playful and invited people to attend in a role of a spectator. The playable projects managed to invite participants to play with lighting—a part of city infrastructure which traditionally is authorised only for the use and control of city authorities. They were engaged in self-expressing, creating meanings and gained ownership of public, urban place. With the playful projects, spectators received meanings, enjoyed aesthetic expressions and could be inspired to play by light, which all affected to their sense of place. Second, we presented a thematisation of the critical scholarship relating to digital technologies as a part of contemporary and future life in cities. Our thematisation of the scholarship resulted in seven aspects that designers and policy-makers should

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Fig. 14 Design framework of viable playful and playable lighting

safeguard while implementing playful and playable lighting into urban places and spaces. These design aspects resonated with our own reflections of the case study design and realisation processes in several ways. In order to design playful and playable urban lighting that would viably support the wellbeing of urban inhabitants in the long term, we suggest the seven aspects presented in Fig. 13 as a check-list against which projects should be judged. The solutions or critical design issues listed under the check-list concern projects with different time-scales, both temporary and permanent. In this final part of the chapter, we present and discuss a combination of these two earlier diagrams in Fig. 14 to arrive at a holistic model of designing viable playful and playable urban lighting. The horizontal axis of the diagram represents the time scale of a lighting installation: whether it is temporary or permanent. As these kinds of technologies and smart

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city solutions are novel, it is still an open question what time scale should be considered as permanent in this context. We could define here a permanent installation of playable lighting to exist either on a basis of “for the foreseeable future” or for more than 5 years. More important than exact definitions, however, is the fact that at this end of the scale, novelty will no longer be a viable design option. In general, we argue, in order to design permanent playful and playable lighting, the design challenges are altered. The case studies and refence projects we have detailed in this chapter have all been more or less temporary. As an exception, the LightGame for Harbour Promenade was designed to be part of permanent smart city infrastructure, nevertheless, its realisation is still in the process. Thus, this is the empirical context where the design implications have also emerged. However, within this chapter, we have extended this through a review and thematisation of critical scholarship on digital technologies in cities. Combined with a reflection of our empirical experience, we argue for the careful consideration of seven important aspects that must be designed for in order to render lighting installations, including playful and playable lighting, viable in the long term. It must be noted that both temporary and permanent installations can be viable or successful in their own way, but they would require differing strategies regarding their design, implementation and upkeep. If these are not taken into consideration, there is a risk of arriving at the situation which we identified at the beginning of the LightStories project: the city had purchased the technology, but no one knew how—or by whom—it should be operated. At the temporary end of the horizontal scale, we have also, within this chapter, identified two types of temporary installations: one-time (which may be longer or shorter standing) and reoccurring (as in the case of light festivals). These also present differing design challenges: as light festivals become an annual, expected event, they may experience some of the challenges that permanent installations face. On the vertical axis of playful and playable are presented the positive experiences, which we recognised in the analysis of the participant feedback and the observations of the case study projects on site. These we want to emphasize as design targets for playful and playable lighting, amongst the other positive forms of experience which may emerge in different kind of contexts. We want to stress that even though one defining feature of play by Bateson and Martin [1] was “lack of practical goal or benefit”, the experiences relating to playable and playful lighting, and to the playful actions the installations induce, are beneficial in many ways and may serve many practical design goals relating to smart cities. These include, for example, the strengthened sense and ownership of place, feeling of belonging, communal identity and increased sense of security. Furthermore, playful physical activities such as playing a LightGame or having walks in the nocturnal city, which has become more inviting, have positive health effects and increase well-being. We have also highlighted in the figure the two roles which urban dwellers can have in relation to playful and playable lighting—the spectatorship and participant. Both viewpoints are essential to consider in design processes. Finally, as can be remarked from the seven design aspects which we have scrutinised in the chapter, design, realisation and maintenance of playful and playable lighting demand multidisciplinary expertise. No one field can master these chal-

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lenges, many of which are becoming more and more crucial in the age of climate change and artificial intelligence. We argue that a holistic understanding of the design task and successful realisation of projects can be gained only through co-operation of different fields and of different stakeholders of smart city development: designers, researchers, local people, city authorities, police-makers and private and third sector. The presented design framework can serve as a road-map in this collaboration. Acknowledgements We thank the Academy of Finland and Tekes for funding the research projects, which have enabled our work: Adaptive Urban Lighting—Algorithm-Aided Lighting Design project (AF), WelLIT —Intelligent Lighting and Well-Being in Northern Learning Environments project (AF), Experiencing Artificial Intelligence in the Smart City: Co-creating applications for urban life (AF) and SenCity—Intelligent Light as Service Platform for Innovative Cities (Tekes). We also thank our fellow researchers in those research projects and all the participants of the case study projects. All the illustrations and photos are by Henrika Pihlajaniemi, except Fig. 2, which is by photographer Ilpo Aalto, published on courtesy of Tehomet Oy.

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Saving Face: Shared Experience and Dialogue on Social Touch, in Playful Smart Public Space Karen Lancel, Hermen Maat and Frances Brazier

Abstract Can shared experience and dialogue on social touch be orchestrated in playful smart public spaces? In smart city public spaces, in which physical and virtual realities are currently merging, new forms of social connections, interfaces and experiences are being explored. Within art practice, such new connections include new forms of affective social communication with additional social and sensorial connections to enable and enhance empathic, intimate experience in playful smart public space. This chapter explores a novel design for shared intimate experience of playful social touch in three orchestrations of ‘Saving Face’, in different cultural and geographical environments of smart city (semi-) public spaces, in Beijing, Utrecht, Dessau-Berlin. These orchestrations are purposefully designed to create a radically unfamiliar sensory synthesis to disrupt the perception of ‘who sees and who is being seen, who touches and who is being touched’. Participants playfully ‘touch themselves and feel being touched, to connect with others on a screen’. All three orchestrations show that shared experience and dialogue on social touch can be mediated by playful smart cities technologies in public spaces, but rely on design of mediated, intimate and exposed forms of ‘self-touch for social touch’, ambivalent relations, exposure of dialogue and hosting. Keywords Social engagement · Digital performance art · City smart spaces · Intimacy · Exposure · Playful social touch

K. Lancel (B) · F. Brazier Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] F. Brazier e-mail: [email protected] K. Lancel · H. Maat Artists duo Lancel/Maat, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_9

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1 Introduction Can shared experience and dialogue on social touch be orchestrated in playful smart public spaces? Playfulness in digital interactive art in public spaces ambiguously combines aspects of physical and virtual presence, familiarity and unfamiliarity, predictability and unpredictability, seriousness and fun [1–5]. In such digital interactive art, social playfulness has been pursued through design of sensory disruption to evoke ambivalence, immersion and reflection [6, 7]. New haptic and visual connections are explored, in physical and virtual entanglement [8]. This chapter explores self- and social touch in such smart playful public spaces. In a series of orchestrations known as ‘Saving Face’ [9] (Fig. 1), in Beijing, Utrecht and Berlin/Dessau, participants’ sensorial experience of self-touch is disrupted, re-orchestrated and shared with the public. These orchestrations are purposefully designed to create a radically unfamiliar sensory synthesis to disrupt the perception of ‘who sees and who is being seen, who touches and who is being touched’. Participants playfully ‘touch themselves and feel being touched, to connect with others on a screen’. Participants are exposed, their intimated experience made visible to others in real life and on the screen and shared in public dialogue. Fig. 1 Saving Face. Promotion photo © Lancel/Maat and Studio Matusiak 2015

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2 Related Work In smart city public spaces, smart systems have been designed to monitor city inhabitants, to shape cities in terms of efficiency, safety, health and commercial interests [10]. City inhabitants are connected to globally distributed networks and complex technological systems [11]. Information from urban screens, sensors, social platforms and apps, is collected and processed by different organizations and authorities for different purposes. This information is for example used for scanning and profiling, to monitor and coordinate activities within a city, for purposes including traffic management, crowd control, spread of epidemics and security. Systems are also, however, being designed to enable city inhabitants to monitor the city themselves, to share their experience of social, cultural, ecological and economic developments of their city [12, 13]. The concept of Playful Cities builds on the second type of system—systems in which the citizen is “in control”. New types of social interfaces and connections, with different levels of public exposure and connection, are currently being explored in public digital art practice. In such artistic interventions, smart city technologies are purposefully deconstructed and re-orchestrated enabling participants to play and rethink emerging social connections, relations and encounters [14–16]. Participants can, for example, play with cameras to visually expose and ‘mirror’ themselves, their behaviour and movements on the screen. Simultaneously, they ‘transform’ themselves into ‘digital others’ [17], exposed on the screen, to be explored as part of a hybrid physical and digital reality [2, 4, 5, 18, 19]. The mirroring screen, in fact, facilitates both public communication and shared reflection on social connections in the smart public space [17, 20]. In such artistic interfaces, direct ‘face to face’ connections are disrupted and re-orchestrated. Physical and virtual presence, familiarity and unfamiliarity, predictability and unpredictability, seriousness and fun are combined, to evoke individual and shared experiences based on ambiguity. This ambiguity, in turn, provokes reflection and interpretation [1, 3, 7]. Interface design for incomprehensibility and unpredictability, described by Reeves et al. [21] as ‘magical’, invites and entices participants to engage in playful experimentation [22]. Ambiguity is also leading in new types of artistic interfaces and orchestrations that are currently being explored in experimental environments, for new digital synaesthetic syntheses of touch [8]. Familiar visual, haptic and auditory relations are disrupted and re-orchestrated to support ambivalent perception of social touch and experience of being immersed. While ‘social’ or ‘interpersonal’ touch design of remote, prosthetic and multi modal interfaces often focus on efficiency, automatization and direct user experience [23],1 these artistic, ‘relational’ interfaces [25] explore intimacy and reflection, as part of connecting through touch. Screen based interfaces, for example, that expose the intimate character of social touch between participants, or between performers and participants, have shown to 1 Emerging

research includes remote, prosthetic and multi-modal interfaces for touch practices between humans, virtual agents, robots [23, 24].

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effectively evoke spectators’ emotional reactions [26, 27]. Types of intimate experience that are explored in this context include telematic haptic experiences of holding and caressing the body to evoke social affection [28–31].2 Examples of mediated experience of touch that evokes confusion between self and others in merging realities have been orchestrated by CREW [33] and Lancel/Maat [29].3 In these artistic orchestrations, the spectators’ perception, of actually seeing others in this context touching each other or themselves, or seeing to be touched, is explored to resonate social empathy and connectedness, as an embodied experience [36, 37].4 In such artistic orchestrations, participation is often facilitated by artists guiding participants through different ‘stages’ of ‘intimate aesthetics’ [38] or ‘interactional trajectories’ [6], including stages of engagement, explanation, facilitating (embodied) experience, forms of debriefing or sharing interpretation [39]. Both facilitation by artists and witnessing by spectators are integral components of such orchestrations, enabling participants to share an intimate experience, through aspects of self-disclosure, vulnerability, physical proximity and witnessing [40, 41].5 Touching another person is an affective and powerful gesture that can support affective communication for social connections, intimacy and well-being [24, 43]. This chapter explores the design of artistic orchestrations for shared intimate, social touch experience in public spaces. These artistic orchestrations, mediated by technology, are designed to be playful and immersive.

3 Artistic Motivation: Caress to Mirror and Merge This section describes three orchestrations of an artistic intervention designed to facilitate social touch in public urban spaces from the perspective of the artists Lancel and Maat. The orchestrations of Saving Face [9] have been performed across the world.6 2 Research

on experience of affective touch using vibro-tactile technologies showed that telematic, haptic experiences of slow (1–10 cm/s) gentle stroking of the body, such as caressing, are associated by participants with experiences of affection [32]. 3 These works can be related to the facial illusion experiment, in which acts of touching a participant’s face are mirrored real-time in acts of touching other peoples’ faces, visible on a monitor in front of the participant. As a result, afterwards, participants confuse their own faces with faces that were touched, visible on the monitor [34, 35]. 4 Related to this artistic research, mirror neuron brain activity while seeing others (painfully) being touched have shown to evoke participants’ sensory, social and emphatic connections and vicarious perception [37]. 5 Engineering discomfort within public performance, of intimate social touch experience, has shown that participants need to know that they can leave at all times [42]. 6 Orchestrations of Saving Face were shown at 56th Venice Art Biennale—China Pavilion 2015; Connecting Cities Network Berlin 2015; Museum BCAC Beijing 2016; TASIE 3rd Art and Science Exhibition and Symposium Beijing 2012; Festival aan de Werf Utrecht, Netherlands 2012; Holland Festival/De Balie Amsterdam 2015; ‘Play Perform Participate’ University Utrecht 2015; ISEA

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3.1 Design Goal and Introduction on the Artists’ Research on Mediated Touch In much of their work, Lancel and Maat orchestrate novel affective, haptic connections between participants, to relate individual participants to others in public, digitally distributed environments. In these orchestrations, participants relate to others on electronic screens through mirroring self-touch as a form of social, relational touch [44], through unique syntheses of ambiguous disrupted sensory connections. The design goal of Saving Face is to invite participants to experience shared social touch in public space of merging realities. Ambiguity is created by disrupting direct sensory connections while synchronizing participants’ caressing actions in relation to the screen. To explore these aspects of shared experience of social touch, orchestration 1 explores the question: ‘Can shared experience through participation in playful social touch be orchestrated in smart public spaces?’, orchestration 2 explores: ‘Can shared experience through dialogue on playful social touch be orchestrated in smart public spaces?’ and orchestration 3 focusses on the question: ‘Are shared experiences through participation and dialogue on playful social touch be orchestrated in different cultures?’.

3.2 Saving Face: A Description of Artistic Orchestration Saving Face is a ‘city interface’ designed to provoke social engagement and reflection in smart city public spaces, through social touch as play. In three, multi-modal orchestrations (performance installations), participants are invited to feel, see, touch and share an experience of shared touch, as shown in Fig. 2. In front of a city public screen, participants caress their own faces, to connect with others in the physical public space, on the public screen and in the digital network, guided and facilitated by a Host. By caressing their faces, participants ‘paint’ their portraits on the screen. Their portraits appear and slowly merge with the portraits of previous visitors acquired in the same way, together co-creating untraceable networked ‘identities’, as Virtual Personae on the screen. Each composed identity is saved in a user generated database, that may be printed, provokingly, for a Saving Face Passport. Saving Face has been designed to orchestrate an immersive, engaging environment for shared intimate experiences in multi-modal, computer interaction through social touch. The touch interface connects face recognition technologies to an urban screen that functions as a shared facial ‘mirror’. Participants explore acts of socially touching, as a process of interpersonal ‘scanning’ or ‘profiling’.

Istanbul and Istanbul Art Biennale 2011; European EIC ICT labs: ‘Mediated presence group’ 2012; Conference and Masterclass ‘Wireless Stories’ 2012.

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Fig. 2 Participants caress their faces in Saving Face orchestrations at Festival aan de Werf Utrecht 2012 (NL) and at Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (NL) 2013. © Lancel/Maat

Hosting is an essential part of the design, to entice members of the public to participate, to guide them through the orchestration, and to engage in discussions on their shared experiences facilitating individual and shared reflection.

3.3 The Design This section describes the social and technological design of the artistic orchestration, while Sect. 4 focuses on testing the technical and interaction design, in particular on synchronisation of disrupted sensorial connections. The technical, spatial and social design of the Saving Face orchestrations are depicted in Fig. 3. Technically, the multi-modal interface consists of an interactive, aluminium sculpture with a camera and a small, in-built mirroring screen with face-recognition technology (a), connected to a city public screen (b). Socially, the interface invites participants to interact with each other in one of 3 possible roles: that of Actor (this notion is used to describe an active rather than passive role of audience), Spectator and Virtual Persona. As Actors7 (1), people from the public are invited to caress their faces in front of the camera and publicly ‘paint’ their portraits on the city public screen. They then can choose to save their portraits and merge them with the portraits of previous Actors, people they have often 7 The

Actors’ participation exposed to the Spectators can be described as ‘performative’. Instead of referring to the notion on performance as a form of ‘role-playing’, performativity is, in this context, considered to be a repetitive act designed for public spaces, to share reflection and social engagement [45].

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Fig. 3 Spatial model of Saving Face © Lancel/Maat and Studio Matusiak 2015. A Aluminium city sculpture (camera, face recognition technologies); B city public screen; C host. (1) Actor; (2) virtual persona; (3) spectators (potential actors)

never met before. The merging process of portraits into Virtual Personae is visible on the public screen. Spectators (3) view from a distance (and can become Actors themselves). Aspects of Virtual Personae (2) and Hosting (c) are described in the sections below.

3.3.1

Virtual Personae

The merged portraits on the city public screen are described to participants as Virtual Personae (2). These Virtual Personae are designed to ‘virtually gaze’ into the public domain, as contemporary ‘fellow men and women’. They emerge from the interplay between Actors, Spectators, the technological system and caressing gestures as described above. The Virtual Personae emerge and are visualized from all Actors’ caressing gestures, visualized real-time on a city public screen. The gestures are translated into visual, slowly emerging ‘data traces’. While caressing, only the caressed part of the face is highlighted as ‘data trace’, building up to a (full) portrait. These data traces then merge with previous participants’ portraits from a database (Fig. 4).8 When no Actors participate, the Virtual Personae morph with portraits in the database through auto-play, visually displaying the process of merging with others on the screen.

8 In

this way, each Virtual Persona exists of data traces generated by many caressing acts. The last portrait layer contains 50% of the previous portrait, to enhance the Actor’s self-recognition and connection. Colours of skin merge, but the last colour is dominant.

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Fig. 4 Excerpt of online, generative database collection: merged portraits (‘Virtual Personae’) (Generative database collection of merged portraits © Lancel/Maat, 2015. Each merged persona is automatically uploaded to Flickr, for public use: https://www.flickr.com/photos/savingfaceportraits/ page1/)

The Host A Host (c) is part of the designed orchestration, often performed by the artists or by volunteers. The Host explains (a) the aim of the orchestration to explore social engagement through mediated touch and (b) physical interaction. The orchestration is explained to people using words such as ‘touch’, ‘digital’, ‘mobile phone’, ‘see’, ‘connect’, ‘meeting’, that are internationally understood. Through both words and body language, words such as ‘caressing’, and ‘being close’ are visualized. The explanation serves both as a spoken manual and as contextualization. The Host then (c) witnesses the performativity of the Actor from a distance, ensuring a safe space for concentration when necessary and (d) engages in dialogue with participants afterwards. The Host mediates between physical and virtual presence, between public space and intimate space. The Host, in fact, mediates the mediation.

4 The Design Process: Exploration of the Effects of Technological Design Choices on Participant Experience Technical and interaction design tests are described below in detail. Different aspects of the design of Saving Face were implemented and evaluated in different tests to synchronize participants’ caressing actions in relation to the screen.

4.1 Test 1: Face Recognition and Merging: Forms and Faces During the first studio test, open source face recognition technology [46] was used to merge different portraits into a Virtual persona. However, as the shapes of different participants’ faces are never equal in size, the merging processes often resulted in

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Virtual personae with facial mismatches. As a design solution, software was designed to detect facial elements (nose, eyes and mouth) as points of reference. These points of reference are used to place elements on top of each other to subsequently, average out the differences between shapes of faces, such as wide and long faces. This design solution most often works well, resulting in coherent Virtual Personae portraits.

4.2 Test 2: Face Recognition and Merging: Skin Colour During the second studio test, 5 participants with different skin colours were asked to caress their faces, to acquire portraits that were then merged. As the merged portrait (Virtual persona) is built from fragmented parts of the face that have been touched, the merging process resulted in what can be called a ‘fragmented colour field’, instead of a coherent portrait. Again, averaging provided the solution: weighted averaging of skin colours favouring the colour in the last portrait.

4.3 Test 3: Portrait Appropriation (A) During the third studio test, participants were asked whether they felt related to the merged portrait (Virtual persona) on the screen, to which all previous portraits (including their own) contributed equally. Participants did not relate the effect of caressing their faces with the resulting portrait on screen, not recognising themselves as expressed by statements such as: “I believe the portrait is a result of my caressing acts and the emerging traces. But the resulting face has nothing to do with me” and “The interaction was mine, but that portrait is weird.” The final merged portrait (Virtual Persona) was rejected by most as a self-representation. The design of the interface was adapted to enhance the Actors’ visual self-recognition in the merged portrait on screen, through weighted averaging and tested in studio test 4.

4.4 Test 4: Portrait Appropriation (B) During the fourth studio tests four participants tested a new version in which every layer of the merged portrait (Virtual Persona) contains 50% of the caressing participant, 20% of the previous participant and 20% of the second but last participant. The last 10% is based on the “average” participants’ portrait. As a consequence, the portrait shows some resemblance to the actual participant. From that moment on participants appropriated the portraits, expressed in words such as: “I felt my face when making this portrait and now, in a way, it looks likes me”, “I made this, it doesn’t really look like me but it must be me” and “I caressed my face, it is me”.

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Fig. 5 Mirror-image of caressing participant visible in the inserted screen (left in the screen), while his caressing acts are lightning up in his portrait (right). © Lancel/Maat [9]

4.5 Test 5: Studio User Test for Relation with the Screen (A) During the fifth studio test, 11 participants were asked to caress their faces in front of a camera and screen in different roles—as Actors and as Spectators. After their acts of caressing, Actors described unfamiliar, embodied experiences, for example “Ít thrilled me. I could feel my face appear on the screen”, “This is weird, the softness of touching feels different”, “It feels as an extended touch.” However, Spectators surrounding the Actors seemed to lose interest fast. They stated that “It is nice to do it yourself but not special to watch for a long time” and “I found it special to look at the person carefully caressing his face, but the emerging picture on the screen did not directly relate for me to the caressing gestures.” Based on these reactions, the design was adapted to include a real-time ‘mirror-image’ of the caressing Actor next to the emerging Virtual Persona on the screen and tested in the following tests (Fig. 5).

4.6 Test 6: Studio User Test for Relation with the Screen (B) During the sixth studio test, four participants tested the new version, in which a ‘mirror-image’ of the caressing Actor was inserted on the screen as shown in Fig. 5. In this inserted image, both Actors and Spectators could see themselves and each other in the same physical space that was simultaneously represented realtime on the screen. As a result, Spectators watched for a long time while talking with each other. Their gazes shifted between watching the caressing Actors and the screen.

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4.7 Test 7: Spatial Relations Between Sculpture, Screen and Participants The seventh test took place outdoors and focused on the position of the sculpture in relation to both the screen and participants’ engagement. The effects of the sculptures’ different positions, at various distances and visual angles to the screen, were explored. If both the act of caressing and the screen cannot be seen from the same position, participants (Actors and Spectators) show less engagement and connection with the merged, Virtual Personae on screen—they seem to ‘lose touch’ and leave. As a result, the design choice was made to position the sculpture and the screen in such way that participants can see both from one place.

4.8 Test 8: Demonstration Video of Performative Interaction Flow In the eighth studio test, a demonstration video (Fig. 6) was made to explain how the orchestration has been designed, to be viewed before a performance takes place, to trigger participant imagination and interaction. The performative actions implemented in the final design of the orchestrations, its actual performance and portraits, are explained below in the next section.

5 Saving Face: Three Orchestrations in Public Spaces This section analyses three Saving Face artistic orchestrations to answer the question: ‘Can shared experience and dialogue on social touch be orchestrated in playful smart public spaces?’, each focusing on one of the three questions presented in Sect. 3.3.

5.1 Research Method This section describes and analyses the three artistic orchestrations described above to explore the effect of the interface design choices on the experience of shared social touch following a research through design methodology [47]. Three sources of information are analysed (1) observations (by a Host, see below) of participants’ actions and reactions; (2) thick descriptions of open ended interviews with participants; (3) photo and short video documentation that support these observations, when available.

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Fig. 6 Performative actions in the Saving Face interface. Stills from demonstration video

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5.2 Orchestration 1: Festival aan de Werf, 2012, Neude, Utrecht (NL) Orchestration 1 took place in the Netherlands in the lively city centre of Utrecht during the 10 days art festival “Festival aan de Werf”. The specific research question on which this orchestration focusses is: Can shared experience through playful participation in social touch be orchestrated in smart public spaces?

5.2.1

Results

The Host stands near the sculpture and observes the public stopping and viewing the orchestration from a distance. When portraits emerge on the screen as a result of caressing, they show interest, come close and ask the Host to explain what’s happening. They express their interest and amazement with words such as: “This is magical! Can I appear there?” or “Can my face be there?”. Many first watch between 10 and 30 min, before participating, although some come back the next day to participate. The Host also observes how Spectators turn to the screen, look back at the caressing act and back to the screen again, relating the caressing gestures and the Virtual Personae on the screen, immersed in a disrupted, two-fold gaze. They stay between 5 and 30 min watching and often take pictures of the screen after an Actors’ portrait has merged into a composite Virtual Persona. The Host observes that once a Spectator decides to become a caressing Actor, more follow, similar to what is called ‘the honeypot effect’ [48]. Having decided to become a caressing Actor, standing in front of the screen (Fig. 7), many Actors express a feeling of nervousness, and wary about caressing in public. In some cases, however, participants expose their caressing gestures in what can be called a ‘theatrical’ manner, mostly when friends are around. A feeling of nervousness, however, is more common, as expressed by a participant to the Host: “Do you think I would succeed to do this?” before participating as an Actor, or as observed, when a woman standing in front of the screen brings her hand slowly towards her face, almost touching her skin. She suddenly stops to turn to her friend behind her, who smiles while nodding her head. Then, carefully, the woman touches her face and starts caressing. Another Actor first touches her face and then stops, giggles and tries to push forward a friend. Then she starts again, caressing her face in a slow, concentrated and precise manner. In two sessions, a student explores the effect of keeping his eyes open or shut when caressing his face, leading to what he expresses as “I discover the machine as part of my imagination while I feel myself caressing my own skin”. In another case, three men have a long discussion with the Host after which they decide to not participate and leave. When after a few minutes, one comes running back, the others follow and surround him closely. With their bodies encircling them, they isolate him visually from the surrounding public, while he caresses his face.

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Fig. 7 Participant caressing her face in Saving Face orchestration 1. Festival aan de Werf, Utrecht (NL) © Lancel/Maat [9]

In all cases the feeling of discomfort seems to disappear once Actors are absorbed in the interaction between themselves and the screen, losing touch with their surroundings. The Host invites Actors to caress their own faces: ‘Caress your face as if it was your lover’s face’ and ‘Take your time’. Actors strongly respond to this intimate reference, smile, giggle and concentrate. Various video recordings capture people slowly and intensively caressing their faces, again and again in many ways of caressing over time: Actors show body language of immersion, intensity, alienation, stillness, and unfamiliarity. Their faces express disbelief, pleasure, wonder, joy, concentration. Some Actors do not look at the screen in front of them while touching, but follow their own caressing hand from the corners of their eyes. Instead of caressing, some mimic putting crème on their faces or ‘shaving’ their faces. Others just softly touch one spot on their face and then another. Some hesitantly caress their faces partially, some eagerly grasp their full faces. Actors seem eager to be exposed in a Virtual Persona once they have overcome their nervousness. They sometimes caress each other’s faces, co-creating the shared Virtual Personae. Video recordings show, for example, a child caressing the face of her father, tracing his face with her finger. He then caresses the face of his child and her mother, after which the mother caresses the father’s face. A group of six women friends all caress each other. Furthermore, the Host observes that many Actors come back to merge with friends and family, to embrace the visual effects and co-creation over time. For example, a girl having participated once comes back the next day with her parents and her brother to co-create merging portraits as a family.

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In another case, three young men caress each other’s faces. During caressing, they talk with each other about how it feels to appear on the screen though touching their faces. Another example is a father who wanted to surprise his daughter by ‘painting’ his moustache in her portrait that she previously created on the screen. Although starting the caressing act as instrumental to surprise his daughter, the Host witnesses a transition to a shared experience, of exploring and discussing the feeling and effects of the unfamiliar orchestration. In a few cases when no Spectators are around and exposure (of their caressing acts) is not part of the interface, actors describe the experience of caressing as purely instrumental to produce a portrait on the screen. In dialogue with Actors and Spectators, after the experience of caressing and rendering a Virtual Personae, discussions range from individual experience to more general discussion on the ‘use of social media’ and about the ‘difference between local embodied connections and ubiquitous digital connections’. These hosted dialogues, in which individual experience of ‘self-touch for social-touch’ within the orchestration are explored, are focus of the second orchestration.

5.2.2

Discussion

The multi-modal, socio-technological synthesis is activated by a Host, Actors and Spectators. Exposure of the intimate character of the self-caressing act incites shared experience and participation. Relations between caressing gestures, gesture tracing on screen and a resulting shared Virtual Persona, incite playful immersion for both Actors and Spectators. This immersion is established only when both screen and caressing gestures can be seen or experienced from one spatial position. The Hosting design creates conditions for all kinds of caressing and allows Actors to fully concentrate on this process. People experiment with acts and experiences of caressing, while expressing and sharing pleasure and wonder. Even when acts of intimately caressing result in merely ‘losing touch with surrounding Spectators’, Actors still need the exposure and witnessing presence of the Spectators’ gazes around them, to experience their gestures as socially engaging. Co-creation of the Virtual Personae on screen incites participation. The unfamiliarity with the role of caressing creates a safe space to embrace interdependency, experiment and sharing conversations both with the Host and Spectators around. Participants share expression of reflection among each other, to accompany each other when caressing and seduced by the unpredictable, exposed outcome of merging portraits. The next orchestration focusses on the hosted dialogues.

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5.3 Orchestration 2: Connected Cities Network Berlin: Dessau, 2013 Orchestration 2 was presented9 during 2 days from late afternoon till midnight in between Dessau’s historical Bauhaus buildings. The sculpture was positioned to mirror its silvery aluminium in the fading daylight, seemingly floating without gravity, connected to the digital network. Actor’s acts of caressing were projected on a very large wall (instead of an electronic screen as in orchestration 1), as shown in Figs. 8 and 9, in high quality. A device showing the video demonstration described above in Sect. 4.8 was implemented in the sculpture (an extension of orchestration 1), showing the procedure and participants reactions, to explore whether this would stimulate agency to use and play with the interface with and without a Host. In this context, hosting of dialogues was explored. Participants were invited to discuss their experiences and imagination of touching their faces and the influence of technology in creating their mirror image and of sharing the mirror-image with others. Furthermore, personal, embodied appropriation of the digital mirror images on the screen that are merged with images of previous participants are discussed. This second orchestration addresses the question: Can shared experience through dialogue on playful social touch be orchestrated in smart public spaces?

Fig. 8 Orchestration 2 of Saving Face. Image by Ruthe Zunz © Lancel/Maat, 2013

9 Presented

by Connecting Cities Network, European infrastructure of urban screens and media facades for artistic content, http://connectingcities.net/, last accessed 2019/2/27.

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Results

Over 130 people participated over this 2 days period, often together with friends or family. As part of the orchestration, after participation, most Actors are asked by the Host to reflect and answer questions about their experiences and emotions. Often, Actors express that they are fascinated by the experience of caressing their faces and that they have never had an experience like this before. The experience of touch in public space is often stated to be a totally different experience, described as “disturbing”, involving co-location of oneself. They often state that it felt strange, and that they do not have words to describe this experience as a sense of touch. And yet they try. It often leads to stuttering and to finding new words and images, expressing their experiences, as a form of reflection. One Actor commented: “When

Fig. 9 Orchestration 2 of Saving Face. Participants exploring during ‘Connecting Cities Network’ at Dessau/Berlin. Image by Ruthe Zunz © Lancel/Maat, 2013

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I closed my eyes caressing in front of this technology, knowing that my caressing act was exposed, it seemed as if a hand outside caressed me, as if it was not my hand but the hand of God.” Another Actor stated that he felt he was giving away a piece of themselves to a ‘digital grid’. Furthermore, the Host inquires whether Actors embrace the Virtual Personae as a mirrored self-image. Actors tell the Host that they have mixed feelings about this image, for example by stating: “I think it is me. Yes, maybe. I was here. It must be me”, “These are my eyes, but whose mouth is that?”, “Yes, a technological but sensitive me”, “It could be family”, “No, I never look at me like that”, “Yes but alienating”. To answer the question whether Actors feel the Virtual personae have been created by the machine or by themselves, they often describe a form of relation with the machine through statements such as: “The machine is part of me”, “This is technology in a sensitive way”, “The machine changed my face”, “The machine was scanning me”, “I feel merged with other people”, “It feels only natural”. The Host observes that Spectators not only watch the Actors’ caressing gestures and the emerging Virtual Persona on the screen, but also listen to the dialogue between the Host and the Actors after fact. In contrast, if no dialogue takes place, Spectators seem less involved. In this orchestration, as stated above, the influence of the Host was explored. The demonstration video (described in Sect. 4.7) itself was sufficient for participants to autonomously use and play with the interface. Participants even ‘teach’ each other how to use the interface and play. However, without guidance and dialogue with a Host, the emphasis shifts from concentrated and haptic exploring, to ‘fun’ forms of exposure, such a making weird and funny faces, exploring technical possibilities and limitations of the face recognition software.

5.3.2

Discussion

Orchestration 2 explored the influence of the Host on the shared experience and dialogue on social touch. In dialogue, the Host provokes Actors to describe their experiences of the socio-technological synthesis that include disrupted self-touch through technical mediation. All participants try to remember and describe their embodied sense of mirroring versus the scanning, tracing and emerging information on screen. Furthermore, they describe their relations to the Virtual Persona, that emerges through intimate acts of caressing and which they visually share with previous participants. The visual-haptic experience of caressing-and-feeling-caressed intertwined with visually emerging on screen was described as unfamiliar by all participants. Actors take time to explore new words, while stuttering and remembering, expressing new images and emotions. Shared experience for Spectators not only emerges from exposure of caressing and emerging Virtual Persona on the screen, but also from the dialogue between Host and Actors and between participants. Without the dialogue with the Host, Actors and Spectators tend to focus on “fun” forms of exposure and less on exposure of their intimate acts of social touch.

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5.4 Orchestration 3: Beijing Culture and Art Centre (BCAC) 2015 In Beijing, orchestration 3 was performed in Beijing’s Culture and Art Centre, in a historical hútòng courtyard building, in one of Beijing’s old and crowded streets, for a period of 10 days.10 The sculpture (Fig. 3a) was positioned in a glass architectural space between the crowded street and the first museum courtyard. The sculpture and the screen were positioned between these two glass walls, as shown in Fig. 10. The urban screen was two-sided, to allow the virtual persona to ‘gaze’ in two directions, both indoor and outdoor. The Virtual Personae gaze at both the outdoor passers-by in the street and to visitors in the indoor gallery in the historic courtyard. To incite involvement and support dialogue, a text describing how to participate, is made available in both English and Chinese. The text is accompanied by a project description and an invitation to participate. It is placed on the glass window to read from the outdoor street and on the walls in the indoor gallery: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Can I touch you online? Come close Caress your face Merge and Mirror.

The role of the Host is again subject of study. The initial role of the Host is performed by both the artists and by the Art Centre’s staff. This is observed in cases by the Host standing on a distance. Orchestration 3 addresses the question: Are shared experiences through participation and dialogue on social touch be orchestrated in smart public spaces in different cultures?

5.4.1

Results

On the opening afternoon, young designers, cultural entrepreneurs, staff-members of art institutions and sponsors crowd the space indoors and outdoors. The outdoor street is crowded with businessmen, neighbourhood inhabitants, school children and shop-owners walking, on bikes and on scooters. The air is heavy with pollution, many people have used thick facial creams and face protecting and oxygen filtering mouth caps. The Host observes that many people watch the performance from outside through the window, while pointing at the text on the window. Instead of watching the screen, Spectators endlessly watch specifically the act of caressing, both from inside and

10 The

orchestration was presented as part of the opening ceremony of the BCAC Beijing Culture and Art Centre.

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Fig. 10 Participant caressing his face in Orchestration 3 at BCAC, Beijing. © Lancel/Maat, 2015. The text of the orchestration is exposed on the walls of the gallery and on the glass windows

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outside the glass window. They watch the caressing gestures in the orchestration’s technological system and take pictures.11 There is closer interaction between Spectators and Actors compared to orchestration 1 and 2, in Beijing. Spectators gather closely together around the interactive sculpture and around the caressing Actor, watching the caressing acts and following the emerging digital traces on the screen. Together they wait for the unpredictable portrait on the screen to emerge, helping each other to participate, making pictures and posing for pictures. They point at the sculpture and explain to each other how it works. Moreover, compared to orchestration 1 and 2, the Host is approached by more Spectators for additional information and for serious discussion. The title ‘Saving Face’ is often subject to discussion, as it is stated to be a somewhat disturbing title, expressed with words such as: “Are you aware what that means for Chinese people?” or “Do you know that ‘saving face’ is very important to Chinese people?” Discussions focus on ‘hiding behind a social mask’ and aspects of ‘hiding’ and ‘shaming’ mechanisms when meeting each other, both on social platforms and in the city. Whereas in previous orchestrations the Virtual Persona was referred to as someone that may resemble the Actors themselves, in orchestration 3, Spectators describe the Virtual persona as someone they socially relate to, for example as “A friend”, “A sort of relative”, “Someone I might know”. The artists hosting the performance are assisted by a Chinese speaking Host. Dialogue evolves between Actors and the artists-Hosts or the Chinese speaking Host. The Host observes that once Actors start caressing they keep concentrated while others watch and talk. Most Actors tend to caress their faces very fast or tap them softly, carefully. When the Host suggests that they caress their faces ‘as the face of a lover’, they try to adhere. For example, a young woman who hardly actually touched her face, changes her caressing rhythm into long, slow strokes. Another woman who initially tapped her face, seemingly afraid to remove her make-up, changed her gestures into slowly outlining the contours of her face. A third Actor, a middle-aged man, touched his face for a long time without moving, watching the still screen responding his absence of moving, until being explained to move slowly. After caressing, Actors express wonder, for example stating that “Caressing my face is a nice feeling” and “I never touch my face consciously, only for creaming” and “I only touch my face to remove pollution”. Many times, after their caressing acts, Actors wanted to be reassured by the Host that the Virtual Persona on screen will keep transforming, without a final face that might be identifiable. The use of printed texts and questions to incite participation appears to be effective, for all surrounding public. The Host observes people reading the texts before participating. Although stepping out of social comfort is experienced as a challenge, it was well received and participated. Actors still discuss with the Host but indepen11 While the opening day is very busy, the days after a few people step into the gallery. In the streets, throughout all days, people keep stopping to read the text on the window, watch the video documentation and to watch the screen with the transforming Virtual Personae.

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dently start the performance, and, if necessary, help each other to perform. Younger people find it easier to start independently from a guiding Host.12 Exposure of individual dialogue between Host and Actors is less effective compared to orchestration 1 and 2. The Host finds that in dialogue with a group of people, more and more people will participate.

5.4.2

Discussion

Although an act of caressing in public can be considered as embedded in cultural meaning, caressing in the Saving Face orchestration opens playful participation and dialogue in different cultures. Moreover, the combination of unfamiliar caressing and technology appears to be a safe seducer for individual reflection on historical and social interdependency and coherence. Overall, exposure of caressing and dialogue are observed as more communal activities compared to orchestration 1 and 2. People gather around the interactive sculpture, they stand closer to each other while caressing and communally discover how the interface works and teach each other. Exposure of intimacy of social touch in public space through dialogue emerged in collaboration between the Host and Spectators around. The resulting Virtual Personae on the screen are interpreted rather as socially relational than individually mirroring. Dialogue happens within the socially gathering, with or without a host, slightly decreasing the importance of the role of hosting, especially in case of a language barrier. Moreover, the technical interface and performance of caressing is found to be more accessible when texts and questions are on the windows, especially for young people.

6 Discussion and Conclusion This chapter explores the design of three artistic orchestrations of Saving Face, for shared experience of social touch in smart public space. The effects of specific design choices are analyzed. Orchestration 1 explores shared experience through playful participation of social touching, orchestration 2 explores shared experience through dialogue on social touch and orchestration 3 focusses on participation and dialogue on social touch in different cultures. New types of social interfaces, with unfamiliar, ambiguous and disrupted sensorial connections, are key to the Saving Face orchestrations. They enable embodied, emphatic relations with others through touch, based on the design of mediated ‘selftouch for social touch’. This form of mediated self-touch disrupts familiar social, sensory relations between ‘who you see, who you touch and who is being touched’.

12 Due

to this accessible character and many people participating, the exhibition period was prolonged.

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In all orchestrations, caressing has shown to evoke an intimate and affective social touch experience for co-located participants touching and spectators. In these orchestrations, interaction is evoked between participants, in various time relations. Through acts of touch, participants synchronize ambiguous virtual and sensory connections. Synchronization is acquired by (1) perceiving all virtual and sensory connections from one spatial position and (2) co-creation of unpredictable merging portraits, to facilitate shared experience of social touch. Staged dialogue with a host, as part of the orchestration, evokes shared experience and reflection for both Actors and Spectators. Orchestrations in different cultures showed that although participants explore and expose both caressing acts and dialogue, hosting needs to be adapted to differences of dynamics in individual or joint exploration. Alternative forms of hosting that enable permanent installation of the orchestration in city spaces are currently subject of research. All three orchestrations of Saving Face, show that shared experience and dialogue on social touch can be mediated by playful smart cities technologies in public spaces, but rely on design of mediated, intimate and exposed forms of ‘self-touch for social touch’, ambiguous relations, exposure of dialogue and hosting. Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Prof. Caroline Nevejan, Susa Pop and Public Art Lab Berlin and Connecting Cities Network for their inspirational contribution and support. Saving Face [9] was developed by Lancel/Maat (Karen Lancel, Hermen Maat) as an art work, artistic research and case study (http://www.lancel.nl/work/saving-face/). The work was generously supported by Media Fund, Mondriaan Fonds, Festival aan de Werf Utrecht, MediaFonds@Sandberg, Cultural Consulate Beijing, BCAF Beijing, Beam Systems Amsterdam, Dutch Embassy Berlin, SICA NLTR 400. It was technically developed in collaboration with Sylvain Vriens, Tim Olden, Matthijs ten Berge, Mart van Bree, Beamsystems, using Kyle McDonald and Jason Saragih open source Facetracker library.

References 1. Benford S, Giannachi G (2012) Interaction as performance. Interactions 19(3):38–43 2. Blast Theory (2007) Can You See Me Now? http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/can-yousee-me-now/. Last accessed 27 Feb 2019 3. Gould C, Sermon P (2015) Occupy the screen: a case study of open artworks for urban screens. In: Armstrong K (ed) Proceedings of ISEA 2015, the 21st international symposium of electronic art. ISBN: 978-1-910172-00-1 4. Lozano-Hemmer R (2001) Body movies, relational architecture 6. http://www.lozano-hemmer. com/body_movies.php. Last accessed 12 July 2018 5. Sermon P, Gould C (2014) Occupy the screen. http://www.paulsermon.org/occupy/. Last accessed 7 Feb 2019 6. Benford S, Giannachi G, Koleva B, Rodden T (2009) From interaction to trajectories: designing coherent journeys through user experiences. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. ACM, pp 709–718 7. Kwastek K (2013) Aesthetics of interaction in digital art. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 8. Gsöllpointner K, Schnell R, Schuler KS (eds) (2016) Digital synesthesia: a model for the aesthetics of digital art. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG, Berlin

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Part III

Nature, Playscapes and Landscapes

The DigiPhysical Playscape Eva-Lotta Sallnäs Pysander, Jon Back, Annika Waern and Susan Paget

Abstract Children’s outdoor play is fluent and fluctuating, shaped by environmental features and conditions. We present insights gathered through a series of field studies in which interaction designers and landscape architects worked together to fuse their knowledge into working solutions for integrating interactive play in outdoor environments. These implementations of interactive play technology have been installed as an integral part of outdoor environments in housing areas and at schoolyards, and have been evaluated with children. The interplay between technology and the environment that are partly natural forest and partly constructed playground will be discussed. We highlight in particular how the interactive technology contributes to the versatility of play activities, but also how the nature setting and the availability of natural materials contribute to the play activities around the interactive artefacts. Keywords Outdoor play · Interactive play · Natural material · Sensors · Actuators · Play value

E.-L. Sallnäs Pysander (B) Royal Institute of Technology, 10044 Stockholm, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] J. Back · A. Waern Uppsala University, Box 513, 75120 Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] A. Waern e-mail: [email protected] S. Paget Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Almas Allé 8, 75007 Uppsala, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_10

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1 Introduction Access to outdoor play is becoming increasingly scarce for children, due to current trends in city planning [8, 29], parental strategies [5, 10, 11] and the increasing presence of digital play [2, 21]. Addressing this issue at multiple levels formed the core of a five-year collaboration project called DigiPhys (Digital and Physical Play Environments), in which urban planners, landscape architects, and interaction designers collectively set out to develop new strategies for redesigning the urban landscape with children’s play in mind. Throughout the project, a deep and nuanced understanding was reached regarding the challenges that children and families meet in accessing outdoor play, as well as of the benefits of in particular nature play on children’s development and well-being. A design strategy for the DigiPhysical Playscape was developed, in which landscape, play installations, and their digital augmentations are designed together when developing outdoor play offers. We propose this as an integrated play design strategy for urban environments, in which key values are taken into account related to children’s access to play in everyday life, the importance of nature and greenery, and the design of play interventions to support children’s natural play activity. When digital interactivity is integrated in the children’s everyday environment, with vegetation, natural materials and terrain, we achieve a playscape that combines the advantages of digital and nature play. The interface between digital technology and nature is an underexplored area, which opens up new perspectives for product development as well as urban planning. This chapter summarises the main takeaways from the entire DigiPhys project. For details on the specific design interventions and associated studies, we refer the reader to our previous publications [1, 3]. After a brief introduction to the project and its background in related work, we will first detail the design ideals emerging from the project; these are based both in literature and in observations from project workshops, studies, and design interventions. The major design outcomes are detailed next, including a range of digphysical play tools and how these were co-designed with the surrounding landscape. Finally, we present some methodological recommendations related to how to best go about, when designing the DigiPhysical Playscape.

2 Background 2.1 Access to Play I have the right to relax and play. Article 31 of the UN Convention on The Rights of the Child.1

1 https://www.cypcs.org.uk/rights/uncrc.

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Article 31 of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child has been described as “a forgotten article”. In their general comments on article 31,2 the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child state that many countries do not work actively with the values emphasised by Article 31. The committee emphasises how the article is based on solid scientific evidence of the importance of play in children’s health, development and learning. Still, at least in the western world play tends to be considered frivolous, a luxury, and a non-productive past-time [1, 6]. In urban planning, access to play has been, at best, considered a special interest. Children’s access to their local environment has radically decreased over time in many countries. Woolley [37] describes how the very idea of playgrounds emerged from a need to get children’s play off the streets. Today, the urban space is becoming increasingly more valuable and every piece of land needs to cater for a number of groups and needs. Car-free environments in residential areas are considered non-productive, phased out and rationalized. When the urban landscape is designed primarily for vehicle access, the whole city gets less accessible to children, which leads to children becoming dependent on adults in order to move around [2]. Playgrounds become increasingly scarce [30], making access to outdoor play a matter of a family excursion rather than a part of everyday activities. While beautiful and well-designed, these ‘excursion’ playgrounds tend to be impoverished from a play perspective, offering rubber asphalt and climbing gear but curiously void of vegetation, sand and other loose materials. Very similar developments can be seen in the school environment. While both parents and school personnel tends to acknowledge the importance of play, neither are sure what children learn from play or how to themselves get involved in play [6, 8]. School yards are decreasing in size: The Swedish National Board of Housing, Building and Planning in Sweden [7] has made a survey of all school yards and notes that school yards are decreasing in size as a result of densification.3 Vegetation areas are shrinking, and some new schools have almost no outdoor areas at all. As the school breaks are one of the few times in the day when children have access to free outdoor play, this has major consequences for children’s physical activity.

2.2 The Role of Nature in Outdoor Play Access to nature and natural materials has been considered a crucial part of the outdoor experience [36]. Talbot and Frost [33] coined the term “Playscape” as a way to think about how a particular landscape can afford play and what they call “magical thinking”. Playing outdoors provides a varied environment with many levels of challenges that help to develop both motor and sensory abilities [32].

2 https://www.refworld.org/docid/51ef9bcc4.html. 3 https://www.boverket.se/contentassets/7f6b1586a5504fcfa11ea370f73b2b05/rapport-grundskol

or-och-friytor.pdf.

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In their detailed study of outdoor play in a natural forest, Fjørtoft and Josefein [13] discuss how shrubbery affords both hide-and-seek as well as imaginative play (e.g. playing house), whereas more sturdy trees afford climbing, and open spaces running and games of tag. Retaining natural landscape environments in places such as school grounds has been found to increase the amount of play activities pursued by children in general, not only in the natural landscape but also in adjacent hard-made areas [19]. Different kinds of loose material have been found to be important for children´s play and development [20, 23, 38]. The temporal aspect of outdoor play is also important, with variable conditions such as wind, snow, sun, dusk, heat and cold contributing to variability of play [20, 22]. Interventions such as planting areas with both natural and horticultural species in the schoolyard have been used as a way to improve the physical wellbeing of the children, and change the culture of play in the school grounds [5]. Herrington and Studtmann [17] used landscape interventions to redesign play at a schoolyard, e.g. by installing a sequence of stepping-stones that encouraged children to move in previously unused areas. A particularly interesting observation from this study was how the mere act of planting some bushes moved play out of the fixed installations into two ‘houses’ formed by the bushes, perceived as suitable for imaginative play by the children. The authors note that the children that were dominant in this play activity were another group than those who dominated the physical activities afforded by the ordinary fixed installations. Presenting a varied landscape is thus not only a way to afford multiple forms of play, but also a way to create more flexibility in the social roles among the children. For the same reason, it may serve to counter gendered differences in the amount of outdoor play [16].

2.3 Interactive Technology and Outdoor Play Numerous research and commercial projects have explored the design of interactive installations for outdoor play. In the commercial sector, interaction design products for outdoor play tend to target playgrounds and schoolyards, and prioritise encouraging physical play. Very often, this is done through game challenges, such as the interactive installations offered by Lappset. One such example is the interactive ball wall Sunu, that provides feedback through LED lights when a ball is kicked against the wall. Research projects have to a larger extent presented designs that support free and creative play. de Valk et al. [9–11] propose a specific design strategy that they call design for open-ended play; these are designs that guide, but do not constrain, the play activity. The design goal in open-ended play is to encourage children to explore the installations to figure out what they can do, and invent their own game or play based on this exploration [4]. Ideally, this is a never-ending process where children constantly invent and reinvent their own play activity. While this design strategy was originally developed for toys it has also been employed to outdoor installations [15, 18]. Sturm et al. [31] suggest that such installations should afford simultaneous

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interaction by multiple players, be simple to use, and while not necessarily be games, offer an interesting challenge to explore. While these design explorations offer deep insights into the contributions of interactive technology in outdoor settings, they have focussed on the technology in isolation. The crucial role of the physical space, of vegetation and natural materials, was not considered. This is, in fact, also true for work on playgrounds research on interactive play technology. In fact, many user studies on interactive playgrounds have taken place in gyms [9–11, 35] and labs [34]. Most studies on interactive playgrounds in outdoor settings also primarily focus on the digital props and the isolated play with them. An exception is represented by the study by Seitinger et al. [29] on a mobile play companion. This study uncovered how this playground prop served to mediate between children and the play environment, as to “enhance open-ended and physically active play in playgrounds”. The authors report increased physical activity, high engagement level of the children, and a strong focus on exploration. The spatial component of playground play is also explicitly considered in the Water Games presented by Parés et al. [25]. Their design covers the entire environment and features interactive water fountains that can be invoked by groups of users holding hands while moving around the fountains. In one project the way mobile play tools, that the children can programme themselves, can support outdoor play is investigated [24].

3 The DigiPhys Project DigiPhys was initiated as a “challenge-driven innovation” project, funded by the Swedish innovation agency. Such projects are not merely research or development projects: they are created to address complex and multifaceted problems which cannot be addressed not just by scholarly study, product design, or policy changes, but must address all of these challenges and possibly other, at the same time. As such, they require the collaboration of multiple stakeholders with their respective competencies. In the case of DigiPhys, the project partners included interaction researchers, landscape architecture scholars, urban city planners, playground installation developers, hardware and software specialists, and governmental policy makers. Apart from technology innovation, the project produced several policy documents, performed multiple studies, and engaged in studies with children, teenagers and families in schools and residential areas. Serving as a hub for most project activities, the project carried out a total of five field trials. For each of these, we carried out a pre-study related to the environment and the local users, a focused and iterative design activity, deployment and have, or are planning to perform, a study. These trials were – A three-day long school intervention including four fixed and two mobile interactive installations (reported in [1]).

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– A two-week long intervention in a residential area including five fixed interactive installations as well as plants and trees (reported in [3]). – A permanent installation in a science centre environment consisting of one fixed interactive installation and additional non-interactive play installations. – A permanent installation in an urban park area for multiple use including play (Vivallakullen) consisting of four fixed interactive installations and multiple play installations close by. – A permanent installation in a residential area (Saxonparken) consisting of four interactive installations and additional non-interactive play installations. The full project team was involved in most of these, allowing the group to learn together and develop a joint perspective on project goals and challenges, design opportunities and mistakes. The installations have all been implemented and installed, but they reached different phases in their respective evaluation processes. The temporary installations at the schoolyard and at the yards in the residential has been fully evaluated, analysed and reported [1, 3]. The permanent installation at the science centre has been evaluated but not fully analysed. Finally, the permanent structures at Saxonparken and Vivallakullen will be evaluated with local children during 2019 and 2020.

4 Design Values Emerging in the Project Throughout the DigiPhys project, the team developed a nuanced understanding of their design challenge and opportunities. These became articulated in the form of design values that the team aimed to achieve in every installation, and were voiced over and over in design discussions. They also influenced which venues that the project decided to engage with. This does not mean that we always managed to realise them: this type of real-world installations meet with a number of practical considerations as well as time and economic constraints.

4.1 Play Values An important goal for the project was to change the current trend in society by proposing a disruptive play concept, that was well grounded in out-door play theory as well as in research on interactive play. We consider it crucial that children have access to environments that offer good play value in their immediate everyday contexts. We have formulated this through the following considerations on play value: A play environment that creates varied and evolving play that is sustained for longer periods, is recurring, socially dynamic and inclusive can be said to have a high play value.

To achieve the goal of designing play environments with high play value, a number of design values thus come in focus.

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4.2 Sustained and Recurrent Play A critical dimension that is pertinent for high play value is to consider where play happens in a play environment, and in what ways it is sustained. From a psychological perspective, this is grounded in theories of flow, creativity, and hyper focus and requires that play immerses the children to such an extent that they keep on doing it for a substantial amount of time. This can be contrasted with how previous research has shown that children typically spend brief amounts of time browsing through the play equipment at KFC (Kit Fence Carpet) playgrounds, often to move on to spending the majority of their time in natural and or “messy” spots nearby [20]. In the DigiPhys project studies, the strategy has been to look for browsing behaviour versus sustained play, as a way to understand where the prolonged play happens [1, 3]. A closely related indication of high play value is that children frequently come back to the play environment, and if the play activities develop and change over time. Recurring play is a typical strength of computer gaming: players long to come back to the game. This can be just to start the game over, but is more commonly spurred by creative construction (e.g. in Minecraft4 ), or by socialising with friends. Recurring play is also constitutive of everyday play, and distinguishes it from the play activities that emerge at excursions. Recurring play often includes elements of fantasy. Today, we can also observe children bringing elements from their computer game activities into everyday play. They may for example build a den in a shrubby area and make up stories about being mobile game characters or creatures, just as well as they may enact stories from other media or common everyday activities such as going to the doctor. When play culture is developed by children in a familiar play environment, one that they play in on an everyday basis and with the same friends play can evolve for long periods of time, children can try out different roles and invent new stories and scenarios. Some such play becomes intrinsically tied to the place and may even be passed on between generations of children. In DigiPhys, we found instances this type of endemic play in schoolyards [1].

4.3 Open-Ended Design In the design goals for the interactive functions in installations, we have been inspired by previous work on open-ended play. As discussed above, this design strategy emphasizes that interaction should support children in inventing and re-inventing their own play activities and games. Guided by previous work, we do not consider a particular play behaviour the ‘correct’ way to engage with a particular installation [2], but make note of both collaborative and transgressive play behaviours as these interact in the reinvention of play activities [2]. From related work on public interactive 4 https://www.minecraft.net.

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technology, we also take the importance of clear invitations to play [12], as well as how people playing attract more people to the play environment [8]. But in contrast with much of the previous work in interaction design it should be noted that in this project, the focus has been on complementing the opportunities offered by the place itself, with interactive opportunities. The installations are not seen as the only design resource but also the existing physical layout and the social practices of the place [28]. Not all of our play prototypes were playable from start, and they were re-designed or even discarded after field trials. Typical issues related to common interaction design errors such as making the affordances for interaction too obscure or the interactions themselves too complex. More subtle issues related to the timing and tempo of interactivity, that sometimes were not well-timed for human play. Several times, we fell into the trap of creating too constrained interactions, that became too confusing. There is a stark difference between nature play and the way it is inherently openended and infinitely variable, and the way the same desired properties can be teased out of the computational material only through careful deliberation and endless iterative testing. When integrating interactive play with nature play, we must also be careful to not infringe on the way in which nature play is intuitively accessible to most children. Even if nature play also is a learned skill, it comes easy for children to learn how to create play value out of natural resources and loose materials, they understand risk better in natural settings, and the affordances of a stick are clear.

4.4 Diversity of Play Patterns Theories on play will often present typologies of play [1, 10, 20, 26, 27]. A good review of theory on play types in outdoor play can be found in Woolley and Lowe [38]. While these models to some extent diverge, they indicate the large variability in how children engage in play. In a high play value environment, the diversity of the play patterns is large and evolving. While the variability of play might be hard to classify and measure (due to the variations among play typologies if nothing else), it is clearly observable in practice. In the empirical work in DigiPhys we decided to work with the following play classification, elicited from previous literature: physical play, explorative play, fantasy play, social play, rule based play and sensory play. – Physical play is often a component in a range of play activities. We took care to observe if children ran around, rolled down a hill, climbed a tree or equipment, jumped, carried heavy things, etc. – Exploration is an activity of curiosity. It is often observed in early stages of engaging with interactive equipment. But exploration also includes tinkering; when children are trying to figure things out and construct things. – Sensory play relates to playing with the sensory experience of the physical world. It includes splashing water, feeling leaves and grass with the fingers, mucking

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about with mud, smelling flowers, feeling the wind in the hair or listening to wild life. Interactive technology can add to sensory play through presenting sound and light feedback as well as vibration. A design strategy in this project has been to achieve a symbiotic integration of digital and physical sensory stimulation. – Fantasy play relates to story-telling and imagination. Fantasy play tends to leave play-traces in the environment; it could be a row of stones that has functioned as an emergency care unit or a hairdresser salon. – Social play takes multiple forms depending on the age range of the children [26]. Through social play, children learn how to negotiate and develop social relations. While social play is important, one must not forget to also design for solitary play especially close to home. Being on your own on an asphalt surface is more intimidating than tinkering with something in nature. – Rule play (playing tag, hide and seek, etcetera) is the most structured form of social play. In this project variations of classical rule-based children games emerged and were sometimes tweaked based on the affordances of the play installations and the surroundings. The open-ended designs made it possible for the children to invent their own games, using the same items in the play environments and integrating both digital and physical resources. We also took care to observe if the typical play patterns for open-ended play emerged [10, 11], looking for play invitations, as well as fluctuations between explorative and immersive play.

4.5 Abundant Resources Play environments that foster low levels of conflict and that are inclusive can be argued to have a higher play value than those, where conflicts are common. Research has shown that there emerge more conflict and aggressive behaviour in certain kinds of play environments, that are characterized by being dense with too many children in a small space. In these environments, resources are often limited; an example is when a school yard offers only a few swings to several hundreds of children and the environment is dominated by asphalt surfaces and little vegetation. Research has shown that introducing natural elements in such environments decreases conflict between children [20]. Research also show that play in nature like environments is more gender neutral and generally more inclusive [16]. An important factor in this is that resources in natural settings are abundant, decreasing competition for play equipment [17].

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4.6 Play Happens Everywhere Studies show that children play everywhere: when in school, on their way home, and close to home [3]. Giving children access to play in their everyday environment was a key value in our designs. This influenced our choice of a specific school yard as a first trial venue, given how the school yard is a key resource in children’s outdoor play and how changes to the school yard has proven an effective way to increase versatility in the children’s play engagement [1]. Even more important was the second trial in a housing area, which provided crucial insights into how to support play close to home. The two final and permanent installations in the residential area Saxonparken and public park Vivallakullen are not quite as close to home as the trials in the housing area, but sufficiently close to make them possible to visit by a short detour on the way home from school. A consequence of the goal to support play everywhere was to focus on small and simple installations, that would be simple to install in the existing landscape and that could provide complementary play value to what was already in place. The idea was that these could be installed as singular installations in small areas such as a school ground or in between the houses in a residential area, or in a forest.

4.7 Access to Nature and Natural Materials Another key design value was to focus on access to vegetation and natural materials, and retaining such natural resources that were already in place. This consideration strongly impacted the choice of location for the trials. In this project play installations and studies have been performed at a school yard, in-between houses in a residential area, in an outdoor science centre park, in a forest area in a residential area (Saxonparken) and finally in a public park area (Vivallakullen) approximately 200 m from a residential area. All of them were selected to allow us to investigate how technology and nature complement each other in the DigiPhysical Playscape. Particular emphasis was put on providing access to different kinds of loose natural materials including water (Figs. 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5).

5 Methodological Considerations In the process of creating the five field installations, it has been necessary to take into account a large range of stakeholder interests including but not restricted to the local community, the technical and practical requirements, and the time and financial resources available to the project. The installations at the schoolyard and at the yards in the residential area were temporary whereas the ones in the park areas Saxonparken and Vivallakullen were permanent, the latter requiring much more coordination with

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Fig. 1 Evaluation of a temporary installation at a school yard

Fig. 2 Evaluation of a temporary installation at yard in a housing area

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Fig. 3 Permanent installation in the park area at a technical museum

Fig. 4 Permanent installation in Saxonparken in a forest glen close to a residential area

Fig. 5 Permanent installation at the public park Vivallakullen neighbouring a residential area

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the municipalities. An elaborate process has been employed to decide on where to locate the installations, and how these were to be physically interrelated in the landscape. The project has established collaborations with the local municipalities, housing companies and park personnel, and has organized multiple workshops with local inhabitants and stakeholders as a way to elicit their perception of the area and understanding their preferred play environments. At all locations, the landscape architects involved in the project would further analyze the physical conditions, such as light and shade, available natural resources such as natural materials, vegetation and terrain, and existing navigation routes and social places in the area.

5.1 Analysing Existing Play Habits Before the installations were put in place in the school yard and the housing area, we took care to analyse children’s play habits on location. This was particularly important in the residential area, as it was a low income area in which children might face unexpected challenges. In this location, we conducted two co-design workshops with local youth, which served to elicit their perception of appropriate places for play installations as well as understanding their attitudes towards nature and play. The codesign workshops were complemented by ethnographic observations of practices and habits in the area, with a focus on documenting movement patterns and play behaviours. Being locally present also served to build personal connections between the participating researchers and the residents in the housing area, something that proved invaluable in order to elicit spontaneous feedback once the installations were in place. Similar but less extensive studies have been performed also in the two areas where we have put permanent installations in place. The reason for these being less extensive was that these were both part of a major re-development, making it likely that the behaviours would change much more drastically in these areas. A method that we have found particularly useful, has been to organise contextual walking interviews with small (3–6) groups of children and teenagers in their everyday play environments. In these tours, the participants are asked to show their favourite places for play, and explain why the place are suitable for play and what they play in that place. Next, they are asked to show the worst places for play in the area, and explain why they are bad. The children take turns, each choosing a few such places, which in total gives a good coverage of the play qualities of an area. It is important that the group members are allowed to have a dialogue together about each spot to make the discussion dynamic and rich. A suitably sized area could be a schoolyard, a few yards in a housing area or in a small public park. We have also used the method to explore play paths, such as the route between school and home. The method serves to elicit perceptions of the values and functions of different areas in a way that is based in the children’s’ real and concrete experience and knowledge of a place, which can be contrasted with more established brainstorming methods such as asking children hypothetical questions about what their dream playground would be, which tend to

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elicit fantastic but unrealistic ideations mixed with stereotypical ideas for playground installations.

5.2 Observing and Analysing the Installations The evaluations of field trials with play installations serve multiple purposes. To some extent, they function as evaluations in order to ascertain if the design goals of the project have been met, that is, if the DigiPhysical Landscape has high play value. In early stages of the project, an equally important goal was to identify isolated design mistakes that intervened with the intended playability. Most of these ‘bugs’ related to the interactivity of the technology, and could indeed be computer bugs, but they could also relate to lack of feedback or overly complex functionality. But we would also identify ‘bugs’ that had to do with physical properties of the place and the placement of interactive technology (such as placing two communication nodes too far apart from each other). But ultimately, the most important goal of all of our studies related to learning about what play patterns emerged and how these play patterns made use of the available resources; environmental, natural and digital. This goal allowed us to learn more about the design solutions from each study and build upon this understanding for the next installation. This also guided our choice of evaluation methods, which were largely qualitative and based on in situ observations. We developed a particular method of data collection as well: the observations were collected by many different persons including academic researchers, professional technicians and landscape architects, and municipality representatives who were all participating in the project. This way of collecting data serves a double purpose, in that it not only results in data but also allows the group to share their experiences and reflections about the installation, building a shared knowledge about hybrid play. When possible, observations were done in different configurations such as observations of local inhabitants that themselves choose to be playing in the DigiPhys installation, and with invited groups of children from local schools. When observing local children playing with the installations the observers were instructed to maintain a non-intervention strategy, while not hiding themselves. The decision was made not to collect video or photos from these sessions, due to the public nature of the installations and the difficulties related to acquiring written consent. Invited participants were photographed and filmed, and interviewed in small groups about their experience of playing in the environment. To prepare for the data collections, a schedule for observations was made, with time slots and precise locations, and a large-scale map of the play environment has been printed in several copies, on which the participants would time and note down their observations and immediate reflections guided by a list of themes, for details see Back et al. [1, 3]. This allows for a fairly uniform way of data collection despite the fact that many people have been involved. The primary form of data collection was note taking on A3 size paper maps. This form of note taking emphasised the spatial and locative nature of the observations. Whenever an interesting interaction, a special play event or anything else notable happened, the

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respective location was noted down and labelled with the time it happened, duration, number of participants, rough estimations for age and gender of the involved children. The observation notes were guided by the following three dimensions: the type of play observed, if and how the landscape was used, and if/how natural materials were used in the play. They were further asked to write down their observations in as much detail as possible, rather than trying to abstract their observations into any specific play typology. Post observation, the observers were all tasked with extending their notes as much as possible based on their recollection of observations, so that the notes became legible for others and accessible for overall analysis. When analysing field observations, it is important to restrict codlings and analysis methods to that which can readily can be observed in the play environment. The primary mode of analysis concerned qualitatively coding observations of play into the play types discussed above, and relating these to the locations in which play occurred. As observations were marked with timings, it was also possible to create a rough schedule showing when and where interactions have been observed, and how children and adults have been moving through the area and engaging with installations and physical material in the area. In line with studies performed by de Valk et al. [9], we also performed an analysis to distinguish between invitations as the initial attraction of an installations, explorative play when the children engage with an installation to figure out its play capabilities, and immersive play when children were deeply engaged in structured play. Finally following Frost [14], the play activities were further classified according to common playground play forms. In addition to these classifications, individual observations that stood out as particularly significant were described in more detail based on notes from one or several observers and when existent, video recordings. These codings gave us good insight into the types of play behaviour that emerged at different places in the landscape, and the function that the interactive installations had in the play activity. For one thing, it became apparent that there is a substantial difference in play behaviour between invited school classes and the local children that are in playing in their everyday habitual context; this has been reported further in Back et al. [3].

6 Design Outcomes 6.1 Interactive Technology In DigiPhys, we have focussed on ways in which the digital can be integrated into the physical landscape as such, with the goal of creating permanent and robust installations that constitute a rich resource for play activities. As discussed above, a key design ideal has also been to support everyday play, at home or school or in-between, rather than play as an excursion or event. In this section, we focus on the specific technological solutions that emerged during the course of the project, their concrete designs and their capacities for fostering play.

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The DigiPhysical material is about more than just individual installations. It is about how the game is connected to the place and the landscape, and over time, to provide rich opportunities for varied and sustainable play. The couplings are therefore important in themselves. Connections emerge at several different levels: between “cause” and “effect” in the digital installations themselves, between different installations, between and within physical locations and between these locations and the nature and loose materials available on-site or close by. Mixing digital and physical materials can create an additional layer of interactivity that sometimes can create high play value in a location without having to radically change it. This was beneficial in particular in the installations in Saxons Park, where we were able to create a DigiPhysical Playscape while preserving the rich vegetation and landscape features that the forest offered. The interactivity is dependent on installations being able to record that play is happening, and presenting an effect back to the game players. DigiPhys used both direct interaction through buttons, but also different sensors that sense the play activity more indirectly. In DigiPhys, we have avoided screens both for input and output and primarily worked with other effects, such as sound, light and vibration built into the play installations.

6.2 The Tube The Tube is an installation that responds to natural materials being pushed into it. Three different types of sensors have been built into tubes of different designs (Figs. 6, 7, 8 and 9). The sensors can sense moisture, sound and movement. The tube is also equipped with sound output and three LED bars in different colours, each of which is activated when the respective sensor detects either moisture, sound or movement. When the children put different things into the tube, such as stones, pinecones, water, branches, sand et cetera, different sound and light reactions are created depending on which sensor or sensors are activated, and how much they are activated. The more materials that the children put into the tube, the more the sound is activated, and the more the tube is lit up. The sounds are programmable, so that different tubes can have their own sound themes. We have used the tubes as singular installations, but also as systems of several tubes, connected through open non-digital chutes. The tubes can also be connected digitally to other installations, such as the hut, to create reactions at a different site. The tube has been shown to generate long-lasting play in several iterations and forms. Single children and small groups, especially of younger children, have engaged deeply in a slow game of putting things in, listening to the sound and then picking up the thing to try again, over and over. This mainly happened with the shorter tubes. In the DigiPhys project a particular form of social play emerged around several digital installations that we have called “work play”. This form of social collective activity required access to the tube and loose materials, and is signified by a frenzy

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Fig. 6 Early prototype of the tube at a schoolyard

Fig. 7 Second iteration of the tube at housing area

of coordination of tasks, running around to find loose materials, pushing material through the tube, checking the results and de-clogging when things got stuck. This form of play mainly emerged around between the two ends of a long tube, in installations with multiple tubes and chutes, and in installations where the tube was connected to other installations such as the hut. In one occasion when the tube was connected to the hut (the blue sphere depicted in Fig. 10), conflict arose about who should get the benefit of using the sphere. The problem with this installation was the limited resource that the hut represented, in that it made room for at most two children at the same time. Fantasy play sometimes emerges around the tube. The shapes of installations as well as the sounds chosen would sometimes help children develop fantastic interpretations of the installations as e.g. animals, space ships, or racing cars.

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Fig. 8 At the technical museum

Fig. 9 The final tube used at Saxonparken and Vivallakullen

6.3 The Hut The hut is a play-hut or play-house, which is equipped with sound and light feedback (Figs. 10, 11, 12 and 13). No input devices were installed in the huts, instead they connected to other installations, so that the interactive feedback generated in the huts (Fig. 15) were connected to something happening at another installation (typically a tube). When external activation happens, a light panel is “charged”, and sound

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Fig. 10 The hut at the yard in the housing area

Fig. 11 Wooden platform at the technical museum

can also be activated. The idea is for the hut to be used for slower forms of play, for example using it as a house for role play, but also to foster social interaction between the children in the hut and children using the connected installations. The hut has taken several forms during the project; a blue plastic sphere with controls inside resembling a spaceship, a wooden platform that vibrated when the tube was charged, and an open wooden cube, empty in itself but placed so that it invites children to themselves add natural materials to make it their own. This design inspires construction and is suitable for placing in environments close to natural materials (Fig. 14). Observations showed that the installation works closely to what was intended. In the blue sphere version placed on a grassy hill, it was mainly envisioned as a space ship and the interactivity as a pilot control panel (Fig. 10). The child controlling the hut tended to take on the role of work-organiser, with children shouting to the “workers” at the connected device to increase their speed to charge up the led lights more. This privileged role and the limited space that the sphere created made the sphere a resource that children sometimes negotiated or competed for (we even observed a

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Fig. 12 The wooden cube at Vivallakullen

Fig. 13 The cube at Saxonparken

play-acted worker’s strike). The aesthetics of the sphere had strong invitation effects. For the final iteration we kept the coupling to the tube through the LED light display, but used a more open structure that could fit more children at the same time. In preliminary re-visits to the two final installations we have found play traces that indicate that the installations have been used much as intended. In the open wooden cubes, branches and natural material have been used to expand the cube into a full hut with roof and walls (Fig. 14). We have also been able to observe that children have put material through the tubes, through the remaining piles on the ground.

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Fig. 14 Branches at the cube at Saxonparken

Fig. 15 The display at the cube

6.4 The Post The post is not intended to be used in isolation, but in configurations together with other posts to form e.g. a circle. Each post contains a multi-coloured light source and a speaker, and has a button on the top (Figs. 16, 17 and 18). The posts can be programmed in several different ways to inspire different types of play. We have used the posts in two configurations: in a circle or forming a running track through a larger area. When a child presses a button, the light on another post will light up, either in a set order or randomly. It would then stay lit for a limited time (in one iteration of the post, it also contained a led light countdown).

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Fig. 16 a, b The first design of the post at the yard at the housing area. Close up of the post

Fig. 17 Posts at Saxonparken

The expected game in such an installation is to “hunt the light” from one post to the next. But on observations of circle installations we found that these were conductive of a range of games, where the children in various ways tried to capture or defend the lights on the posts. While the ‘hunt the light’ game was sometimes played by individual children, these installations were mostly used in groups, in which the children would fluctuate between collaborating and competing [3]. An alternative use of the posts is as a musical instrument. In this installation, the posts are placed in a ring but programmed so that when someone pressed the button it lights up and a sound is played. If the same post is pressed again, the sound and the colour change. This makes the whole circle into an instrument for creating music and soundscapes. We used this programming in the forest area in Saxons Park, to enrich the ambiance of the forest with a soundscape composed by the children in groups or individually.

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Fig. 18 Posts at Vivallakullen

6.5 Circle of Light The circle of light has been designed to create ambience and a sense of mystery and wonder. It is a large ring raised in the air, and fastened between trees so that it is perceived as floating in space (Figs. 19 and 20). The circle contains multi colour light directed towards at the ground beneath the circle. It is intended to create a sight line into the forest, and to make people interested to move in that direction. It is deliberately placed further away from other play nodes, to give space for slow imagination and fantasy play. While installation at Saxon’s Park has yet to be evaluated, it builds on previous experiences in the project. The idea of using an aloft circle emerged in the schoolyard trials. In this trial, the ring was a loudspeaker, and part of a distributed installation that allowed remote verbal communication between two places at the schoolyard [1] (Fig. 19). If the children stepped on a button below the circle, they opened a communication channel between the positions. While the communication model was disruptive of nearby play, the children imagined multiple functions for the button as well as the floating circle. It was said to give a tickling feeling in the tummy, to create hunger, to read thoughts, to be a teleporter, a time machine, an “alien thing”, and many other things. The fantasy play that the rings afforded in the first iteration at the school yard motivated us to further develop that idea for the installation in Saxonparken, while discarding the remote communication functionality.

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Fig. 19 The light rings at schoolyard and buttons

7 Discussion The design for play close to home meets with specific challenges, related to the ways in which children have access, to and learn to know, such installations. We have highlighted how both the physical aspects of the space and the social practices of the same influence the play behaviour that emerges in and around the DigiPhysical Playscape [3]. However, our finding shows that the DigiPhysical Playscape offers some opportunities that emerge from the interaction between the social, the physical and the digital. Firstly, adding interactive elements to the landscape can increase the versatility of a location. Through interactivity, the locations are enriched to support a wider range of play activities than without interactive installations. Interactive sound and

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Fig. 20 The light ring in Saxonparken, attached to trees and a high post with a Birch tree pattern that hosts the digital technology, and a green post with a push button used to change the behaviour of the light

light create strong invitations to play and helps people to understand that a place is intended as a place for play. In our observations, we found that the digital installations were effective in offering invitations, in particular through sound but also through light. The invitation effects that the digital elements have make it easier for children and adults to identify the space as a place where play is allowed. A play area with no traditional equipment that have high play value because it has a lot of vegetation and natural materials might not look like a play ground and then the digital elements provide strong play identification mechanisms. Secondly, interactive installations are adaptable and configurable in a way that ordinary play equipment is not. One of the goals of the design has been that the interactive prototypes would be adaptable, in two important ways. First, that their exact design could be adapted to the specifics of the location of an installation. Second, that they would be conductive of open-ended play, which offers children ways to invent their own games and play activities based on the offered interactivity. We saw multiple forms of play emerge around the installations. The importance of access to nature and natural materials cannot be overstated. While nature offers versatility in and of itself, residential areas and schoolyards are typically much less versatile. We argue that even then, adding interactivity should be seen as a replacement of nature and natural structures. If the environment is lacking vegetation, varied terrain and natural materials these could be introduced. It is possible to plant bushes and possibly shape the site to make the terrain more varied. But even just leaving sticks stones and leaves at the site instead of tidying it away instantly creates richer play opportunities. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the DigiPhysical Playscape emerges through the couplings between multiple installations, and between the digital and the physical, nature, and natural materials in the place. For example, the wooden

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huts worked as basic structures that children could add sticks and fallen branches to, to make them more enclosed, but also as locus for feedback from interactions with the tubes. Designed with this in mind, the physicality and the interactivity can be made to work together creating a coherent play environment for the children. We have observed a wide range of play behaviours, including long-term engagement, recurring play, and richly varied play. In our final, permanent, installations we have not yet had the opportunity of observing ongoing play, but play traces show that they are in use in much the ways we would expect from previous trials. For many of the participating stakeholders involved in DigiPhys, the idea of the DigiPhysical Playscape required major reorientations, in design strategies, planning processes and business models. The DigiPhysical Playscape offers opportunities for creating more access to play as well as a greener city and more versatile use of the ever-shrinking public spaces in cities and suburbs. We thus see benefits from the DigiPhysical approach for adults as well as children, in that it allows different generations to enjoy a shared space together. Acknowledgements We want to thank all personnel at the municipality organisations, schools and pre-schools that we have collaborated with that made it possible to build and evaluate the installations at the five different locations during five years in the DigiPhys project. Without their strong engagement this work could not have been performed. We also thank all partners from industry and municipality that contributed with invaluable insights and dedicated work in the project over the five-year period. This work was funded by Vinnova, Sweden’s innovation agency.

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Towards Eco-Centric Interaction: Urban Playful Interventions in the Anthropocene Valentina Nisi, Catia Prandi and Nuno Jardim Nunes

Abstract The twin crises of nature and climate is supported by overwhelming scientific evidence and increasing public concern about long-term and potentially irreversible consequences of the Anthropocene. People and wildlife living today, as well as future generations, are at risk unless urgent action is taken to reverse the loss of plants, insects and other creatures on which we depend for food, clean water, and a stable climate. As urban dwellings become the main concentration of citizens, we thought of addressing these issues through a series of urban interventions aiming at educating and enhancing the user’s biodiversity and sustainability awareness through play and reflection. We provide a list of preliminary insights, discussed, and shared trying to frame how these new interventions can contribute to a panorama where playful interactions in smart cities can inspire sustainable and respectful attitudes towards nature. We conclude with a constructive conversation about playful urban approaches aimed at understanding how the interaction process could be re-centered to promote environmental protection and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users. Our case studies strive to reconcile concepts and theories, about ecological computing, more than human design, biodiversity actions and nature awareness and conservation in urban settings, for the design of urban playful and enjoyable systems that promote environmental protection and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users. Keywords Interaction for sustainability · Biodiversity monitoring · Playful interactions · Urban systems V. Nisi (B) University of Madeira, ITI/LARSYS, Funchal, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] C. Prandi University of Bologna, ITI/LARSYS, Bologna, Italy e-mail: [email protected] N. J. Nunes IST - University of Lisbon, ITI/LARSYS, Lisbon, Portugal e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_11

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1 Introduction Cities are becoming increasingly complex, in terms of their social and cultural context, as well as the technologies they require to operate, as they are currently redesigned with sensors and data at their core [45]. Environmental monitoring, energy and waste consumption, and traffic mapping are just a few examples of the sociotechnical systems at play in smart cities today. The concept of the smart city emerged roughly a decade ago, when information and communication technology (ICT), and various physical devices connected via the internet of things (IoT) started to be used to optimize the efficiency of city operations and services and connect to citizens [9]. The concept of a smart city was initially technology driven and subsequently concerned about city management and efficiency. More recently, smart cities entered a new era, embracing citizens as co-creators and collaborators [19], supporting sustainable values, preserving traditions, and cultural heritage [1]. These systems are new sites of politics, values, and ethics where human (and nonhuman) actors collaborate, negotiate, and debate the future [18]. In this new setting, issues related to leisure, play, fun, and humor are taking a new role [32]. They are currently above or at the same level of concern as efficiency and optimization because these ultimately rely on citizen engagement, participation and co-creation [19]. As a consequence, cities are becoming gameful, hackable, playful and playable [32]. The idea of a “Playable” city incorporates a bottom-up approach of citizens engaging in an active and positive loop with the urban landscape [11]. On the backdrop of the above, we are also living the effects of the Anthropocene with global consequences and raising concerns about climate change and loss of biodiversity [5]. Once an environmental buzzword from Nobel Paul Crutzen [12], Anthropocene refers to a new (cene) geological epoch emerging from the undeniable impacts man (anthropo) had on the environment at the scale of the planet as a whole. Due to overwhelming scientific evidence and increasing public concern about the twin crises of nature and climate, the question is no longer about the global impacts of anthropogenic processes, but rather how permanently we have affected our planet [41]. Focusing on cities and urban environments, our work emerges from three crucial trends. First that a majority of people will soon live in cities (60% of the urban population by 2030) which will lead to increasing pressure on the planet ecosystems (10% of the landmass is estimated to be urbanized). The Earth’s population doubled in the last 50 years, and we are living longer and consuming much more, causing gas emission to double since 1980. Second that humans are global ecosystem engineers creating, modifying, and destroying habitats. In the words of a Dutch biologist, Menno Schilthuizen [44], we cannot continue to factor out humans, and their prime habitats cities, when we talk about ecology, evolution, and nature. Estimates show that 75% of the land, 40% of oceans, and 50% of rivers manifest several impacts of degradation. Thirdly, the environmental consciousness often manifests as a pand of guilt, the need to understand the impacts of everyday actions, and sometimes confusion about the right thing to do. A recent United Nations report1 on the state of nature 1 https://www.ipbes.net.

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shows that people living today, as well as wildlife and future generations, are at risk unless urgent action is taken to reverse the loss of plants, insects and other creatures on which we depend for food, clean water, and a stable climate. Still, inspiration to act sustainably and respectfully towards nature and its biodiversity does not come from instilling guilt and painting apocalyptic scenarios without hinting at potential solutions [48]. Nevertheless, while global diversity loss is estimated to be 100 to 1000 times higher than the naturally occurring background extinction rate [6], at the same time entirely new ecosystems are emerging and adapting to urban habitats. Despite the global decline, there is scientific evidence of the rising number of species in cities when they are declining in the countryside [31]. Moreover, urbanized spaces that were considered exclusively human spaces are now crossing with animals [46]. Urban living spaces involve much more than the human worlds and are often sites for nonhuman ecologies [46]. The subject of how to design human spaces for cohabitation with other species and foster more than human respectful interactions becomes a prime concern. In this evolving context cities are likely the new Galapagos,2 requiring a new mindset for designing to leverage the raising biodiversity and contribute to more sustainable and enjoyable urban environments [34]. As Forlano argues, we need to take the non-human seriously in order to meaningfully engage in the design of cities with more responsible, accountable, and ethical ways of engaging with emerging technologies [18]. This chapter presents and discusses several design and technological interventions for urban playful interactions in the Anthropocene. In our work interdisciplinarity is instrumental in highlighting and valuing the interrelations between human and nonhuman actors, because it sets the grounds for a discussion around possible ways of engaging inhabitants of urbanized environments in novel playful interactions highlighting nature conservation and preservation discourses, taking advantage of the technologies of the smart city. We envisage playful interaction and entertainment as being a fruitful way to foster awareness and engage citizens in an urgent callfor-action. Therefore, we designed and evaluated a series of urban interventions conceived as research by design, focusing the attention of the users and players on issues regarding natural habitats and biodiversity.

2 State of the Art Environmental sustainability is one of the fastest growing areas of activity in technology related-research. Many HCI researchers began examining the opportunities to use computing technologies to promote environmental protection and ecological consciousness on the part of technology users. Blevis defends that sustainability should be a central focus of interaction design—a perspective named sustainable interaction design [3]. Considering that design is defined as an act of choosing among 2 http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-wealth-of-urban-biodiversity/.

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or informing choices of future ways of being, sustainability as a notion of viable futures can be defined to include aspects about humanity and the biosphere such as the environment, public health, social equality and justice [3]. Interaction design for sustainability can thus be seen both from how interactive technologies can be used to promote more sustainable behaviors and from how sustainability could be a critical lens to the design of interactive systems, themselves [3]. DiSalvo et al. [14] note that computing technology is used as a persuasive force in behavior change, with a focus upon individual rather than collective action. Dourish examines the way that traditional HCI discourse obscures political and cultural contexts of environmental practice, which, on the other hand, must be considered as part of a practical solution [15]. He claims that research on ecological politics and the political economy of environmentalism highlight some missing elements in contemporary HCI analysis. Moreover, the trend of decentering the Human and including non-humans or more-than-humans such as plants, animals and the environment in collaborative cities is an effort discussed among HCI researchers, designers, and philosophers [18, 46]. Similarly, Kobayashi advocates for a new paradigm in HCI, which he names Human Computer Biosphere Interaction (HCBI) based design and interfaces on supporting our future society in a multidisciplinary approach [26]. In recent years, taking advantages of ICT and citizen science projects, Interaction, and Game designers have tackled the design of experiences focused on biodiversity actions and nature awareness and conservation in urban settings [43]. Games were recently proposed as strong concepts for city making [45], Flanagan had already proposed the idea of using playful interaction as tools to shed light and examine social issues [17]. Here we extend social issues to include environmental and nature conservation topics. From geographer researchers [43] three main playful approaches are used when tackling conservation and biodiversity monitoring through games. One strategy focuses on education and behavior change, a second one on fundraising and a third one is promoting research, monitoring, and planning. Each has its pros and cons, and the potential to reach different target audiences [43]. The majority of such playful interventions exploit emerging and pervasive technologies, from mobile sensing to social media, Virtual and Augmented Reality techniques. Some projects take the form of interactive stories and games, following mainly the education and behavior change approach in order to influence their audiences and create awareness about specific topics. For example, Alternate Reality Games (ARG) and more recently Transmedia Storytelling (TS) can play an essential role in raising awareness towards sustainable tourism practices due to their immersive and participatory nature. TS can be described as transferring and developing stories that can be spread through various platforms to create, unified and coordinated entertainment experience” [23]. Moreover, stories can be powerful forces helping us to understand the world and how we should live our lives due to their narrative persuasion and character involvement techniques [20]. We can tap into the power and potential of stories to create positive social change by designing stories to educate and engage people on a wide range of issues, and ultimately even persuade them to take actions [21]. On the other side, the transmedia aspect can entertain through participation, engagement, interaction or collaboration of the audience.

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Examples of such projects that trace the intersection of humans, nature, and technology are different. Bear 713 a fully immersive, multi-platform interactive social narrative created by the National Film Board of Canada. Participants explore and engage with the world of a female grizzly bear through webcams, augmented reality, geolocation tracking, motion sensors, social media, and other platforms and channels. “A conversation between trees” [22] is an urban public exhibition used to prompt deeper reflections on climate change by engaging the public with data collected in forests and remote trees, portraying historical and forecasting global CO2 emissions data. In the 2015 “summer school data explorers” children were taken to the London’s Olympic Park to collect environmental data through a Raspberry Pie, and then work with artists designer, Stefanie Posavec, in order to produce artistic visualizations from it. The project is described in [52]. Mostly based on educational strategies, in 2015, The Royal Botanic Gardens of London, launched a multi-platform interactive game, “Tweet and Grow” which encourages players to follow Kew Gardens on Twitter4 as well as tweet about their game experience in order to get hints and tips. This is a creative strategy for increasing Kew’s Twitter following, and for advertising the game. Tweet & Grow also encourages players to visit and explore the gardens, which represents a way of modifying real-world behavior through a game. The use of games is relatively well established in conservation research and monitoring. Games can be used to support conservation research by creating incentives for gamers to collect data, or by using games to identify potential solutions to realworld problems. Several of these projects take advantage of bioacoustics sensors for biodiversity monitoring, such as New Forest Cicada Hunt [37], iBat,5 Bat Detective [28] and LOCOMOBIS for detecting mosquitos [49], to name a few. The iBats and Bat Detective projects focus on bats as indicators of habitat quality and climate change thanks to their sensitivity to human impact, their slow population growth rate, and their temperature-sensitive hibernation behavior, making them excellent indicators of a healthy environment [25]. Moreover, they are essential elements of entire ecosystems (e.g., contributing to the ecosystems functioning through fertilization, pollination, and seed dispersal). The iBats project, established in 2006 between the Zoological Society of London and the Bat Conservation Trust, coordinates a volunteer-led bat monitoring on a global scale. Citizen science powers this project. Since its creation, thousands of iBats volunteers, often in collaboration with local conservation or governmental organizations, have carried out acoustic bat surveys yearly. Initially involving driving cars along specified survey routes with a bat detector mounted on the roof [50], the project evolved through the development of a mobile app (for Android and iPhone). Such app allows participants (or citizen scientists) to record sounds, location, and data and share through the iBat platform [24]. Bat Detective is an online citizen science project launched in 2012 that relies on volunteers to identify bat calls in audio samples [28]. Volunteers recorded those 3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bear_71. 4 https://twitter.com/kewgardens. 5 https://www.bats.org.uk/our-work/national-bat-monitoring-programme/past-projects/ibats.

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audio samples with specific technologies (i.e., iBats project). The ultimate goal of the project is the creation of a software that automatically extracts the relevant information out of recordings, helping researchers all over the world to track the bat populations. When users log onto the Bat Detective website, they are presented with an audio clip accompanied by a spectrogram (a visual representation of the audio). Users can analyze the recorded sound by looking at the spectrogram. Bats emit calls in a very restricted frequency, so many sound sources can be ignored when searching and recording bat calls. But some sources can emit sounds in a frequency similar to bats. Bat Detective shows the user what the spectrogram of those sounds might look like, enabling them to make a classification with more certainty. An interesting game exploiting AR (Augmented Reality) technology to engage users is Safari Central,6 a mobile application that allows users to visualize 3D models of different animals, directly from their smartphone. The company, called Internet of Elephants, was founded to make wild animals part of daily life for millions of people currently unconnected to wildlife, while generating a new revenue stream for conservation. The original idea behind the game is the fact that the animals, six in total, are the virtual representation of existing animals living in the wild. Researchers track these animals in order to understand them better and monitor their behavior. All in-app purchases go directly to the conservation of the live animals part of the game. Despite the intriguing idea, the app is lacking a mechanism to engage users for a long time and to involve them in the animals monitoring, in order to increase their awareness about the non-human inhabitants of wild areas. All the presented projects, situated in the urban context or simply on the web or mobile phones of players, allow citizens to familiarise, learn and take actions about nature conservation, as well as engage in playful biodiversity monitoring and control. These projects inspired our interventions, where sensing and game mechanics are exploited to provide playful experiences.

3 Case Studies Towards Eco-Centric Playful Urban Interactions In this section, we present several case studies from our work, that shed some light on how to design and implement urban-based playful activities to increase awareness and biodiversity preservation attitudes. The case studies correspond to research by design projects that offer a variety of opportunities to combine sensing technologies in urban settings with storytelling and playful interaction. The case studies were designed, deployed, and tested in Madeira Islands, which provide a unique setting for this urbannature duality. First, because the Island southern coast holds the third metropolitan area in Portugal (with 270 thousand inhabitants with a density of 390/km2 and 1.5 million tourists per year). Secondly, because it also hosts one of Europe’s most important biodiversity reserves accounting for thousand so of terrestrial and marine 6 https://www.safaricentralgame.com/.

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species, many of them endemic. In a landmass of only 800 km2 , Madeira Islands hold an estimated 7571 taxa of which 1419 are endemic to the Islands and dependent on the rich surrounding ocean or the UNESCO World Heritage Laurisilva Forest.7 Our interventions build on IoT sensing and web platforms that sense and make sense of usually hidden urban phenomena. In the BeanStalk project [36] we used passive wi-fi routers to detect touristic flows and provide urban communities with novel visualizations about the impact of urban flows in Islands with a specific focus on Tourism. BeanStalk and VitFlow [42] are two examples of novel infrastructures that provide large-scale sensing of the movement of people, weather conditions, social networking activities, and transportation means. They were used to deploy interactive and location-based storytelling and transmedia components which engage the locals and visitors in novel services that explore the connection between the hybrid physical and digital space. We further expanded this vision with the integration of ecoacoustics, which uses sound as a material from which we can infer environmental information to investigate the ecology of populations, communities, and landscapes along a broad range of spatial and temporal scales [47]. Ecoacoustics enables the mapping of soundscapes [38], the highly dynamic emergent patterns of acoustic activity of physical (geophonic), biological (biophonic), and anthropogenic (technophonic) agents. Ecoacoustics relies on sound recording which currently can be done autonomously and remotely using cheap IoT sensors, capable of local processing and networking communication. It can be used to investigate several types of media (e.g. air, marine, freshwater, vegetation, and soil) operating in pristine or densely populated environments. The different projects span five years of work and reflect an ongoing vision of exploring eco-centric interaction—a perspective aiming at making people aware of the broader ecosystem and the complex interdependences and long-term consequences of their individual and collective action for both humans and non-humans (nature).

3.1 beEco—A Game for Promoting Environmental Awareness Among locals beEco [35] is an interactive game aiming at increasing environmental awareness among local fisherman and farmers towards a nature reserve park in a densely populated touristic Island. Designed for the Natural Park of Madeira Islands, the main objective of the project was to promote and enhance the compatibility between the development of socio-economic and cultural activities at the border of the natural reserve park—such as fishing, agriculture, and nature tourism, and the management of nature reserves, threatened areas, habitats, and species. In this case study, the humans and non-humans compete for natural and ecological resources of the Madeira Natu7 https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/934.

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ral Park, member of the European Union Natura 2000 sites.8 We conducted our field research to understand the complex ecosystem of stakeholders involved in promoting and enhancing the compatibility between the development of socio-economic and cultural activities (fishing, agriculture, and nature tourism), and the management of nature reserves (threatened areas, habitats, and species). The challenge was how to convey to farmers and fisherman’ the harm of some of their practices once what is at stake are much more basic needs such as being able to pay their bills and support their families. If farmers and fisherman cannot meet their ends the underlying conditions are endangered, and both groups believe that the Park (the non-humans) are trying to stop them from making a living. Most of these challenges were grounded on the diversity of motivations suggesting that individuals’ eco-friendly behaviors are constrained by one’s circumstances, social context, and access to resources. In this project (see Fig. 1) we used a participatory design strategy to conceive an interactive game aiming at promoting a new and more positive dialogue between the local population and the Nature Reserve Park. Recognizing the power of relationships and the creative potential and emotional impact of children, the development team ended up involving local schools in the visual design of the game. beEco incorporated children’s drawings of both ideal and distressing views of their natural environment in order to focus on users’ thoughts and actions towards the future of the island and their legacy. Considering that design is an act of choosing among or informing

Fig. 1 beEco—Co-designing a game for environmental awareness

8 http://ec.europa.eu/environment/nature/natura2000/.

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choices of future ways of being, using the creative expression of children provides a powerful means to raise environmental awareness.

3.2 Fragment of Laura—Urban Transmedia Intervention at the Service of Nature Another case study connected with the Laurisilva of Madeira (the largest surviving area of laurel forest contains a unique suite of plants and animals) adopts the name form the forest itself. “Fragments of Laura” (FoL), is a bespoke transmedia Story, designed to encourage urban dwellers and visitors to the city to develop knowledge and awareness about Madeira’s Island biodiversity [13]. The project investigates how storytelling, coupled with mobile interactive technologies, can bring awareness and engage its audience in understanding the benefits of the local natural capital and its underlying biodiversity. The platform is composed of two interconnected systems: an online participatory documentary, equipped with some participatory features (HáVita) and a mobile location-aware fictional story (FoL) (Fig. 2). The “Fragments of Laura” fictional plot is set in the XIX century, describing the impact of human settlement on the Laurisilva Forest ecosystem as well as its the medicinal uses (as explored in folk remedies). The narrative invites the audience to embark on a quest to follow its heroine, Laura Silva. With a unique talent and passion for taking care of nature; she escapes a difficult childhood in a nun’s ruled orphanage to study abroad as a naturalist. Eventually, she returns to Madeira to pursue her life’s work studying, cataloging, and defending the local Laurisilva, Madeira’s unique forest. Her notes and samples are kept in a vast herbarium—an annotated and illustrated book of medicinal plants, nonetheless, her work, ahead for the times, is not well received by everybody in the small island community and often mistaken for witchcraft. By following this narrative, the audience learns how various local plants can be used as remedies and how the forest has been degraded and exploited in the past. By presenting the fictional story, our goal is to entice the audience to contemplate

Fig. 2 Fragments of Laura Mobile Application

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the richness of the Island and reflect on the sustainability of its patrimony by linking the proposed fiction with the current reality. Motivated by the design of conventional location-aware multimedia stories [33], FoL is delivered as a mobile application, which makes use of a map interface with icons representing meaningful locations. The audience is guided through the exploration of the physical streets of the city of Funchal in order to unravel the plot while gaining knowledge about the history and the natural capital of the island. Each location is associated with a story point and its icon is representative of this association. Participants, supported by the map interface, must walk to the desired locations (see Fig. 3) where the mobile phone will vibrate, indicating that they are have reached the correct spot. The content then is unblocked, and the user can press the corresponding button to visualize the story. Six touch-points of the story are realized as 2D video animations, while one is an interactive 3D reconstruction of Laura’s pharmacy/laboratory dating back the 19th century. Six audio clips (distributed across the main story path) serve to fill in background details of the story in the form of gossips of people who lived back then. At the end of each plot point, an interview clip, synthesized from in-depth recorded conversations with local scientists and local knowledge holders, is proposed to the

Fig. 3 Fragments of Laura Transmedia relationship among channels and Content: 2D Motion comics (left); Location aware Mobile application (centre); Há-Vita website and scientific local knowledge (right)

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Fig. 4 Há-vita webpage: Laurisilva Topic expanded and participatory aspects of the interface

participant, who can choose to watch or save it for later viewing (see Fig. 4). Furthermore, the full version of the interviews can be followed in the “Há-Vita” web platform, which collects a variety of scientific facts about the island natural heritage, gathered and edited as video clips and available online. Moreover, the “Há-Vita” documentary and web portal enables three levels of public engagement, from asking questions to send personal stories via email, to engage with the locals through enrolling in advertised activities and gatherings.

3.3 Memories of Carvalhal—Ghosts, Taxidermies Species and the Monk Seal Sanctuary While beEco was targeting the local population working at the outskirts of the urban landscape, FoL brings the natural (and cultural) elements of the island into the city, targeting urban dwellers and visitors to the island’s capital city of Funchal. Unlike the two first projects, Memories of Carvalhal Palace—Turning Point (MoCP-TP) targets a teenage audience in a more traditional Museum setting. MoCP-TP is a location-

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Fig. 5 Left: Image representing the Carvalhal Palace, or Natural History Museum of Funchal and several moments of the MoCP mobile application in use. Right: Screenshot of the app when the users are invited to choose one of the characters to follow the story from their point of view

specific gamified narrative that unfolds at the Natural History Museum (NHMF) of the city of Funchal (capita of Madeira islands). It takes the concept of locationaware multimedia story set in a confined location (the Natural History Museum) and connects it with the surrounding natural ecosystem of the Island of Madeira. The MoCP-TP (Fig. 5) was designed exclusively for the Natural History Museum of Funchal and based around the museum’s permanent exhibition of taxidermy animals and aromatic plants. The museum building, dating back to the 18th century, was originally a distinguished palace of Victorian style (wooden floors and ample doors used for women to move around in their ballroom dresses). Moving from the exterior medicinal garden, to the interior rooms of the museum, the user learns about how the palace became a museum, about its collection of taxidermy species and aromatic plants, mostly endemic to the island, but also about the endangered, now protected Monk Seal species. After consulting with the museum staff and director to comply with the museum goals and offerings, we created an original story plot and fictional characters to ground the experience on the NHMF exhibits collection, which comprises a prominent embalmed monk seal exemplary, one of the most endangered species in the Atlantic oceans. Such species found shelter in the Madeira archipelago, which finally established a protected nature sanctuary devoted to the surviving monk seal in late 1980. The taxidermy monk seal in the museum is also one of the most famous exemplars of the entire collection due to its size. This exhibit prompted our creative team to seek inspiration from the northern European legend of Selkies, or women seals, in order to create characters and a mystery plot to engage our young audiences. Selkies are said to live their lives partly as animals, and partly as women, who shed their seal skin to become human and live, marry and procreate on land. The aim of this fictional plot is not only to familiarize teenagers with the marine and terrestrial natural wealth of the island, but also to use the legend, to stimulate awareness towards endangered species, and conservation of the natural patrimony, and in particular of the endangered monk seal exemplars. The fictional plot of the MoCP-TP revolves around the last heir of the aristocratic Madeiran family that owned the palace where the museum is located. The young heir

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falls in love with a Selkie woman, but she disappears in mysterious circumstances, leaving him waiting at the altar. He never comes to terms with the grief caused by this loss and, as unsatisfied ghosts do, he still lingers around the museum rooms as an angry spirit. The audience becomes aware of its drama through the progression of the story unfolding in the museum garden, is then prompted to help him find the truth by interacting with the museum taxidermy species. With the Memories of Carvalhal’s Palace—Turning Point, users go to specific physical locations of the museum to unlock parts of a story. The story is related through photorealistic images of the characters accompanied with dialogues rendered as voice over audio and text. The user is also presented with several historical and scientific facts woven into the story, such as the existence of a Madeiran tradition of whale hunting and the inherent massacre of the seals as a threat to the old fishing industry. In the second part of the experience that happens inside the museum, each interaction with a taxidermy species yields scientific facts about the fauna and flora of the island. The application relies on the finding of markers that indicate content and unlocking story fragments that progress the plot. In MoCP-TS we explore how to foster awareness and interest of young audiences towards nature, its elements and habitats, by combining a fictional story world with gamified interactions and the species of a natural history museum exhibit.

3.4 Poseidon—Monitoring Whales in Coastal Urban Environments Moving from land into the ocean, POSEIDON [39] is a low-cost passive acoustic monitoring system for marine citizen science and real-time acoustic augmentation of whale-watching experiences. POSEIDON stands for Passive-acoustic Ocean Sensor for Entertainment and Interactive Data-gathering in Opportunistic Nauticalactivities. It uses low-cost IoT technologies to collect acoustic data for citizen science and enhancing whale watching experiences, with the underlying intention to avoid stressing the animals by a too close or frequent approach of humans to their location. POSEIDON (see Fig. 6) is a novel acoustic monitoring application that enables a mix of citizen science data gathering and enhanced real-time interactive entertainment using on-boat mobile applications. It uses machine learning techniques to identify vocal acoustic samples of common cetaceans like whales and dolphins. The features extracted from the machine learning models are used to enhance the whale watching experience and provide citizen science data to marine biologists and environmental protection agencies. POSEIDON User Interface (PUI) was designed to augment the tourists’ experiences on the boat during the whale watching tours, happening in the territorial urban waters of the city of Funchal. Our prior works inspired the design of a treasure hunt mobile game tailored for ocean museums where we used passive proximity Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) beacons as sensors [40]. The PUI consists of two core

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Fig. 6 POSEIDON Ecoacoustic IoT system—a and c sensor, b and e deployment, d and f usage

components: (i) a Machine Learning component, which portrays previously collected and classified sounds of cetaceans in real-time (Fig. 8a–d); and (ii) a Whale Reporter component, which fosters citizen-science, allowing the tourists and marine biologists to report, gather media, and classify cetaceans’ vocal calls (Fig. 6e–h). POSEIDON was the first general purpose system aiming at collecting and streaming acoustic signals during whale and dolphin watching activities, but it goes beyond merely capturing the acoustic data, deploying a novel on-board mobile application for augmenting the user experiences with real-time sound detection and classification of cetaceans. Whale and dolphin watching is a growing touristic segment in the urban waters of Funchal, capital of Madeira Islands. Concerns about the impact of direct and indirect human activity over the marine environment require the implementation of sustainable strategies for the usage of marine goods and services (Fig. 7).

3.5 U-Gene—Ecoacoustics Powering Playful Experiences The idea of using ecoacoustic sensors to power playful urban experience was further explored in [27]. U-Gene is an ecoacoustics game designed with a two-fold aim: (i) educating city dwellers about environment biodiversity—while playing the

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Fig. 7 POSEIDON mobile interface

user learns about biodiversity variety and changes in locations with bioacoustic sensors; and (ii) involving and engaging users in data classification to help researchers validate the animals’ detections generating datasets of classified animal calls. The U-Gene game concept builds on a fictional back story: set in 3050, Human civilization survived a great environmental catastrophe, where most of nature was distorted from its original genetic composition. In the year 3050, time travel is a safe technology. A governmental agency that performs genetic modification focuses on recruiting agents in the past (our present, 2018) to collect samples of original species to restore nature to its former state. The player recruited from the agency is asked to collect samples in the present. A future based scientist guides the players in following the instruction of the game and helping them fixing the future. U-Gene was implemented in Android allowing the player to experience the game in two different modalities: (i) a remote-based scenario, where the player can select one of the available parks where the network of our ecoaccoustic sensors is installed and virtually explore it, listening and classifying the detected calls; (ii) a local-based scenario, in which the player is physically located in one of the parks where our bioacoustics infrastructure is deployed. In this case, AR technology has been exploited to provide a more engaging experience to users while exploring the environment (see Fig. 8). Central to the game scenarios is the sound classification game and the mutant creation feature. The player’s skills in classifying animals’ calls grant him/her the collected DNA samples to help the future scientists to restore nature. We tested U-Gene game mechanics in different contexts. Data analysis resulted successfully, and players had an enjoyable and educational experience, which is necessary to boost the participants’ engagement in the project, hence the crowdsourced

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Fig. 8 Photos taken during the experience prototype: the sound classification (right) and the mutant creation (left)

validation of the animal calls. Finally, we deployed the ecoacoustic sensors network in the University Campus in Lisbon to test the final prototype of the game. Beforehand, we carried out a series of usability tests and interviews in order to separately assess that game elements like mutant analysis, capturing animals, and the game’s story contributes to an effective user experience. Figure 9 shows the points of interest (sensors and AR contents) in the map integrated into the game and made available to players. After the analysis of qualitative (interviews and questionnaires) and quantitative data (the log related to the users interactions with the game and the classified sounds), we concluded that involved players had a good capacity for sound classification, echoing results of projects like Bat Detective. In summary, U-Gene relies on an intriguing premise that motivates players to classify acoustic samples of animal calls, while having a fun experience. Although we could not acquire enough data to completely validate the audio classification portion of the game, participants enjoyed the game, with a majority stating that they would like to play a version of this game in the future. U-Gene was our first attempt to combine IoT acoustic sensors for an explicit gameful experience in an urban setting. Our preliminary results show that ecoacoustics has a strong potential to engage (young) audiences into gameful urban experiences. Unlike previous work, focused on citizen science (e.g. iBats [24] and BatDetective [28]), U-Gene brings a game experience to the level of non-human generated data. This a new avenue for playful experiences since most of the previous work used gamification in citizen science applications.

4 Discussion From participatory urbanism to city residents as co-creators, the role of technology in cities is evolving in tandem with the criticism of the technology-lead agendas.

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Fig. 9 Users evaluation session: points of interest display in the game map (right); the possibility to enter the AR mode due to the proximity of the player with AR content location (left)

Progressive cities are not only looking at citizens as co-creators but also rethinking themselves as places of cohabitation between humans and non-humans. In this new post-anthropocentric paradigm, we envisage the city becoming a playground of cohabitation between people and nature enabling novel playful interactions in nature conservation and preservation. Building on Weiser’s vision of calm computing [51], we call this new paradigm ecological computing (see right side of Fig. 10). The current smart city builds on the personal and ubiquitous computing technologies which are inherently egocentric (see the left side of Fig. 10) affording applications such as personal assistance, navigation, and entertainment. These technologies lead people to focus on themselves, either through their self-images (the selfie), the social (the social network) or living context (the smart home) or their own wellbeing (the fitness tracker). Since all of the canonical applications are egocentric, they are not designed to make people aware of the broader ecosystem and the complex interdependences and long-term consequences of humans and non-humans. Throughout the cases studies described here, we illustrate one vision of how the interaction process is re-centered to promote environmental protection and ecological consciousness of technology users. In this paradigm, humans are part of a broader

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Fig. 10 Evolution of computing from mainframes to ubiquitous computing to ecological computing involving non-humans

ecological network which also includes non-human agents. Through ecological computing and interaction, we want to design for more than human contexts and evaluate how users react through playful interaction. We believe this paradigm change could impact the call-for-action required in order to revert today’s dramatic consequences of climate change and biodiversity loss. Our case studies (see Fig. 11) strive to reconcile these concepts and theories, about ecological computing, more than human design, biodiversity monitoring and nature conservation, for the design of urban playful and enjoyable systems that provoke change and awareness about the needs of adjusting our fundamental understanding of human and non-human boundaries while coexisting in the world. Playful interventions, interactive stories, and games have great potential in engaging humans with nature conservation awareness, biodiversity monitoring and more than human interactions, nudging the way humans understand and respond to global problems [8, 30]. Notable examples of games crowdsourcing power, trying to solve real world problems include Foldit [10], where players try to solve puzzles to predict protein structures and Minecraft [4] based on 300 villages around the world to help village residents imagine urban renewal and how to build badly needed infrastructure. Pervasive games [2, 29] extend the gaming experience out in the real-world, where the fictive world in which the game takes place blends with the physical one. The design of these games and interventions, and the production of the technology infrastructures required to power them is dependent on a complex political dimension that must be considered and eventually become part of any effective solution. Decentering the human requires a new design approach which fundamentally brings non-human aspects to the surface. IoT related technologies are capable of bringing non-humans into the loop, but they are inherently designed for a human-centric context and an egocentric era. It is essential to be aware of these complex dynamics and interdependencies in order to design playful intervention intended to foster respect towards nature and awareness towards the effects we cause on the environment we inhabit.

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Fig. 11 Mapping case studies of playful interventions in terms of scale and type of content. Overview of the playful urban interventions mentioned in this chapter, in terms of scale (from indoor to city and planet scale) and content (from authored fictional content to documented and live content). Most artifacts are small scale authored projects. These experiences are challenging to scale up as they require substantial design and production efforts. On the other hand, citizen science projects which do not require authored content can scale considerably

Designing, testing, and deploying the different case studies presented above, enabled some reflection which we summarize in the following insights: 1. The Power of Storytelling From Fragment of Laura and Memories of Carvalhal we learned that combining technology, storytelling, and game creation is a highly complex, multidisciplinary, and specialized endeavor. It requires careful interdisciplinary listening and needs various and specific expertises and contributions. However, for how much we strive to listen without preconceptions, our effort will always be human centric. Designing with such awareness in mind, is essential. Moreover, human-centric approach facilitates relying on the power of storytelling and character persuasion, which are be fruitful strategies. 2. Focus the Aims of the Intervention Playful interventions aiming at monitoring and conservation of nature, need to be tightly focused in their aims. Successful serious games tend to have one goal [43]. Through designing and evaluation of Be Eco as well as U-Gene, we realized that the

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lack of one game designer figure that took control of the game focus and mechanics in order played a role. Being aware that the interdisciplinarity of the team might play a role in complicating the aims of the game, can be of help. 3. Target a Specific Audience Playful interventions need to carefully target a specific audience based on the intended outcome. As Falk mentioned: one size does not fit all [16]. A game designed for children will not have the same effect on adults or policymakers. MoCP was explicitly designed for teenagers after several participatory workshops were conducted to understand and elicit their preferences [7]. beEco was particularly challenging because it was targeting a challenging social-political audience (fishermen and farmers working at the boundaries of the natural park) and it also involved co-creating with children. While the message might be the same, the aesthetics and the game mechanics will need to different. Through POSEIDON evaluation, we realized that the same mechanic of relying the marine mammals’ calls needed different dynamics and aesthetics to engage different audiences: exploiting the same technology for different audiences. 4. Don’t Make Them Feel Guilty Fourth, and perhaps most important, while we are open to being exposed to the complexities and consequences of the Anthropocene, feeling guilty is not something that will motivate us for long. If these interventions mostly make us feel bad about ourselves, they will likely be discarded. It is crucial to identify narratives and storylines that are not depressing while maintaining complexity and honesty. Such storylines and games are likely to succeed in time and engagement efforts.

5 Conclusions In this chapter, we have highlighted the timely issue of bringing awareness about nature preservation through playful interaction in an urban setting. We root the motivation on the Anthropocene interdisciplinary discourses on the effects of humans on our natural environment. Throughout our work over the last five years, we designed, deployed, and tested a series of interventions in a unique urban-nature landscape. In the above text, we presented different possibilities of engaging inhabitants of urbanized environments in novel playful interactions in nature conservation and preservation discourses, taking advantage of the technologies of the smart city. Our motivation spands from the challenge of how to design human spaces for cohabitation with other species and foster more than human interactions. This requires that we take the nonhuman seriously in order to meaningfully engage in the design of cities with more responsible, accountable, and ethical ways of engaging with emerging technologies. Only then we could understand how the interaction process could be re-centered to effectively promote environmental protection and ecological consciousness on the

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part of technology users. We discuss our ongoing work as a first step towards a new paradigm we call ecological computing, one that could leverage the necessary and urgent call to biodiversity actions and nature awareness and conservation in urban settings. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank all of the researchers involved in the different research projects reported and summarized here. beEco was designed by Ana Alves, Salim Batlouni, Julia Silva and Kara Rennert. Fragments of Laura and Há-Vita included contributions from Mara Dionísio, Dina Dionísio, Sandra Olim, Rui Trindade, Paulo Bala, Ana Bettencourt and Cláudia Silva. Memories of Carvalhal included contributions from the previous plus Vanessa Cesário, Tomás Nunes and Micaela Sousa. POSEIDON was led by Marko Radeta with contributions from Dinarte Vasconcelos. Finally, U-Gene emerged from the work of Pedro Loureiro. Part of this research work was supported by LARSyS (Projeto Estratégico LA 9—UID/EEA/50009/2013) and MITIExcell (M1420-01-0145-FEDER-000002).

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Part IV

Designing Location-Based Games

Interactive Narrative Design for Geographically Dispersed Points of Interest Tonguc Sezen, Ido Iurgel, Nicolas Fischöder and Digdem Sezen

Abstract In 2020, the RheijnLand.Xperiences project will connect eight museums along the Dutch-German border region by a continuation network using a storydriven application for mobile devices for an audience between the ages of 14 and 25. The goal of the project is to motivate users to visit other museums in the network. While experiences and stories are individually tailored for each museum, an overarching narrative and experience structure is also designed to establish connections between them. This structure relies heavily on the contemporary narrative and location-based gaming concepts and practices to compensate for the environmental and thematic diversity of each museum. To enrich the overall experience of visiting multiple museums in the network, the design also relies upon shared and regional characteristics. In this chapter, the authors summarize their conceptual approach, findings of the analysis of the distribution of the museums in the region, core elements of the “universal” narrative and experience design, and early results of the development. Keywords Continuation network · Narrative design · Secondary world · Regional experience design

1 Introduction The RheijnLand.Xperiences (RLX) project aims to build a “continuation network” [10] between eight museums in the Rhine-Waal region of Germany and the Netherlands by employing junctures built through methods such as interactive digital storytelling (IDS), culture caching, hyperportals, and blended experiences. The core T. Sezen (B) · I. Iurgel · N. Fischöder Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, Friedrich-Heinrich-Allee 25, 47475 Kamp-Lintfort, Germany e-mail: [email protected] D. Sezen Faculty of Communications, Istanbul University, Kaptani Derya Ibrahim Pasa Sokak, 34116 Beyazit Fatih/Istanbul, Turkey © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_12

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project outcome will be a location-based application which will be available by 2020 on major digital distribution platforms for mobile devices. The project is supported by the European Union’s Interreg program, and the project partners include Erfgoed Gelderland, Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences in Germany, HAN University of Applied Sciences in Holland and the 8 participating museums: Valkhof Museum (Nijmegen, Netherlands), Openlucht Museum (Arnhem, Netherlands), Nationaal Bevrijdings Museum (Groesbeek, Netherlands), Geldersch Landschap Kasteelen (Ammerzoden, Netherlands), Museum Schloss Moyland (BedburgHau, Germany), Museum Kurhaus Kleve (Kleve, Germany), Museum Goch (Goch, Germany), and Archäologischer Park Xanten (Xanten, Germany). A continuation network is a network of overarching location-based experiences tied to predetermined member locations, which aims to encourage visitors to visit all its members by forming curiosity and desire to continue their experience. The defining feature of a continuation network is providing an ongoing and familiar experience across member locations while also respecting and promoting the core identifying essence of each one of them. The concept offers an alternative solution to the challenges of designing location-based games for geographically dispersed points of interest, especially at regional scales. Mainstream mobile-games designed to be played globally in multiple cities, like Ingress or Pokemon Go, repeat an overlaying game-design at each location and use local points of interest in standardized roles such as spawning points or portals. Mobile-games designed for specific points of interest on the other hand are local by design and thus difficult to adapt and expand to other locations. The regional continuation network developed for the RLX project gives each member museum a role within a larger storyline. In the meantime, it also recognizes their unique cultural relevance for their hometowns and to the region through specifically tailored local stories. The interactions of the continuation network are designed in a balanced way, relying on both standardized and unique gameplay elements for each museum. Traveling between member towns and cities in the region is an essential part of the progress. These features make the continuation network a possible solution for regional mobile-game projects aiming to connect different towns and cities and promote local attractions through gameplay. After the initial conceptualization of the RLX project [10], the project team continued to design and develop an implementation of the proposed continuation network, a modular and flexible framework for narrative and experience design which would manage cross-regional museum visits. Methodologically the team followed a double top-down and bottom-up strategy to answer the local needs and expectations of each museum while also building a sustainable network and a continuous universal experience. One key challenge identified during the design process was the diversity of the member museums on multiple aspects. Besides thematic and technical differences which will be discussed later in the chapter, the design had also to take the differed roles museums were playing in each city and throughout the region into consideration. A city museum focusing on local artists had different requirements and limitations than a museum commemorating a national event which took place in the region. Regional commonalities on historical and cultural levels were used as anchor points to balance such differences. This chapter summarizes the ideas behind

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the conceptualization of the continuation network, describes the challenges faced during the design process, the core elements of the top-down “universal” narrative and experience design, and the early results of the implementation process.

2 Conceptualizing the Continuation Network The term continuation network has been proposed by the authors [10] to conceptualize a narrative and experience design approach for regional location-based games involving specific points of interest. On theoretical level the concept has been inspired by discussions in different fields such as game studies, IDS for museums, and contemporary screen narratives. The requirements and limitations of the RLX project, the first implementation of a continuation network, has also shaped the authors’ understanding and formalization of the concept. Montola [17] categorizes location-based games within four main typologies; “physical games” which core experience is focused more on scenography and props and less on an actual location, “local games” which are specifically designed for a location and can only be played there, “global games” which form a game space parallel to the real world and thus can be played everywhere, and “glocal games” which “use the surroundings, but the content and the gameplay are designed in a flexible manner in order to be easily relocated” [26]. Since they aim to connect geographically dispersed specific points of interest, games and interactive experiences build upon continuation networks can mainly be categorized under glocal games. They must be designed specifically for a series of locations and reflect their individual characteristics while also sharing certain experience features to be perceived as a continuous construct by users. This means that a continuation network should both introduce new experiences and repurpose others. The reuse of location-based interactions in multiple locations has been discussed by Scheider and Kiefer [25] in terms of re-localization of location-based games. They propose a layered model of game localization in which game mechanics, game narrative, and game space are evaluated so that a location-based game can be played in different locations without creating inconsistencies and breaking the game. The hypothetical game scenarios they investigate mainly focuses on the consistency of the gameplay and discusses how different real-life locations can be used as a continuous game space for a certain game with the help of changes in the narrative layer: The same conquest game can be played as a medieval fantasy story in a historical town or as a crime story in a modern city. In this regard the notion of using narrative elements to transform different locations into a continuous game space is applicable in the design approach of the RLX project. Yet in ideal terms, a continuation network also requires certain changes in gameplay reflecting the individual characteristics of real-life locations. Moreover, the fact that the real-life spaces RLX project uses are museums should also be considered in examining the question of re-localization. Ranging from simple audio guides to complex information kiosk, from marker based augmented reality (AR) projects to digital treasure hunts using global posi-

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tioning system (GPS), the application of digital technologies to enhance museum visit experiences is a well-established approach [6, 3, 22, 28]. With the rise of highperformance mobile-computing, cultural institutions including museums started to provide mobile-applications to successfully engage wider audiences. These applications used both storytelling and game-based approaches to engage audiences, and their effectiveness were both tested and discussed [18, 20, 22, 27]. Most of such projects cover only one museum or cultural institution and cross-institutional museum projects which can be evaluated in terms of continuation networks are comparatively rare and diverse in their scales and design. The digital storytelling project The Tales of Things for example, which collected local stories about exhibited daily objects using a standardized model, had run at several museums in the U.K. but did not connect the museums directly [13]. It could have been seen more like a series of augmented exhibitions sharing the same theme and are shown at several museums at the same time. Aiming the entire museum sector, the EU-funded CHESS project conducted extensive research in the application of mobile technologies and storytelling. One of the main goals of the project was the attempt to prioritize the focus from “exhibit-centric, information-loaded descriptions, to story-centric narrations with references to the exhibits” [10]. One of the difficulties to overcome during the project was to create appealing mobile applications using exploratory activities, an adaptive game-experience, and AR-representations of cultural artifacts wrapped in a drama-based storytelling approach. While the final framework was aimed to be used in a variety of museums, two prototypes of the project were tested; one at the Acropolis Museum in Greece, and the other at the Cité de l ‘Espace in France [11]. While using the same technical aspects and design paradigms, both prototypes may be considered independent from each other thematically and narratively. In this regard, the CHESS project may be considered as a framework for the re-localization of augmented museum experiences. A continuation network, on the other hand, requires more than just re-localization but also expansion, especially in its narrative layer. To conceptualize a continuation network from a narrative design point of view, authors investigated concepts on contemporary screen narratives spread to multiple platforms and productions such as “transmedia storytelling”, “complex narratives”, “crossovers”, “media franchises”, and “secondary worlds”. Henry Jenkins describes the concept of transmedia storytelling as a “process where integral elements of a fiction get dispersed systematically across multiple delivery channels for the purpose of creating a unified and coordinated entertainment experience” [8]. In an ideal transmedia story, each medium is expected to make its unique contribution to an unfolding of the story. This conceptualization bears similarities to the core idea of a continuation network in which a narrative and gameplay experiences are distributed among different museums, and each museum is expected to make a unique contribution to an overall continuing experience. A key difference, at least within the limitations of the RLX project, is the use of a mobile application as the main medium, whereas the museums themselves with their unique thematic and technical limitations may also be considered factors affecting the affordances of each local experience. Mittel [15] describes the “complex, narratives” model as a redefinition of the balance between episodic and serial forms. The late 1990s and early 2000s TV

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dramas Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel may be seen as pioneering examples of complex narratives in TV. According to Mittel [15], such TV shows offer their viewers season long ongoing story arcs with consistent narrative elements and character development, but also episodic coherence and mini-resolutions. In other words, in an ideal complex narrative, viewers are expected to enjoy the conclusion of each episode with an emotional fulfillment while also being intrigued by the fragments of the overall story so that they desire to watch the new episode next week. This balanced relationship may be considered as a target for the narrative design of a continuation network. Each narrative fragment distributed to a different museum may be treated as an episode which provides a coherent story with a mini-resolution while the combination of all museum stories forms an overarching regional story experience. Similar features can also be found in contemporary “crossovers”. In traditional terms, a crossover is a text format where “two or more cultural references intersect in one piece” or an outcome of “hybridizing cultural objects” [5]. In terms of storytelling, this may be seen as a one-time-only partnership or face-off between established characters with similar backgrounds or lines of work; Sherlock Holmes meets Hercule Poirot or King-Kong versus Godzilla for example. In contemporary media practice, crossovers have taken the form of “crossover uber-franchises” where individual cultural objects which can be experienced by their own form a larger experience if combined with the other objects or text within the same franchise [9]. Series of movies based on the Marvel Comics superheroes or the so-called “Marvel Cinematic Universe” may be seen as an example of such crossovers where each movie tells the story of a separate hero while also providing clues to a larger story, which is later, told in a movie where these heroes assemble to stop the threat hinted earlier. The difference between an episodic complex narrative and the in-franchise crossover is the nature of individual episodes. In complex TV narratives, each episode features more or less the same cast of characters going through the same series of events while in contemporary crossovers each movie focuses mainly on one character and their individual stories. A continuation network may adopt both approaches. As discussed later in this chapter, the RLX project narrative design borrows elements from both by introducing unique key story characters in each museum who are accompanied by a framing character throughout the regional experience. Nevertheless, both complex narratives and crossovers approaches may provide a potential basis for the general narrative aspects of a continuation network. Since the core of the concept is based on geographically dispersed locations, or locations which can only be visited with temporal intervals, the episodic structure of both approaches may be applicable. The one key feature most contemporary complex narratives and crossovers share is the secondary fictional world in which their stories are set in. According to Wolf [30], the subcreation of a secondary fictional world combines existing concepts of the Primary World, in which we live in, with inventions that replace or reset them; there may be vampires living hidden among us, or the world might actually be a simulation. The “overlaid world” of Spider-Man’s New York provides a good example of how the primary world and the secondary world can work together [30]. Spider-Man stories use the real city as their setting thus benefit from the familiarity of the reader but through hidden underground bases or replacing real-world buildings with fictional

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ones it also creates a secondary fictional geographic layer which makes the adventures of the superhero possible. An overlaid secondary world is a concept, which one can argue, lays in the heart of most “pervasive games”, which “expand the contractual magic circle of play spatially, temporally, or socially” [16]. Pervasive games use both mobile technologies and other types of narrative or playful interventions to let their players interact with secondary overlaid game worlds. A historical landmark becomes an alien beacon to be conquered or a bank building becomes an inaccessible base. In its ideal form, a continuation network should not only form a secondary fictional world spread over member cultural institutions but also create a cultural umbrella where the whole experience of the project is promised to be larger than visiting the member museums individually. A combination of a complex episodic structure and a shared fictional world which also respects and benefits from the individual characteristics of each member location should be seen as the ideal form of a continuation network narrative design. This goal, however, can only be achieved if the diversities within these characteristics are evaluated and built-upon during the design process.

3 Engaging Diversity on Multiple Levels Challenges in several areas were faced during the design and development of the early prototypes of the RLX-app. These challenges limited, shaped, and inspired the narrative and experience design processes, and technical development. Unlike local apps specifically tailored for the constraints of one point of interest, or global apps which could function at any location providing a series of general services; the RLX-app had to reach a niche balance in terms of content and technical structure. It had to involve local themes and artifacts in its design and function across individual institutions while also providing a global experience across them. Thus, the challenges faced are mainly based on the diversity of RLX project museums. In conceptualizing a continuation network amongst the eight partner museums of the RLX project, one of the key parameters to be considered has been their geographical features and relationships. Ahlqvist and Schlieder’s [2] interpretation of Kuhn [12] and Janelle and Goodchild’s [7] work on core geographic concepts for interdisciplinary research in relation to location-based games has proven to be useful in doing so. First among those concepts, “location” has provided us insight regarding possible user scenarios. In terms of where they are located RLX museums are quite diverse; especially in regard to the different amounts of effort, they require to be reached by the selected target audience. Most of the RLX museums are located in town centers thus can easily be reached by younger segments of the target audience by using public transportation. Others are in more remote and hard to reach locations, such as Kasteel Doorwerth; one of the member castles of the Geldersch Landschap Kasteelen Network, and mainly require private transportation, thus a specific effort to be reached. Thus, school or family trips were regarded as a possible scenario for younger segments to reach and experience some of the partner museums. “Distance”

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between the museums was another parameter which shaped the design decisions. RLX project partner museums are spread across different towns within the border area between Germany and the Netherlands. Individual museums are in some cases tens of kilometers away from each other. Thus, visiting multiple museums at a time seems not to be feasible. Only one RLX museum being visited by a specific user in a given day is considered to be a more realistic scenario. At the same time, the museums are located within a specific region and spatially interconnected, thus form a “neighborhood”. Depending on the starting point they form naturally aligned target points to be visited in temporarily separated pulses based on proximity. In this regard, RLX museums do not form a “field” or a continuous phenomenon, but a natural network of nodes of interest; interconnected but independent at the same time. Other factors of geographic diversion between the RLX museums were identified as “scale” and “spatial variability”. While some RLX museums consist of wide open-air spaces as large as a small town with various experience offerings (i.e., Nederlands Openluchtmuseum), others offer mainly indoor experiences within one building (i.e., Museum Goch). Considering that RLX partner institutions being museums, these geographical aspects can also be discussed in terms of “exhibition ecologies”. According to Roppola [21], exhibition ecologies can be understood as “environmental opportunities available to visitors [and] the interfacing of visitors and exhibition environments”. Some exhibition ecologies of RLX museums are organized more in line with traditional “off-hands” approach, while some contain “multisensory elements” such as smells and touchable specimens, and others offer “hands-on participatory exhibits” which let visitors take part in various activities such as cooking or using late 19th Century machinery. In some cases, more than one of these approaches can be observed together; both in terms of individual exhibits but also in the organization of general exhibition ecologies. Borrowing the concept from semiotics, Roppola [21] argues that museum exhibits should be discussed through multimodality, where each mode of expression, here modes of exhibition, should be seen as equal, while also acknowledging that they can only carry parts of the meaning attached to that exhibit, and the total meaning of an exhibit is formed not by addition but integration of multiple modes. In this regard, the RLX-app can also be seen as a new mode of exhibition which expands the exhibition ecology of each individual RLX museum. This understanding differentiates the design priorities of the project from any experience module designed for an individual museum, such as specially tailored audio tours or guide-apps which can be found at some of the RLX museums. The interactive components of the RLX-app should offer new ways of experiencing the museums; providing new modes accompanying the existing offerings; but also, must expand their meaning through the bridges it builds within the continuation network. In addition to exhibition ecologies and geographical features, RLX museums also differ from each other in terms of their “thematic foci”. This forms a key design challenge since the RLX-app is expected to harmoniously tune into the thematic environments of museums while also creating an overarching experience and storyline. In this regard, the partner museums can be divided into two major categories;

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historical museums and art museums; with some of them offering a mixture of both themes based on local cultural identities. Historical periods and themes covered by RLX museums collectively can be listed as the Roman period in Rhein-Waal region (i.e. Archäologischer Park Xanten), Late Middle Ages (i.e. Geldersch Landschap & Kasteelen), the Second World War (i.e. Nationaal Bevrijdingsmuseum 1944–1945), and the people’s history of late 19th and early 20th century (i.e. Nederlands Openluchtmuseum). The art museums too diverge from each other in terms of their collections and foci on different local and international artists and art movements. Another important factor affecting especially the art museums is the “frequency and relevance of temporary exhibitions” and the circulation periods of art pieces within the permanent museum collections. While as Roppola [21] underlines, such changes encourage visitors to revisit individual museums, they also create a challenge in term of RLX continuation network design since they inadvertently affect the layouts of museum grounds and their thematic continuity. Nevertheless, despite this diversity, the shared history and cultural heritage of these neighboring places, and the relevance of internationally acclaimed local artists such as Joseph Beuys, also provides a unifying thematic backdrop which is utilized in the design of the RLX app. Finally, variations in the technological infrastructures of partner museums should also be noted as a major challenge. Wi-Fi offerings to visitors and mobile reception quality are inconsistent amongst partner institutions. The usage of Bluetooth devices such as iBeacons was also not possible in some museums due to concerns related to circulation periods and maintenance. Thus, self-reported positioning had to be chosen as the main locating strategy and movement-based interactions had to be limited.

4 Narrative Design Diversity on multiple levels has proven to be a challenge in the practical application of a continuation network in the RLX project. To overcome these challenges on the narrative level, the authors decided to create a secondary fictional world which could be easily overlaid on the primary world of the museums. This secondary world had to create a fictional context within which partner museum with different characteristics could be interpreted by the users as a continuous narrative space. In addition, the secondary world also had to create a setting for both episodic and overarching storylines. One key inspiration during the design process was the UK media franchise Doctor Who; which narrative design has been called “a loose format for a long-running series” [19] due to the characteristics of its protagonist, The Doctor, an alien time traveler accompanied by various companions, usually from earth, and engages in adventures told in various styles; comedy, mystery, horror and so on. While the series had been quite episodic in its early days, since its revival in 2005 the narrative design of Doctor Who also included season-long story arcs. Taking inspiration from these characteristics in designing the narrative world of the RLX project continuation

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Fig. 1 From left to right, the main framing character, Sofia the Trader; the museum mascot of Museum Xanten, Ursus of Xanten; a secondary character inspired by field marshal Maarten van Rossum, Rus Mar of Valkhof

network, the authors developed the idea of a mysterious trader who could visit an invisible secondary world accessible only at and shaped by the collections of RLX museums. Named Sophia (see Fig. 1), this trader lives in a secondary world which is invisible and inaccessible without the use of the RLX-app and invites users to become her apprentices. The realm Sophia lives in has formed out of the emotions, memories, and ideas surrounding the art pieces and historical artifacts in RLX museums and is based on the individual characteristics and collections of museums and the shared historical, cultural, and artistic heritage of the region. It brings the collections of partner museums into life and populates them with a society of imaginary beings reflecting both individual museums and the shared history and legends of the Rhein-Waal region. To keep a healthy balance of emotions and ideas, invisible societies living at museums require trade, which Sophia provides with the help of her apprentice. This core fictional logic provides a high level of creative freedom while developing local stories while also connecting them seamlessly. Individual museums may be inhabited by living sculptures or ghosts of long dead historical figures with different desires and motivation, but all of them require Sophia’s services. Besides The Doctor, the character of Sophia the Trader, is functionally similar to the alien smuggler of earlier iterations of the RLX project [10] but her actual character is mainly inspired by the Glückel of Hameln; a 17th-century businesswoman who had visited the Rhine-Waal region and had kept diaries about it [29]. Each location features non-player characters called during the design process “museum mascots” but will be addressed in the story as partners or acquaintances of Sofia, who embody the characteristics of each museum and act as story companions throughout the visit (see Fig. 1). In term of enhancing a museum visit by adding distinct personal voices, museum mascots carry a resemblance to the fictional storyteller companions used by Nationalmuseum Stockholm and Universeum SDC Gothenburg, who add new perspectives to the visitors’ experience of a museum through their personal stories [4]. Museum mascots were created in collaboration with the museum curators following

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a series of interviews and workshops. There are also other secondary characters in the overarching story who were inspired by historical and mythical figures of the RhineWaal region, such as the legendary Geldern Dragon or the 16th-century Dutch field marshal Maarten van Rossum (see Fig. 1). The current narrative and experience design of the RLX-app can be described as a combination of an episodic and linear “universal story module” (USM) with inter-changing “local story modules” (LSM), and unique “local experience modules” (LXM) which also use standardized “interaction modules” (IM) within different contexts. The story of Sofia, the USM, is an overall linear episodic story similar to complex narratives and creates a frame around local stories. Due to the modular design approach, the flow of the USM does not impose a specific museum-visit order to the visitors. While each episode, which is mainly built around LSMs, is selfcontained, together they also form an overarching story which not only connects the museums within a larger narrative but also can be divided into 3 acts in which the role of the visitor changes over time thus offers a transforming narrative experience instead of a repetitive “museum of the week” structure. Throughout these acts, Sophia and the user shift from traders into smugglers, from smugglers to rebels, and finally from companions to adversaries. The first act introduces the workings of the secondary world to the player and by the end of the first episode it’s revealed that Sophia runs a side job as a smuggler. In later episodes she must redeem herself by leaving her criminal ways behind. The second act starts with the mystery of a corruption affecting the fabric of the secondary world. Museum mascots start to reflect the darker aspects of the museum collections. In the final act the user is directed to search for Sophia’s secrets which leads to a confrontation with her. Any RLX museum visited by the first time RLX-app user automatically becomes the first museum, and thus the setting for the first episode of the USM. Each continuing visit to a new RLX museum activates a new episode and the story concludes at the end of the 8th museum visit, or the 8th episode of the USM. Throughout the experience, the USM acts as what Ryan [24] calls a “vector-based narrative” preserving linearity of temporal sequence and causal structure. Each USM episode is divided into an introduction, conclusion, and a small number of conversation scenes which are separated by LSMs and LXMs. These LSMs and LXMs form the interchanging and branching sections of the narrative vector. In other words, combined with the LSM and LXMs the USM build up a “foldback story” structure [1] similar to the ones found in contemporary episodic adventure games [14]. LSMs are local stories tied directly to individual museums and thus reflect their characteristics, unique features, historical backgrounds, etc. Each LSM has multiple versions parallel to USM episodes. Based on which order a museum is visited, USM episodes and LSM variations get paired and create a continuing story. If a museum X is visited by a user as the 3rd museum of the USM, she experiences USM episode 3 and the episode 3 variant of the LSM of this museum. These pairings change the narrative framing of LXMs which are unique for each museum (see Fig. 2). LSMs contain two additional narrative components which are directly linked to the overarching experience. The first, hyperportals [10] from connections between two or more RLX museums using thematic links. Minerva sculptures in Museum Kurhaus

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Fig. 2 USM and corresponding LSMs frame LXMs built individually for each museum

Kleve and Archäologischer Park Xanten, for example, form such a hyperportal which informs and directs users to the other museum. Second, linked to both USM and LSMs archive documents, such as diaries of museum mascots, which may be read or viewed after visiting a museum, are designed to keep the interest of the users alive by forming a secondary narrative thread linked to the completion of the main experience.

5 Experience Modules LXMs are interactive experiences individually tailored for each museum. As interactive and playful components they take various forms, and their purpose is to offer visitors new perspectives to the RLX museums. While each museum offers a fixed number of LXMs their narrative framing gets changed by LSMs; i.e., a culture caching activity gets framed as a rescue or a hunt. In this regard, while these modules are not re-localized they are re-contextualized throughout the experience. LXMs can be divided into two main categories, app-based offerings, and tangible offerings. App-based offerings are shaped by the environmental features and limitations of the museums listed above. To provide a streamlined production process and keep the technical requirements in line with the technical specifications of average mobile devices on which the users will experience the RLX-app with, several IMs were created. IMs can be described as standardized mini-games which can be used within different contexts through replacement of assets or slightly recontextualizing of their interaction processes. In other words, an LXM is a specific combination of an object or location in an RLX museum with an IM. At the current stage IMs developed by the RLX-team can be divided into 3 technical categories; iBeacon-based IMs, computer vision-based IMs, and screen-based IMs. In line with their underlying technologies, the IMs under the first category provide area-based AR interactions which are activated when a visitor moves near them (see Fig. 3). IMs under the second category are used to create object-based AR interactions, visitors interact with the virtual extensions of real objects using their mobile devices (see Fig. 4). Screen-based IMs, on the other hand, encourage visitors to gather information, which they are asked to use as input for screen-based puzzles or riddles (see Fig. 5). Throughout the RLX museums, these IMs are distributed in accordance with the thematic and environmental factors; i.e., computer-vision based IMs were not

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Fig. 3 An iBeacon-based AR IM in Archäologischer Park Xanten, a gladiator fight which must be won next to a specific altar in the museum

Fig. 4 A computer vision-based AR IM in Archäologischer Park Xanten, collecting olive oil from the amphorae collection

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Fig. 5 A screen-based IM in Archäologischer Park Xanten, placing buildings in their correct location. The users are asked to investigate a miniature city model in the museum to solve this puzzle

used if the exhibition design of a museum created an environment filled with highly reflective surfaces or a museum relies heavily on temporary exhibitions. In contrast to app-based offerings, tangible offerings are unique interactive physical constructs which themselves take the form of an exhibition piece within an RLX museum. Tangible offerings are planned to be experienced independently from the RLX-app but at the same time will provide input material at the end of each experience to be used with the RLX-app; i.e., a kiosk combining multisensory elements with digital components reveals at the end of its usage a marker which will be used as an input for a computer vision-based IM.

6 Implementation The technical implementation of the RLX-app is continuing for different fragments of the project. In line with the double top-down and bottom-up design and development strategy, in addition to the USM, the development team also focused on LSM and LXM combinations. The USM is being developed using articy:draft 3 authoring software, which allows the creation of modular stories with branching structures in a relative ease. The main technical framework of the application is Unity3D. Unity3D allows for cross-platform development and the creation of interactive 3D and 2D applications for Android and iOS-driven smartphones. The usage of a game engine enables the developing team to quickly embed interactive audio-visual effects and game-mechanics that aim to appeal to the target audience. 3D- and 2D-content,

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narrative content developed in articy:draft 3, as well as audio content that has been created in third-party packages, can easily be imported and utilized in Unity3D. In order to provide appealing AR experiences, Wikitude has been utilized as a state-ofthe-art AR framework. Wikitude enables rapid creation of various AR tracker types, e.g. object trackers, where objects are transformed into virtual markers which can be tracked by the system. Exhibition pieces are photographed from every side and uploaded into a cloud-service provided by Wikitude service. Image trackers provide the possibility to use planar surfaces as markers. These markers can be generated using photo imagery of designated surfaces which are also converted via the cloud service. Several difficulties emerged from uneven lighting conditions, as well as the lack of contrast within the object’s surface. In addition to AR-frameworks, peripheral sensors of the mobile devices are used for additional game mechanics. For instance, gyroscopic sensors capture the orientation of a smartphone. They are used for games in which the player balances virtual objects on the smartphone’s screen. The player’s progress is updated into the online database Google Firebase, as soon as the internet is available. Following several workshops and interviews with museum curators, first an analog prototype has been developed to test the USM, LSM, and LXM combination balance and been tested in laboratory environment with university students who form the older segments of the target audience. While the story and game combination has been perceived generally positive by the testers, puzzle difficulties had to be reevaluated. Later, two digital prototypes were created to test the design and technical aspects of the proposed project structure. These prototypes, one for Museum Kurhaus Kleve and the other for Archäologischer Park Xanten, have proven that the LXM concepts are applicable in museums. In addition, several IMs were prototyped in Unity3D and tested on mobile devices in laboratory environments. These included an iBeaconbased AR exploration IM, a computer vision-based AR collecting, carrying and dropping IM, a computer vision-based AR avatar control IM, and several screenbased IMs. The balancing and re-localization of these IMs are continuing. Since the RLX-app will be used on smart devices owned by the users instead of devices provided by the project, accessibility is a major technical concern regarding computer vision and iBeacon-based IMs. To answer possible worst-case scenarios caused by the limitations of user devices, a screen-based version of each IM is being developed. Following a similar logic, the quality of the audio-visual content must also be adapted to the lower-end target devices.

7 Reflections What is the further potential, and what are the possible limitations of the continuation network approach? The core idea of a location-based continuation network can be transferred to several other realms where different locations carry enough family resemblances to allow for the creation of narrative connections. For example, distinct quarters of a city that attract tourists to a different extent may form such a narra-

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tive network or smaller villages in a rural area. The whole success of the endeavor depends on actually providing a superb initial experience so that users want to travel to the next location for this experience to continue, much in the vein and inspiration of TV and Netflix series. As in there, a multitude of narrative approaches for the user to choose from, according to his/her special interests and life situation, should considerably expand the reach of the approach—there is no story that “fits all”. An intelligent parameterization according to personal interests and possibly also to time available and characteristics of further group members should carry much potential, using artificial intelligence (AI) and dynamic narration engines. The potential of accommodating structured group experiences should be one of the major goals for further studies. Also, youngsters in particular, should be attracted by further integration of social media and their potential for self-expression, employing elements and ideas of the story world. The small screen of a smartphone is a potential distracting factor, and repeated reading and some interactive activities require its constant use, so that users may look away from, or only indirectly at, the exhibits. As an alternative, the RLX approach could also have relied much more on audio, to minimize the role of the small screen. In the end, the authors have given priority to reading and looking at the smartphone, rather than to listening, because of practical considerations, but also because for youngsters, the continuous presence of the small screen is “natural”. It remains a question for further studies whether an audio-based experience would lead to substantially different experiences. There is the peril of superficialization, inherent to many gamification approaches. Would a youngster who enjoys the RLX app not go to a museum to play a game that happens to take place there, without actually developing some deeper hermeneutic, aesthetic connection to the exhibits? Is the experience not “external” to the museum, though it accidentally happens “in” them? The RLX approach is being developed in close collaboration with the museum specialists; and surprisingly, no museum director or pedagogical expert at one of the museums ever expressed such concerns. A playful, fresh, joyful activity related to the exhibits was valued as supreme achievement by itself. The authors also expect that the concrete design of the RLX-app stories and interactive activities will lead users to engage and appreciate the exhibits, to a considerable degree; within this debate, much will depend on the details of the concrete implementation. In the course of the ongoing development, the authors are gaining a better understanding of the goals of the RLX project, and its relation to the work of museums. To assess the RLX approach, it is impossible to simply juxtapose the gamified RLX experience to an ideal, RLX-free, profound museum experience, because there is no such generally accepted, clear view on an ideal museum experience. The project is not simply steering more youngsters to museums, by some gamification/storytelling mechanisms; as if at the end, the museums had their own fixed and settled understanding of their idealized role in cultural lives and personal growth of the youngsters. Rather, through its stories, design, and interaction approaches, the project to a certain extent is participating in the ongoing endeavor of defining a possible role of art and

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cultural heritage, for youngsters in particular. Thus, the RLX task and its assessment are more complex than foreseen at the beginning.

8 Conclusion and Future Outlook In the present chapter, an overall narrative design approach for a regional and intercity location-based application has been presented. The modular and flexible framework allows the inclusion of diverse museums with environmental and thematic differences into an ongoing shared experience while maintaining their own identity. An evaluation of this interactive narrative structure based on a systematic and quantitative model [23] is planned to be conducted in the future. In addition, the authors evaluate the internal structures of the LSMs which may lead to the creation of small branches or switchable mobile blocks. This is not only a concern regarding the agency level of the individual users but also based on user scenarios where multiple users, such as a group of students, may use the RLX-app simultaneously. Visual aesthetics and the interface design of the project is still in development. However, iterative, user-centered design methodologies are being applied to elaborate on an appealing and intuitive product. The large diversity in technical restrictions between each RLX museum requires extensive planning and testing and may cause some IMs to be left unimplemented at particular regions. All-in-all, the foundation in terms of early prototypes and an established framework will provide the authors with a solid base to build an appealing and successful product.

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A Game-Based Service to Mitigate the Risk of Inundations Caused by Solid Waste Accumulation Francisco Lepe-Salazar, Tania Cortés-Álvarez, Elia Serratos-Chávez, Luis Jáuregui-Flores, Erick Juárez-Cervantes, Rodolfo Valdovinos-López, Demis Rincón-Martínez and Ramón Moreno-de la Madrid Abstract The number of people living in metropolitan areas of Mexico has steadily grown over the last decades. However, a lack of proper regulations has led to various consequences. An example of this is the mishandling of solid waste. A 2018 study reported that, in our country, 27% of solid waste remains in the cities, and only 12% is recycled. For that reason, garbage accumulation on urban areas is an environmental concern. To address this problem, a law for the management of waste was promulgated. Nevertheless, despite government efforts, the issue continues to aggravate with time. Another dilemma that affects our territory is that many regions are flood-prone. Together, solid waste and seasonal floods result in blockages of the drainage systems in cities, which in turn leads to the stagnation of large amounts of water and inundations. To mitigate the risk of inundations caused by solid waste accumulation, we developed a game-based service. The name of the ludic tool that we developed for this purpose is Wood of War: a pervasive, mobile serious game that motivates players to register places with a high concentration of solid waste. The service works as follows: first, we contrast game-generated registers with information of rainwater flow to determine high-risk zones and to create heat maps; then, we present the maps to the corresponding (local) authorities, so that they may optimize their garbage collecting efforts. To explore the viability of our approach, we tested our service in a pilot study. Additionally, we conducted interviews with government officials to learn their impressions. In this chapter, we present a summary of the results, a discussion of the benefits and limitations of our project, and our plans to consolidate the service. F. Lepe-Salazar (B) Ludolab, Nigromante 89, Centro, Colima, Mexico Coordinación General de Tecnologías de Información, Universidad de Colima, Av. Universidad 333, Las Víboras, Colima, Mexico T. Cortés-Álvarez · E. Serratos-Chávez Cognos+, Nigromante 89-2, Centro, Colima, Mexico L. Jáuregui-Flores · E. Juárez-Cervantes · R. Valdovinos-López · D. Rincón-Martínez · R. Moreno-de la Madrid Facultad de Telemática, Universidad de Colima, Av. Universidad 333, Las Víboras, Colima, Mexico © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_13

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Keywords Playable cities · Serious games · Geographic information systems · Solid waste management · Inundations · Game-based service · Location-based games

1 Introduction According to official data, in Mexico, an approximate of 86 thousand 343 tons of solid waste are produced each day; including cardboard, plastic, glass, and aluminum, among others [2]. Although the country has laws and programs in place (both at the state and federal level) to handle garbage disposal, authorities are constantly overwhelmed by the magnitude of the problem [8, 15, 23, 35, 40, 41, 42, 43]. This, coupled with a proclivity of different regions in the territory to get overrun by water, aggravates the situation. To help mitigate the problem of solid waste accumulation in flood prone areas, a game-based service was developed. The service consists of four phases: (1) use of a serious game to detect areas affected by pollution, (2) contrast of areas detected by players with information on rainfall to highlight locations at risk, (3) generation of heat maps, and (4) presentation of heat maps to the corresponding authorities. The name of the game that we created for this purpose is Wood of War, an application for mobile devices that makes use of animations and activities to illustrate the benefits of proper waste disposal. To explore the viability of the service, a pilot study and interviews with government officials were conducted. This chapter is structured as follows. First, in Sect. 2 (Background), we introduce the theory that served as basis for this project. Then, on Sect. 3, we describe the service and its various components. In Sect. 4 (Evaluation), we report the results of the pilot test, and present highlights from the interviews with government officials. On Sect. 5 (Discussion), we elaborate on the benefits and limitations of our gamebased approach. Lastly, in Sect. 6 (Conclusion), we summarize the contributions of our service.

2 Background 2.1 Solid Waste Management in Mexico and Its Relation to Inundations As a consequence of the natural dynamics of the planet, we live exposed to different phenomena which, coupled with various risk factors, can become real threats to the economic, political, social, and economic stability of communities [22]. One natural phenomenon with great recurrence in our country are floods. Floods are understood as events in which precipitation, swell, storm surge, or failure of the hydraulic or drainage systems can cause an undesired increase in the water level of a region,

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generating invasion or penetration of water in places where there is usually none, and, often, resulting in damage to the population, agriculture, livestock, or infrastructure [10, p. 5]. According to international statistics from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters [9], floods have become the greatest natural threat of the 21st century. In 2018, globally, inundations ranked second in deaths due to natural disasters with 2859 people dead; affecting over 35.3 million individuals, in addition to provoking economic losses that amount to more than 20.3 billion dollars [9]. At the national level, the scenario is not so different. Due to Mexico’s physiographic and climatic characteristics, it is a favorable ground for the presence of hydro-meteorological events. In this sense, our country is significantly exposed to conditions of vulnerability to inundations, which have generated large economic and personal losses in the past (e.g., in 2018, three major floods occurred in the states of Sinaloa, Sonora, and Nayarit). Risk factors known to lead to or aggravate inundations in our country include the following: (1) increase of the population living in urban areas; (2) location of human settlements in prairies/planes near bodies of water (e.g., rivers or lagoons); (3) unplanned change of land use; (4) sufficiency/adequacy of drainage systems to capture copious amounts of water; and (5) blockages generated by solid waste dragged to the sewers, which obstruct the flow and relief of water in the streets. A related problem, of constant concern since the 1970s, is the production of urban solid waste. This because of the imminent expansion of the phenomenon, as a side effect of population growth and the lack of planning and regulations for the urbanization of green areas. What in principle may be considered a problem of the government agencies in charge of cleaning and sanitation, today is one of the factors associated with climate change. Hence, in 2003 a law for the prevention and management of solid waste was promoted, which in 2009 would lay the foundations for a national program for the prevention and integrated management of solid waste by the Instituto Nacional de Ecología y Cambio Climático. A 2017–2018 report states that only 61% of the country’s waste reaches designated landfills, while 12% is recycled, and 27% stays in cities, as part of clandestine garbage dumps. We are not the first to observe this flood-garbage relationship that takes place in Mexico. Zambrano et al. [54], from the UNAM Ecological Restoration Laboratory (Laboratorio de Restauración Ecológica, in Spanish), conducted a geographic analysis based on public databases of Mexico City, including the amount of waste generated per city district, number and location of floods, and sinking speed in each region, among other data. They found that, garbage is one of the factors that intervene in small floods because “small floods in the city are related to solid waste production, which means that a solid waste disposal program may be useful. However, as landscape characteristics also contribute to small floods, these will not disappear, even if there is a reduction of wasteful blockages in sewage systems” [54, p. 778]. Therefore, it is important to generate non-structural strategies that contribute to the reduction of floods generated by obstruction in sewers, together with the design of transversal, public policies.

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2.2 Colima and the Inadequate Management of Solid Waste It is important to point out that when we talk about solid waste, we refer to Enger and Smith’s [16] definition of municipal solid waste (MSW): materials that the population no longer needs or wants. This definition includes domestic and commercial sources of waste. Sáenz and Urdaneta [48], emphasize that proper waste disposal is closely related to the quality of life of the population: (1) due to the transmission of bacterial and parasitic diseases both by the transferred pathogens, and by the vectors that feed and catalyze with the residues; (2) as there is a potential risk due to the gases that originate during the decomposition process; and (3) due to the indiscriminate accumulation of waste in drainage areas. Contreras [13], points out that the inadequate disposal of solid waste affects the development of a community, in addition to creating health and environmental problems. Ochoa [32] describes that waste management is comprised of all the functional or operative activities that integrate five phases: (1) Generation, directly related to population growth, consumption patterns and the increase of commercial activities. (2) Composition, which includes the classification of the waste according to origin. Regularly between family homes and businesses. (3) Separation, focused on the segmentation of waste by type of material. (4) Collection and transport, which refers to the path between the generators to the place of discharge. It is usually a shelter station or sanitary landfill. (5) Treatment and disposal, once the waste has been collected, must be processed to guarantee its complete decomposition. For Ochoa [32], in Mexico waste management only contemplates the phases of collection and disposal. It should be noted that the service we propose in this chapter contributes to phase 4 of Ochoa’s model (i.e., collection). The author also observed that mechanisms for bio-digestion or thermal use of waste are not available in the country. Therefore, the 27% of waste that remains in clandestine garbage dumps represents a potential catalyst of frequent flooding. Our home state of Colima is the smallest producer of solid waste in the country (accounting for only 2%). However, it does not practice selective collection. That is, waste is not classified according to the modalities suggested by the National Program. In addition to that, according to the National Atlas of Risks (Atlas Nacional de Riesgos, in Spanish), six of its ten municipalities have a high probability of flooding. Recent studies observe that, in part, this occurs because solid waste blocks drainage systems and causes water stagnation, which generates severe problems of mobility/transportation, and is a breeding ground suitable for diseases such as sika or dengue.

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2.3 Developing a Comprehensive Solution Guevara and Guevara-Fiore [24] point out that, to provide an appropriate solution to the problem of solid waste (including generation, accumulation, collection, disposal, and/or treatment), it is important to conceive the issue as being not only logistical or technical, but also socio-cultural. For that reason, we considered the role that different stakeholders may have in it, and how they may contribute to its solution. We understand the term stakeholders as the group of people committed to the functioning of an entity, and without whose contribution it would not be possible to reach an objective [20, 46]. Andrés and Azofra [3] suggest that, to fully understand the roles stakeholders play and how they correlate with each other, it is necessary to evaluate these groups with their own logic. In this sense, the main stakeholders involved in the problem of solid waste are: (1) government, the entity that establishes public policy, and that is in charge of waste management; and (2) the private sector and general public, as leading actors, that is, the ones who generate the waste and the ones who can solve the problem. Under this premise, we analyzed different types of technology that could allow us to potentiate the strengths of each type of stakeholder (e.g., video games, computer systems, mobile applications, Bluetooth sensors, GPS, and RFID tags, among others). In the next section, we describe the service we devised as a result.

3 A Game-Based Service to Mitigate the Risks of Inundations 3.1 General Description of the Service To help mitigate the risk of flooding due to the accumulation of solid waste, after considering technology that could enable us to potentiate the strengths of the stakeholders involved in this problem, we designed and developed a game-based service. The two main technological components used in this service are: (1) a geographic information system (GIS), to obtain reliable information; and (2) a video game, to motivate citizens to collect data. It should be noted that, at the moment, the service does not contemplate the participation of the private sector. However, we plan to do so in future editions. The game-based service consists of the following phases: (1) use a video game to detect areas affected by solid contamination, (2) contrast areas registered by players with information on rainfall to determine places of risk, (3) generate heat maps, and (4) present maps to the corresponding authorities. These phases are described in the following subsections.

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3.2 Serious Game—Wood of War (WoW) Video games are a type of tool that attracts the attention of people and sensitizes them to reality. Video games are computer systems composed of elements such as characters, stories, challenges, rules, interactivity, and feedback systems, among others, through which a score is obtained, and emotional reactions are stimulated in their users [47]. In recent years, the number of video games used for activities other than entertainment has increased. This is due, in part, to the success obtained in their implementation for purposes such as education, health, and sports, among others [27, 28, 30, 34]. This particular type of video games is known as serious games. That is why for this project, to motivate the active participation of young citizens, we decided to work with this kind of software.

3.2.1

Game Design

To design a serious game that could enable us to motivate players to contribute to the waste accumulation problem by continuously reporting clandestine dumps, we studied the characteristics of young citizens. Traditional thinking tends to cast citizens as consumers, governments as providers, and technology as a passive medium [33]. However, as Wells [53] observes, young citizens are becoming increasingly self-reliant, constantly engage in (remote) activism, and use technology to solve their problems, interact with the world, as well as for self-expression. For that reason, various authors suggest that civic digital technologies must be designed to empower citizens by enabling them to take a more active role (e.g., by allowing them to participate in the creation of solutions) [14, 33, 50]. Empowerment refers to a person’s sense of autonomy, self-esteem, agency, and/or safety [39]. In general, technology is considered to be empowering if it: (1) gives power to someone over something or others; (2) enables the user to feel in control by improving her understanding, or by contributing to her activities; (3) provides a transient or persistent sense of self-efficacy; and/or (4) is tailored to fit the user’s particular needs (e.g., through participatory design, user-centered design, etc.) [39]. To develop a serious game that empowers young citizens, we conducted participatory design sessions with young students, and collaboratively designed a game that uses in-game rewards to encourage players to actively participate in the waste collection efforts.

3.2.2

Game Description

The name of the ludic tool we created is Wood of War (WoW). WoW is a serious game for mobile devices aimed at young people between the ages of 15 and 25 that seeks to contribute to the process of identification of areas with high levels of

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solid waste pollution. It should be noted that WoW is currently available only in Spanish. Two reasons why we decided to work with this age group are because: (1) currently, a large part of young people in that age range possess a mobile device with Internet access; and (2) they make constant use of applications for their entertainment (including video games). WoW was developed for Android mobile devices making use of the UNITY platform. So far, WoW is configured to be played in selected areas of the city of Colima, Mexico. However, we expect to expand its reach for future editions. In Fig. 1 the main menu of WoW may be appreciated. To achieve its goal, WoW invites users to carry out three activities. The first is to look for places “infested” by enemies using the GPS of their phones. This kind of gameplay is similar to that of the popular Pokémon GO of Nintendo. Pokémon GO is a video game that motivates players to constantly visit different locations to obtain new characters, unlock prizes, and upgrade their level. Prior to its release, the WoW development team marked positions on the map of the game in which enemies would appear. These were chosen based on their

Fig. 1 Screenshot of the main menu

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Fig. 2 Minigames present in wood of war

concentration of solid waste. With this, we sought to convey to the user the message that if a real-world location has a high accumulation of garbage, its equivalent in the virtual world would be full of enemies. The second activity in WoW is to attack enemies and earn points for it (Fig. 2). The player is encouraged to eliminate solid waste (i.e., villains) in the virtual world, crush them and take them to the trash can. The third activity is to register new places with a high concentration of solid waste. To motivate the proactive participation of the players, extra points are given to those users who provide information about the locations of clandestine dumps. This is possible thanks to a game function that saves the user’s current geographical position, using GPS. Once compiled, new locations are sent to the server, and checked periodically in order to determine which ones will be included in the videogame.

3.2.3

Narrative and Characters

Wood of War (WoW) narrates the main character’s Tolkien-esque journey to stop the contamination produced by solid waste. In WoW life is becoming less sustainable due to the indiscriminate accumulation of garbage. For that reason, Gaia the spirit of nature resorts to her best warrior: Doran. Doran is an entity that lives in the forest, the last of the Knights of Olvar, with skin made of tree bark, and supernatural strength. The main villain of the game, responsible for causing the crisis that is lived in Doran’s world, is the multi-billionaire businessman Trobas. Trobas in his thirst for power and wealth, leaves toxic agents on the earth, which transform garbage into aberrations: monsters that destroy everything around them. To save the planet, Doran must recycle the aberrations, and help clean the areas he crosses.

3.2.4

Gameplay

The current version of WoW consists of only 8 levels. Nevertheless, we plan to increase their number for future editions of the game. Our intention is to create different levels to represent the types of waste that can be found in cities, and the various of spaces that tend to be polluted. To play, the user can use two types of weapons: the crystal sword and the metal sword. To win, the player must face 7 bosses and the main villain. Once the application is opened on the mobile device, the gameplay of WoW is as follows:

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• When clicking on the game and starting the game, a message that invites the user to recycle is shown on the screen (Fig. 3). • Afterwards, the player is presented with a map through which he can explore contaminated areas using the mobile phone’s GPS (Fig. 4). • To select an area, the user must walk towards it. • Upon entering a contaminated area, the player can start a mini-game in which he must seek the center of the contamination to purify it. • During the minigame, the user must collect materials that can be recycled and exchanged for weapons. • Thanks to this, Doran can earn experience points, which will allow you to unlock new weapons.

Fig. 3 Example of the messages that invite players to recycle

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Fig. 4 GPS navigation map of the game

3.2.5

Added Value

Video games are interactive media capable of transmitting values and beliefs as part of their components and structure [28]. This phenomenon is known as indirect or incidental learning. For that reason, several serious games are enriched with positive messages [27, 28, 30, 34]. As an added value, WoW makes use of its characters, dialogues, and story to raise awareness among young people about the importance of recycling. An example of this is the different messages that appear when loading a new game (Fig. 3). In addition, the game rewards the players’ positive actions (e.g., recycling certain items) by giving them special items.

3.2.6

Controls

To play Wow it is necessary to use the touchpad of the mobile device. Table 1 shows the main controls of the game.

A Game-Based Service to Mitigate the Risk … Table 1 Wood of war controls

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Navigation

Projectile attack

Fist bump

Attack with crystal sword (available in the store)

Attack with metal sword (unlockable with points)

3.3 Contrast of Information, Generation of Heat Maps, and Presentation of Maps to Authorities The information provided by the players on new locations with high levels of solid waste accumulation (e.g., clandestine dumps) is compiled into a database, which is reviewed periodically. Visiting the places registered by users one by one to verify their current condition puts the scalability of the proposed service at risk. For that reason, the following criterion was established for the selection of locations: places that have two or more mentions are considered of greater importance. Subsequently, these priority sites (i.e., their geographic coordinates) are stored in a list. The next phase of the service is to contrast the recently generated list with information published by local authorities related to the city’s pluvial flow in order to identify regions that, during rainy season, could be more affected. This process is similar to that carried out by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) of the United States, who make use of geographic information systems (GIS) to obtain data on recent rainfall and compare it to rainfall records from previous dates, to mitigate the effects of meteorological phenomena (e.g., droughts) [17]. As a result of this process we obtain a heat map which allows us to highlight areas of risk. It should be noted that, due to limited resources, the map currently generated covers only a small section of the city. However, in future editions we hope to extend it to cover the entire city. The last phase of the service consists in showing heat maps to the authorities responsible for solid waste management and environmental care. This to collaborate with the process of selection of priority spaces for cleaning.

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4 Evaluation To explore the viability of our approach, a study was carried out. This study consisted of the following: (1) a pilot test of Wood of War, and (2) interviews with local authorities to obtain their impression of the service and its different products. A summary of the interventions appears next.

4.1 Pilot Test: Wood of War (Wow) To assess the potential of WoW as a serious game that motivates users to compile information about their surroundings, a pilot test was carried out with the participation of 21 students. The test took place during a single session, which consisted of the following activities: (1) make use of the video game, and (2) answer a post-test questionnaire. In general, finishing these activities took players up to 25 min. To thank participants who joined the session, they were awarded an extra point on their computer science class. The format we used in the intervention includes questions to learn the opinion of participants in relation to the following: (1) video games in general, including their past experiences; (2) WoW’s design and functionality; (3) clarity of the message presented by the game; (4) play experience; and (5) WoW’s ability to motivate them to register locations with accumulation of solid waste.

4.1.1

Results

The following is a summary of the results obtained in the pilot test. The 21 students are all male, and have an average age of 20.52 years. Of these, twenty (95.24%) use video games on a regular basis (once a week or more), sixteen (76.19%) play using their PC, four (19.05%) play on their mobile phone, and sixteen (76.19%) had previously used a serious game. The most popular video game genre among them is Action/Adventure, followed by Sports, and Fighting. Table 2 presents a summary of the results from Sects. 2 to 5 of the post-test questionnaire, on which players were asked to evaluate factors using a Likert-5 scale. As may be appreciated on said table, in general, the response to the game was positive, with the game’s design, ease of use, and clarity of the message being the most prominent factors. It is worth mentioning that thirteen (61.90%) said to have previously heard about the seriousness of the problem of solid waste accumulation in the city. Lastly, fifteen (71.43%) consider that videogames are an appropriate means to carry out this type of interventions.

A Game-Based Service to Mitigate the Risk … Table 2 Evaluation of the play experience by users

Factor

291 M

SD

Entertainment

3.24

0.77

Motivation to keep playing

3.10

1.00

Difficulty level

2.52

0.98

Design

4.33

0.80

Ease of use

4.05

0.86

Clarity of the message

3.81

0.93

Overall experience

3.52

1.08

Motivation to walk through the city to play

3.38

1.16

Motivation to register places with trash

3.57

1.21

The table includes calculations of the mean (M) and standard deviation (SD)

4.2 Interviews with Local Authorities Through a series of semi-structured interviews, we sought to gather the opinion of local authorities with regards to the proposed service and its derived products, as well as to identify possible areas for improvement. We did so following the recommendations from Charmaz [11]. After the information was collected, interview transcripts were analyzed, and categories were obtained using coding techniques such as axial and selective coding [7, 11]. In the case of our city, Colima, the government agencies responsible for the management of waste, as well as for the care of the environment, are: Instituto de Planeación para el Municipio de Colima (IPCO) at the municipal level, and Instituto para el Medio Ambiente y Desarrollo Sostenible del Estado de Colima (IMADES) at the state level. We contacted them, visited their facilities, and interviewed a staff member from each. The topics that were discussed during the interviews were: (1) resilience policies at the city, state and national level; (2) seriousness of the problem of solid waste; (3) difficulties in carrying out the garbage collection process; (4) floodings in the city and related problems; (5) knowledge about the relationship that exists between the accumulation of waste and the undesired increase of water level; (6) need for a methodology to optimize the process of waste collection; and (7) opinion about our game-based service and its products. We were particularly interested in learning about their opinions, impressions, expectations, relevant experiences, insights, and recommendations about the topics mentioned previously. The interviews took place between January and February of 2019.

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Finding an Equilibrium

Both agencies, IPCO and IMADES, oversee the developing of programs and initiatives related to the environment, and resilience. However, they cannot act on their own, as policies are usually decided by multiple government branches/officials. For that reason, they stay in close contact with other agencies at the municipal, state, and federal level. This forces them to try to find an equilibrium, as there are issues that cannot wait for them to reach a general consensus with the different stakeholders before finding a solution. Our contact at IMADES (responsible for the communication with other agencies) expressed the following: “Well, we usually work in groups. Sometimes we can detect a problem, but often the problem comes to us. So, we try to address it with a multidisciplinary approach”. On this regard, in the case of IPCO, the staff member mentioned the following: “From a planning perspective, the design of a city must consider balance in terms of sustainable development and environmental issues… We as an entity cannot control urban development… What we can do is plan, design, but the construction of new areas is the responsibility of a different agency, so we have to have clear limits”.

4.2.2

Waste: An Aggravating/Causal Factor

At the state level, IMADES is the government agency in charge of solid waste management. IPCO, on the other hand, collaborates with other municipal agencies to contribute to its solution. Even though their experience on the subject varies, both entities agree that waste is (at the very least) partially responsible for the problem of inundations in the city of Colima. Our contact at IMADES said the following on this regard: “The problem is that there is too much waste. Too much garbage is generated. An estimate of more than one kilogram per inhabitant is generated daily… There are not enough final destinations to withstand consumption like this… It is something we discuss on a regular basis, the lack of (proper) infrastructure. We often make comments like “people should not throw garbage (on the streets), the drainage system cannot work like that!”.” The staff from IPCO said the following: “Most of the floods in Colima occur due to rain water overflow. There is no proper drainage system (on the city)… What often occurs is that rainwater is poured into the rivers. They (sewage) are insufficient to drain, to carry all the water”. When asked about the negative effects that blockages (due to solid waste) on the drainage system, the staff member said: “That is right. Blockages (due to solid waste) aggravate the problem”.

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Openness to the New Approach

As part of the interview process, we showed to the staff from both agencies our game-based service, as well as its products. In general, the response to them was positive. However, in both cases, they suggested the inclusion of more topics. The person from IMADES said the following: “It is interesting that citizens can participate. Will there be a 2.0 version? I think that it (the game) speaks in a language they understand. If this is a path we can take, I can’t wait to see how it goes. We’ll see how the information can be handled. Any new idea to solve a problem is more than welcome. You have to try it, to see what results it gives us… We need more eyes. That is why I think it (the game) should be tested with different audiences. Because it is important to learn what is happening on the streets near real time. A blockage may be occurring and a person can see it in real time, but the problem can continue to worsen, as the authorities can’t be everywhere at the same time. So, if somebody tells you that the level of water is rising, that something like that is happening, it catches your attention, you must take time to see what is going on… This kind of app can be used for other things, like reporting problems with the lights on the streets”. The staff from IPCO mentioned the following: “It is great that it (game-based service) can allow us to know what the current situation in the city is like, so we can provide a better cleaning service. This type of game practically allows you to monitor the city in real time… It allows us to provide more efficient services, specifically Cleaning and Health. You can just continue adding new services to the tool. It can become a very valuable tool, as you can monitor many situations. For example, a heat map can be created for the topic of security. To establish the relationship that exists with dirty areas. It may be the case that there is some relationship (between a rise in crime and neglect of areas by the authorities)”.

5 Discussion To help mitigate the risk of inundations caused by solid waste, we designed and developed a game-based service that contemplates the participation of two key stakeholder groups: government officials, and the general public. We evaluated this service in a qualitative study, and found the following: (1) young citizens feel motivated to register places with high concentration of solid waste thanks to the serious game; and (2) government officials consider the information that is provided as a result (e.g., heat maps) can be useful. Therefore, it may be suggested that the proposed game-based service can be a viable approach. The study that was conducted had four limitations: (1) the number of participants for the pilot test was small, (2) all participants from the pilot test were male, (3) evaluation sessions were only 25 min long on average, and (4) staff from only two government agencies were interviewed. These factors may limit the generalizability of the results we obtained. Nevertheless, we intend to continue testing our approach

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with larger, and more diverse audiences, and in longer sessions in order to develop a game-based model to mitigate environment-related risks. One current limitation of Wood of War (WoW) is that it is playable only in a small region. We plan to include the use of different sensors (e.g., beacons) to cover larger sections of the city on future editions. A limitation of the service is that, at the moment, it does not contemplate the participation of the private sector, an important group of stakeholders involved in the solid waste problem. For that reason, we plan to redesign the service to include their participation. Other limitation of the service is that, currently, sightings reported by two or more players are automatically considered for inclusion in the heat map. Therefore, we intend to test different criteria to increase the trustworthiness of user-generated reports (e.g., photographs taken by street cameras, verification by a staff member, among others). Our game-based service contributes to one of the key fields necessary to have a smart city: care for the environment [19, 51]. A smart city is a city in which technology is used to improve people’s lives through a more interactive and responsive management [19]. This is thanks to the fact that our service favors the reduction of the response time, on the part of the government, to areas at risk of flooding due to the accumulation of waste. The proposed service favors one of the goals of e-government: to increase citizen participation in decision-making [1, 37, 52]. This goal is also known as e-decisionmaking or e-participation. E-government refers to the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in favor of the development and implementation of solutions that help the transformation and modernization of functions, activities, policies, and interactions of the government in order to promote its effectiveness, integrity, transparency, and responsibility [1]. This is because the proposed service allows citizens of different ages to get involved and participate in decision-making with regards to urban areas that require more attention (i.e., when reporting places with a high concentration of garbage). There exist several video games (including serious games) that deal with issues related to the environment and pollution. For the most part, these are designed for children and young individuals, and aim to promote the culture of recycling. A summary of some representative examples is presented in Table 3. Wood of War (WoW) differs from these in the following: (1) it was designed to be played by young participants and adults; (2) it has a double objective, that is, to raise awareness about the importance of recycling, and to motivate players to compile information about places in the real world with high accumulation of solid waste; (3) it makes use of the GPS of the mobile device to favor the usability and user experience in terms of the space in which it is played; and (4) it is part of a service to mitigate the risk of flooding due to the accumulation of garbage in risk areas. Video games that make use of sensors (among other components) to enrich the play experience in terms of space, time, or social interactions are called pervasive games [49]. Pervasive games that expand the fun spatially may be categorized as: location-based games, site-adaptable games, and site-specific games [26, 49]. There exist multiple location-based, site-adaptable, and site-specific games that make use of in-game rewards to motivate specific player behavior. Wood of War differs from

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Table 3 Examples of serious games with environmental themes Name

General characteristics

Reciclatón [29]

Audience: Children between 6 and 10 years old Objective: Teach children the basics of reusing, recycling, and reducing Description: 3D game for desktop computers Genre: Platform, Adventure Gameplay: The player must clean a room following one of three possible paths: reuse, recycle or reduce

Recycle city [18]

Audience: Children and adolescents Objective: Teach issues related to recycling and environmental responsibility Description: Game available online Genre: Simulator Gameplay: The player is asked to make use of an interactive map that presents a city divided into four zones; each one presents different aspects on how to recycle

Sky Taxi 2 Storm [5]

Audience: Not specified Objective: To promote garbage collection Description: 2D game for mobile devices Genre: Platform, Adventure Gameplay: The player must accumulate points by picking up garbage

Reciclator [21]

Audience: Children Objective: Raise awareness on the importance of recycling Description: 3D game for desktop computer Genre: Platform, Adventure Gameplay: The main character must clean the city by separating garbage and depositing it in assigned containers

them in the following: (1) it is part of a service, and (2) it contributes to the solution of a civic issue by promoting place-making. Place-making is a term used to refer to the development of a sense of ownership of a space that is promoted by the continuous, meaningful interaction with its physical infrastructure [38]. In WoW this is possible thanks to the constant visits a player must make to specific types of locations, and the messages presented to them about the importance of keeping the city clean to preserve the environment (Fig. 3). Lastly, this is not the first project to propose the prioritization of garbage collection points in order to optimize the process. Several research teams have developed algorithms and models that make use of technological services to allow for the selection of collection points based on the travelling salesman problem (TSP) [4, 6, 12, 25, 31, 36, 44, 45]. The type of technology used by them includes RFID tags, GPS, and Bluetooth devices, among others. The objective of these services is to reduce costs related to the transportation of solid waste, both in terms of scheduling (i.e., when they must be collected) and prioritization (i.e., in what order they must be collected). Our service differs from said algorithms and models in the following: (1) the generated heat map seeks to highlight points that, in rainy weather, can cause unwanted accumulation of water; (2) we use a serious game to motivate the participation of

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users in the gathering of information; (3) the main objective of our service is to mitigate the risk of natural disasters related to rain; (4) at the moment, our service does not propose a specific schedule for collection; and (5) the type of waste that is considered is not limited to organic and inorganic (e.g., food, wrappers, cardboard, plastic, etc.), but also includes larger waste such as debris, furniture, tires, etc., which are also related to the blockage of the sewer system and rivers, among others.

6 Conclusions In this paper, we introduce a game-based service that aims to mitigate the risk of inundation caused by solid waste accumulation in urban areas of Mexico. While this environmental issue may not be common to all regions of the planet, we believe that this kind of service may be of interest to countries with similar physiographic, climatic, and/or socio-cultural characteristics. To explore the viability of our service, we conducted a qualitative study with two key groups of stakeholders: government agencies and the general public. Results suggest that, despite its limitations, our approach may be viable. As part of our future work, we intend to continue improving the different components of the service in order to develop a game-based methodology for the mitigation of environmental risks. Acknowledgements The authors are grateful to Michelle Magallón-Vega (Banshee’s Veil student team), who contributed with her talent to the design and development of the Wood of War game. The authors would also like to thank the authorities of the City of Colima, and the State of Colima, Mexico for their support to conduct the interviews. Lastly, the authors would like to thank Sara SandovalCarrillo (Universidad de Colima, Facultad de Telemática), for her continuous help throughout this project.

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Part V

Nomadic and Traditional Games

Levelling Playing Fields, A Nomadic Play Design Annika Olofsdotter Bergström

Abstract In this article I am exploring how a feminist playing practice presents when using public spaces as playing field, with focus on the human body as the game piece. I will also investigate how this externalized playing gives potential to the player to act and to develop into, what I in this article will call, a nomadic play design. I will do this by describing the site-specific game ‘Levelling playing fields’, which Italian artist duo (Giuliana Racco and Matteo Guidi), a group of Palestinian women, and myself designed together at a sports field in the refugee camp Al-Arroub in the West Bank, in December of 2014. As a game designer, my interests are in the playful body’s meeting with the rules, norms, and behaviours of which public spaces are made up, and to study these rules, how they are created, and how they affect norm-breaking behaviours and actions of the players. I have chosen to name this physical play a deed of ‘a nomadic play design’, an idea inspired by Rosi Braidotti’s concept ‘nomadic body’. To cultivate the physical nomad, I will use as aid Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s concept of ‘care’ and ‘touch’ in an attempt to link together the sometimes- elusive nature of the nomad with the apparently more structured public space to explore the outcome of that meeting. The aim of the article is to develop the site-specific game genre to emphasize the player’s body as a mean for game design. Keywords Site-specific game · Playable cities · Nomadic · Game design · Care · Touch

1 Site-Specific Games My interest in games which use physical bodies and spaces originates in my background as a theatre director and trained game designer. I perceive these games as an embodied rule-based performance where players engage with the world in alternative manners. To see the body as the main design component is crucial in my work. A. O. Bergström (B) Blekinge Institute of Technology, Biblioteksgatan 4, 37435 Karlshman, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_14

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Game designer and researcher Flanagan [9] suggests that physical movement and active usage of space in games played in public often pose as interventions to interfere with dominating systems in society. A few examples of such games are: Flash mobs (Ejbye-Ernst 2007 in [26, 27]) that can interfere with rules in public places, parkour interferes with architecture [19], and so-called ‘aesthetic vandalism’ which as an example can be to change the colour of a street light which in turn interferes with expectations of the city [26, 27]. Games that embrace the physical environment as the game world is what the game designers and researchers Montola et al. [17] define as pervasive games. Spatially engaging games as a definition of pervasive games are according to Montola et al., about discovering and changing the perception of places. These games also expand space, by using architecture and objects as part of the gameplay. Games that are played in public can transform the way we understand space and how we can perceive of it in new ways (ibid). One example is ‘Abstract Tours’ by Laura Ruggeri, who did an alternative tourist tour in Berlin, letting the players stick to the line of a geometrical form drawn on a map [17: 78]. Spatial expansion can also be about transforming social norms of time and space like Spencer Tunick’s installations of naked bodies in the public (ibid: 79). There are games that subvert space, as in the ‘Reclaim the streets’ movement where activities like guerrilla dance take over the streets without permission (ibid). Other examples of using public space to spark critical discussions about how playful situations can challenge the way citizens perceive the city, is ‘Park(ing) day’, where people rent a parking lot to create a small urban park (see Hassan and Thibault in this volume). To question the expectations and norms of the city is what Stenros and Montola [27] calls ‘Reality games’. These games encourage players and nonplayers to see and experience their living area in a new and different way and to have stronger agency over it (ibid). When it comes to site-specific games they are by definition played in specific locations and have to be adopted if moving it to another setting [17]. The authors mean that these games foster deeper spatial experience of its geography and reflect the history of the site, so if played in another site the game must be adapted. I see the game design in ‘Levelling playing field’ as an entanglement of the genres and definitions above. The reason I am concerned about placing my work within site-specific games is that the design is made through a very specific site, in my case the sports field. Even though the game itself, the relay, could be played almost everywhere in any open field or any square, the game would not have the same impact on or meanings for the players in a different site. The very site is specific for that particular game. ‘Levelling playing fields’ combine different genres and important design values into a site-specific game which is about the movements of female bodies. Bodies that playfully question the resistance of them using the space. My understanding of site-specific games is that they have all the conditions to be able to play more with the constraint of the physical body and possibilities of public spaces. Their variation of expression and configuration can be combined and tried against the limitation of the physical world and also against the unpredictable. Site-specific games are able to play more with norms and everyday behaviours and ask questions such as: Who are not visible in public spaces? What kind of actions

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are quelled by the rules and norms we are surrounded by? Flanagan [9] promotes games that are critical of conventions, in order to create alternative themes that include social, cultural, political, and personal concerns. Flanagan calls this critique “Critical play”, which implies that playing produces or occupies environments for creative activities which question the creation of the world (ibid).1 This kind of critical playing is found in the ‘Games for change’ genre, but as a game designer with roots in performing arts, it is my belief that playfulness and experimental interventions also generate questioning of public spaces, and thereby challenge options to act. By playful embodied movements the players can be touched by the possibilities of what they could become instead of settling with what they are at the moment. In order to examine how this movement of becoming can arise and what it does, I will turn to Braidotti and her idea of the nomadic body.

2 The Playful Nomadic Body Braidotti’s nomadic figuration [5, 6] derives from Deleuze’s nomadic concept [7] but while Deleuze uses it as an existence outside the controlling state, Braidotti opens up the bodily potential. She wants to focus on the embodied knowledge and experience with the insistence of constructing alternative values in the society [6]. In my work, it is how to live and connect with public spaces from a playful bodily perspective. A nomadic perception of the body defines it as multifunctional and able to transform desires and imaginings into actions with other bodies and materials [5]. “The body speaks through temperature, motion, speed, emotions, excitement that affects the cardiac rhythm” [5]. In site-specific games the body is engaged with all senses; vision, touch, hearing, smell, balance. Embracing the whole body generates a shift in the control of using the visual as dominant [4]. All sorts of games are in most cases ruled by the vision and the visual gaze used as an instrument to control. This fact has been challenged by several feminist scholars [5, 6, 12, 18]. What using more senses could do to site-specific games is to expand how to become embodied playful and how to perceive the city as a gameboard. By designing with bodies, players can question what a public space could become and how to use it differently. Braidotti argues that a nomadic body affirms agency and aims to engender transformations, subvert conventions, and resists settling into socially coded modes of thought and behaviour [5, 22]. Braidotti also claims that to question these structures is important in a world where only a few people are governing positions of knowledge and power which they themselves have created [8]. For Braidotti, this is about western (patriarchal) capitalism. Braidotti means that alternative practices can make the nomad break free from dominant and static images, concepts, and representations of women but also to move its marginalized position as such. The nomadic body inspires me as a game designer asking questions how playing bodies twist the norms and rules that public space is made of, like how to walk on a 1 For

more elaboration on critical design in games see Hassan and Thibault in this volume.

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street or act on a square and how this playing can connect players and spaces. I argue that the physical human body as a game design component gets too little attention in the designing of site-specific games. Since the nomadic body is a figuration that emphasizes the need for action (Braidotti 1994, in Petrescu [20, 21]) it starts from yearning and not from “who we are but what we want to become” (bell hooks in [20, 21: 4]). To play is to become, or at least try out how to become by alternative actions. I see the becoming as the very central for a site-specific player, in order to “belonging differently in the world” [11].To belong differently in the world is in my work to create various feminist practices and engagements which are playing with the dominant and prevailing narratives of public space. As a game designer, I am using both the responses and the subversive force of women making space for themselves as players in public space, with the help of their actions, movements, perspectives, and desires. Helped by playing, limits are being pushed by opening up possibilities to act in public space. The subversive force in site-specific games can be about moving together as a group in places that can feel unsafe for women, or occupying a space, or question the confines of public space in a creative way. It is this creative subversive force that questions who can do what in public space. Braidotti [6] denies that the body is a fixed map of cultural codes or captions; instead, it is an active transforming force that changes but also influences. With site-specific games, bodies can play with restrictions of places and create new conditions and expectations of happenings. To play with the aid of the body is also a statement of what the player wants to do with the world, what kind of standing the body will have, and what it will become. A playful nomadic body challenging what is static, fixated and established as in ‘Levelling playing fields’; this has been a movement from passively abiding by social structures to becoming active in the sports field. These embodied movements are not about physical performance like in Parkour, but rather about small shifts of increased power to act through the playful encounter of the body with the surrounding, other players, the public space and its objects and also other non-players. The nomadic body tends to become too abstract by movement, transformation, and perpetuity. It can be complicated to understand how these movements start and evolve. Do they ever meet resistance? To land in care is to land in the body and ease the movements of the nomad for a moment. Contact creates intimacy as an additional confrontation. To closer examine what care can do in site-specific games, I will now address Maria de la Bellacasa’s concept of care and touch.

3 To Touch and Be Touched, A Playful Care Puig de la Bellacasa [24], researches alternative extents of knowledge and practice by means of the two notions touch and care. To take care is an activity of the body and to give care is a flexible action that can be exploratory and curious. Care materializes the rational and the engagement that result from caring and taking care [23]. Care is not an uncomplicated concept. It can be expressed in many different ways and

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therefore have different meanings. Rather than see care as a moralistic origin Puig de la Bellacasa sees care as a transformation, as a practice to recognize the possible (ibid). She theorizes that the feminist approach emphasizes the fact that the idea of care is not innocent, it is not only a loving and uncomplicated undertaking. The act of showing care has practical and material consequences but we have to be cautious so that the care, to show concern, does not become a moralistic obligation in each situation, activity, or decision (ibid). Puig de la Bellacasa wonders how care can challenge situations and create opportunities rather than fix and control ideas and actions. In my work, some of the resulting questions are: what would a site-specific game do if it could generate care? How would this care be expressed? Careful speculation about a possible scenario can reveal how things can turn out differently and show the potential of a situation (ibid). Puig de la Bellacasa [24] means that the speculative is connected to a feminist tradition to think about the possible as a political and ethical provocation. Games become speculative when the players curiously are trying out possible actions and behaviours which are somehow connected to everyday life and places. Exploring the act of care as an engagement in circumstances and in the formation of things should also include relations beyond the human (ibid), like public places. The speculative tactic is about regarding care and touch as open, non-normative, and especially as positioned relational acts (ibid). Puig de la Bellacasa moves from care as a practice on to touch as a materialized care and investigates what kind of alternative space there is for cognizance and execution when touch is confronted with the dominance of the gaze of the eye. She asserts that touch blurs the line between the self and the other (ibid). This becomes interesting in site-specific playing since the contiguity with the surrounding re-evaluates the worldly relationships of the players when the body engages with and influences the surrounding. The gaze, the visual, gets demoted in the hierarchy when players touch other items or bodies. By not observing but instead touching the surrounding creates transformation through participation (ibid). Just as care is an involvement and an engagement, so is touch. By thinking, doing, and caring relationships are formed, and this is the foundation of the development of the world, according to Puig de la Bellacasa (ibid). I explore site-specific playing as a collective and relational care which challenge rules and conventions in public spaces by the movements of the players towards other possible worlds. This practice of touch that is playfully tried and played elevates the nomad’s fluidity to be inclusive. The player has to respond each time the body touches something, either by validating or steer away from the contact. Puig de la Bellacasa states that care together with touch and closeness is a practice that unites but at the same time generate an idea of what is not there and what there could be [23]. Care and touch can be seen as an actualization of how connections between disparities can occur in Braidotti’s nomadic figuration. The relationship that is shaped by using care, closeness, and touch, helps ask the question ‘how I can care’ rather than ‘how can I care more’ (Atkinson Graham et al. 2015 in [24]). ‘How I can care’ focuses on what practice it takes to show care. This is important in playing because it is how the player act rather than what the player does which matters.

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In the next paragraph, I will describe the site-specific game ‘Levelling playing fields’ which took place on a sports field in the Palestinian refugee camp Al-Arroub, and how the players through play and games created care in their wish to reclaim the area from where they were expelled.

4 Levelling Playing Fields I felt when I started to go to the stadium that I liked it very much. It is like sitting in paradise, but I felt like I will lose it because I can’t be here permanently. Lots of people speak about us, but we continue this sport. We have no right to walk or go out, but men can come out wherever they want. —Fatima, one of the women in Al-Arroub [2] (Fig. 1).

4.1 Background This game project arose through the ‘Campus in camps’ program. It was an experimental educational two-year program which engaged Palestinian participants in dealing with new forms of visual and cultural representations of refugee camps (see

Fig. 1 The stadium

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http://www.campusincamps.ps). The participants were working with project-based interventions in different camps in the West Bank together with the refugees. During a workshop (arranged by Stockholm Royal Institute of art) at Campus in camps in 2012, I met the artist duo Giuliana Racco and Matteo Guidi, working with the program, and interested in collaborating. They told me they lived in Al-Arroub, another refugee camp close-by, and that it had a sports field that had potential to be a game board for us to work on. Al-Arroub is located 15 km south of Bethlehem in area B, which means that it is controlled both by Palestinian and Israeli authority. The road outside the camp falls within area C, and an Israeli watchtower is controlling the refugees passing in and out of the camp. Al-Arroub has around 10,000 inhabitants, the unemployment is high and some people are forced to work for the Israeli state building Israeli settlements. The camp is more conservative than the others situated near Bethlehem, which means for example that every woman wears a scarf and they are harder maintained when it comes to rules and restrictions how to behave and act. Giuliana and Matteo told me that the camp had problems with incursions and that there were no safe spaces for anyone in the camp to play or relax. In addition, they told me that Bisan, one of the participants in Campus in camps, had been working on the field with a group of women, because of their great need to both move physically and free themselves mentally from daily pressure. The initiative ended abruptly when several men in the camp had opposed the women using the area. Giuliana and Matteo invited Bisan to work with us and she contacted her group of twelve women ages 35–60. The group wanted to reclaim their right to use the arena. Bisan opened up for the possibility to have the wishes and needs of the women fulfilled. Care for the women and their earlier work would also challenge the resistance they had met before by being able to use the arena again. The purpose was now to design a game, together with the group, to explore if it could be a subversive force in which playfulness could connect notions with reality so that the women once more would be able to affect their usage of the arena. Could playing become materialized experiences that would help the players to active a possible world? The placement of the arena, on a mountain with a view of Al-Arroub, was an ideal place for the players to live out their dreams to move freely. Bisan conducted interviews with the women before Giuliana, Matteo, and I arrived to Al-Arroub. It would work as a foundation for the game with the purpose of giving an oversight of the lives of the women and their wishes when it came to the arena. The interviews revealed that the women spent 18 h of working at home each day, that several of them were divorced because their men had met other women, or single because their husbands were unjustly imprisoned in Israeli penitentiaries. Many of the women had different health problems which were related to stress and insufficient physical exercise. They expressed the wish to use the arena for different things, everything from socializing with children and friends, to picnics and moving freely. The interviews showed that the women wanted public restrooms, a playground, and even an outdoor kitchen at the arena. I got the impression that they had many ideas of how they wanted to use the arena and that the dream of gaining access to the area was highly alive.

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4.2 The Public Space Before I continue, I would like to expound on the term public space. The architects Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti (who started campus in camps program) mean that in the West a public space is considered a place that is open for access to anyone, while in the Arab world it is considered a political sphere with power structures and colonial history, but during the Arabic spring public spaces transformed into common spaces by the people [14]. Hilal and Petti (ibid) also assert that the western public spaces nowadays are obsessed with security, control, and surveillance. Furthermore, they mean that in the Palestinian refugee camps the commons are spaces where neither the private nor public exists. The common in Palestinian refugee camps are created with a communal focus on relationships and the shared life activities [1]. Common exists beyond state institutions and common is created by people while using it which means that common only exists if people constantly are using it [13]. It comes down to how people share life necessities such as water, air, electricity, and knowledge. It takes active participation from the refugees for these places to exist at all [13]. The common is a becoming of “a space of the people” [13]. The idea of activated and shared common space was inspiring to me during my work in AlArroub because the open access did not seem to involve the women. It was obvious from the interviews that women were not a part of the people that had access to ‘the commons’, for example, the arena.

4.3 In Al-Arroub The first day in the camp Giuliana, Matteo, Bisan, and I met with the leader of the people’s committee to explain to him what we wanted to do during our two weeks. It was of importance to include him in our plans since the social control in the camp was strict and with his approval, our work would be easier. He was pleased that someone wanted to revive the field again since it was no longer used by either men or women. We camped out in the women’s centre during the first eight days due to the women not wanting to go to the arena. The reasons for that resistance was unclear. The yard of the women’s centre was small and crammed and had no visibility from the street. We were sometimes in a room inside of the women’s centre when the yard was occupied by other activities. I started by introducing the game project and suggested meeting each other every day for two weeks. Together we would create a game up on the field and the process would be open and explorative. The suggestion was met with enthusiasm and the women immediately introduced different games from their childhood which we tried out together like Fisherman net and thumbwrestling game (Fig. 2). The women, me, and Giuliana now became players.2 Memories of games 2 Matteo

was usually more in the background taking photos and made reflections. We asked the women if they mind Matteo’s presence (and later on Abed and Ismael who helped us filming) but they assured us it was no problem.

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Fig. 2 Fisherman net, Thumb wrestling, walking backwards

past created another meaning in the moment and distorted the line between everyday life and the world of games. One day Giuliana showed me the artwork + and − by Mona Hatoum (1994–2004), where a circle of sand is continuously made striped and smooth by a spinning metalarm. I was instantly reminded of an architect friend who had told me that in the Middle East, the future was seen as a backwards movement. One turns the back to the future to be able to step into it together with the past since the past is what makes the future [15]. This enthused me and Giuliana to suggest to the players to try and move backwards to explore what happened to our understanding of the body here and now in the room, out of sight and free from any unevenness of the ground (Fig. 2). This backward movement became a careful touch of how feet meet floor without being able to see the directions. Afterwards, when we reflected on our backwards movements which were achieved during concentrated silence as a joint body, some of the players observed that it generated a feeling of losing control and uncertainty of one’s body. One player told of forgetting about stress, daily life, and all of her problems. Another one said: “I don’t move backwards usually, so this was really playful like my whole mind was going backwards”. This release of rational thinking and moving [5] unlocked other games in which the players asserted the backwards movement. Coupled with back against back and arms hooked in each other, one player always moved backwards and one forward depending on what direction in which they were moving. Embodied impulses led to new responses in the shape of actions and behaviours. One player started to run and her back-player was dragged along. It looked like fun, so all of us wanted a ride. The trial of new limitations and mobility of the body, conjoining with other bodies to see what happened and what kind of new games arose, created a touching nomadic body that moved backwards and opened up an alternative realm (Fig. 2).

4.4 On the Playing Field On the eight day, the women suddenly agreed to join us up on the arena. During five days the big open space was being used to explore more spaciously demanding games similar to volleyball and soccer. Sometimes we were followed to the arena by children who curiously sneaked up on us. One afternoon, when Giuliana, Matteo and

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I were having coffee with some male friends from the camp, they started explaining a game they had played as children, “Seven stones”. It is a team sport similar to baseball that includes a softball and a pile of seven stones. One team is supposed to hit the stones and build it up again before the opposing team hit them with the ball they have caught. The next day when we together with Bisan met the players on the arena, we asked them if they could show us how to play ‘Seven stones’. One idea was to add new rules in order to together create a new game based on the context of the arena. What kind of rules would work for these players physical conditions? Which rules would be able to embrace the arena from the perspective of the players at the scene? The players rummaged for pieces of broken tiles and cut the edges to get them rounded. They then stacked the stones in a neat pile. When they all lined up at the starting line, a lively conversation about rules broke out, and when they all agreed the first player threw the ball (Fig. 3). When a player hit the pile of stones and it fell, her team started to run in a circle until one of the players had put the pile together again. This was repeated several times. The urgency of staging the memories that were generated by the game created care for the shape of the stones and strategies to hit the pile of stones. It also produced a collective movement in which all participants ran around the stone pile over and over again with the same conditions. I saw a lot of design potentials but in the end the players were not interested in modifying the game even though I tried hard to convince them. Other games that were picked up by the players were several variations of skipping rope and rope games. This kind of resurgent of games and play became a search in embodied experience of the childhood and was now transformed into new modifications on the arena. The personal and embodied memories made the games more

Fig. 3 Seven stones

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into a practice of meaningful care to be able to relive the game, rather than dutifully recalling rules and then repeating them. The contact with different tools such as balls, ropes, strings, and stones re-examined the players’ relationship with the arena to make it into a space of many different games and embodied knowledge.

4.5 The Relay After many discussions by the players about how to use the arena in daily life, Giuliana, Matteo and I understood that the players were mostly interested in going for walks. After a discussion, we agreed that the relay with its straightforward rules and manifestation, with focus on the stroll, would be a good fit. The relay as a model shows care for involving all of the bodies according to their prerequisites. One player walked slowly, another one ran, one was limping, and so on, as a collective movement, that moved in different ways and made each movement unique. This shared body appeared via the chain movement of the relay through the delivery of new players bodies and their movements. Teams usually run counter-clockwise on tracks next to each other in relay races, but with Mona Hatoum’s artwork as inspiration the idea of having one team moving clockwise and the other counter-clockwise popped up in order to create two movements simultaneously. In this way, the players produced a clockwise and counter clockwise movement all within the same spatiality, in the same playing world. During the course of the work, it became apparent that the players had different opinions on whether they wanted to start using the arena again or not. Half of the group wanted it to happen as soon as possible, they said ‘Yalla’, let’s go. The other half argued God’s will, ‘Inshallah’. This became an element brought into the relay and the suggestion that came up was that the women split up in two teams based on their opinions. Training bibs with numbers and team name ‘Yalla’ or ‘Inshallah’ were produced and purple and light blue scarves were purchased to wear over their hijabs to be able to visually tell the teams apart. The Yalla and Inshallah opinions of the players connected visually by bibs, movements, and colour, the difference in opinions and the categorization of for and against was what collectively shaped the relay (Fig. 4).

Fig. 4 The relay

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Fig. 5 Cat’s cradle

4.6 Site-Specific Game as a Nomadic Care On the day of the relay, the work team of the people’s committee cleaned out the arena from debris and weeds to show appreciation for the fact that the relay was about to happen. The players care about their actions on the arena sparked another group’s care for the aesthetic of the place. Each player chose what team she wanted to belong to by putting on either a purple or light blue scarf and belonging Yalla/Inshallah bib. In total there were two rounds with four different teams, and team Yalla won both times. Afterwards, I asked the women if they would start to use the arena at this point. Half of them still replied—Yalla, and the other half—Inshallah. Even though the relay did not change the mind of every player I see the relay as a playful practice which became care about the possible [3]. The possible for players to change the rules, where and how to move their bodies and to be touched by play. By changing rules, the embodied enactments became nomadic in tricking the resistance from the camp. The arena became a space where the players created their own lines to dream and follow like the Cat’s cradle (Fig. 5). Mobility is fragile and it takes care to become a nomadic body.

5 A Feminist and Nomadic Game Design A feminist game design utilizes experiences of the body and possibilities as a playful tool. It is also a playing which focuses on the emergence of alternative practices that inflates the space for action by care and touch of public spaces. Feminism and design research have in common the exploration of alternative domains and practices to continue to advance the world [10, 16, 25]. In my work, site-specific games become a design of potential incarnated acts. Within the collective play a care beyond the

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rational is generated (to what will it lead? What is this good for and for whom?) and unlocks the possibilities in which different perceptions and playful acts meet. Playing as an alternative practice in public space engage other people outside the game. The relay generated care that was conveyed by the people’s committee’s clean-up of the arena, the women’s centre baking pizza for all of the participants, and a professional camera operator that had heard of us and joined us during the last day to film the relay. This care created meaning to the game which allowed outsiders to see what the players actually transmitted – the opportunities to act. My interpretation of these expressions is that a common space for games, play, and sports were something that felt significant to many of the camp inhabitants. The nomadic bodies moved their positions from the home domain and daily chores to the arena where they positioned themselves as players, an alternative practice, to show that the dominant ideas of their freedom to move was not abiding. By playing as a subversive tool it became possible to change the power hierarchy of the public space. Site-specific playing is to me an inquisitive interconnection of the unexpected and the acknowledging of it. The unexpected action of a player pulling out a clothesline that is made into a skipping rope and results in a bouncy dance around the arena. This bouncy dance involves additional players’ desire to try different kinds of jumping, separately or together. Or the backwards movement, at first cautious and hesitant, soon leading into the players dragging one another around in a cheerful game. The unexpected of the playful bodies creating movements that replicate and formed new ideas and variations of the play. Feminist game design is to explore the seemingly structured and regulated world to find that it through playing is more fluid than supposed since playing creates multiple configurations proving that nothing will be quite the same again. As one of the players said; “I want to play more instead of staying at home”. Feminist game design including and value all senses of the body as design possibilities. In this article, I have developed a site-specific game through what I call nomadic game design. It is based on site-specific game design but also includes the flexible role of the body in playing as in the act of designing. The conflicts on the nomadic games are not constructed but rather physically noticeable, as the limitation of where and how a player can move centred around the surrounding rules and norms. Nomadic game design questions the boundaries and norms we envelop ourselves in through the sensitive contact with the surroundings via movements and touch of the body. It is the testing of movements and responses of the body in physical proximities that are in focus in the design of the game, and not a defined and governed goal. As a game designer, the playful meeting of the body and a public place is an exploration in what kind of responses result in increased opportunity to act in public spaces. Nomadic game design is a game design which also embraces the concept of care with its moves. When a group’s care for its right to space (the players) lead to another group’s (people’s committee) care for the place, it will, in the long run, become a

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care for which bodies have the permission to take up space and this in its right will aid in creating participation in public space.3 My work is a suggestion to think of the body as a technology for asking questions how to design playful cities. The body loves practices, it does thinking, walking, talking, loving, feeling, eating, sleeping, jumping. The body is living and dying. A city is full of human bodies which know what is going on and what is not. So start asking yourself, what practices can a body possible do in a city by using all its senses?4

References 1. Abu Alia M, Al-Assi N, Al-Barbary I, Brave New Alps, Hamouz N, Odeh M (2013) Common 1. Retrieved from http://www.campusincamps.ps 2. Al Jaffari B (2013) The stadium, sustaining relations. Retrieved from http://www. campusincamps.ps 3. Bordeleau E (2011) The care of the possible: Isabelle stengers interviewed. Scapegoat 01(01):12–27. Retrieved from http://www.scapegoatjournal.org/docs/Scapegoat_Issue_01_ Service.pdf 4. Braidotti R (1996) Cyberfeminism with a difference. New Form 9–25. http://www.let.uu.nl/ womens_studies/rosi/cyberfem.htm 5. Braidotti R (2011) Nomadic subjects—embodiment and sexual difference in contemporary feminist theory, 2nd edn. Columbia University Press, New York, Chichester, West Sussex 6. Braidotti R (2011) Nomadic theory. The portable Rosi Braidotti. Columbia University Press, New York, Chichester, West Sussex 7. Deleuze G, Guattari F (2013) A thousand plateaus. Bloomsbury Academic, London, New York 8. Dolphijn R, van der Tuin I (2012) New materialism: interviews & cartographies. https://doi. org/10.3998/ohp.11515701.0001.001 9. Flanagan M (2009) Critical play, radical game design. MIT Press, Cambridge 10. Forlano L (2017) Posthumanism and design. She Ji J Des Econ Innov 3(1):16–29. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001 11. Gibson-Graham JK (2011) A feminist project of belonging for the anthropocene. Gender Place Cult 18(01):1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/0966369X.2011.535295 12. Haraway D (1988) Situated knowledges: the science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Stud 14(3):575. https://doi.org/10.2307/3178066 13. Hilal S, Petti A (2013a). Beyond the public: a common space in Fawaar Refugee camp. Retrieved June 19, 2015, from http://theatrum-mundi.org/research/lorem-ipsum/ 14. Hilal Sandi, Petti A (2013) Reimagining the common: rethinking the refugee experience. In: Keenan T, Zolghadr T (eds) The human snapshot. Sternberg Press, Berlin 15. Khaldun I (n.d.) The Muqaddimah. Retrieved from https://asadullahali.files.wordpress.com/ 2012/10/ibn_khaldun-al_muqaddimah.pdf 16. Lindström K, Ståhl Å (2015) Patchworking ways of knowing and making. In: Jefferies J, Wood Conroy D, Clark H (eds) The handbook of textile culture. Bloomsbury Academic, London 17. Montola M, Stenros J, Waern A (2009) Pervasive games: theory and design. Morgan Kaufmann, New York 3 Still today I do not know for sure what the men in the camp were thinking about our activities. But

when chatting on messenger with the camera operator (in March, 2019) I was told that the women nowadays are taking their walks in the camp. 4 See ‘Saving faces’ by Lancel, Maat and Brazier in this volume.

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18. Mulvey L (1975) Visual pleasure and narrative cinema. Screen 16(3):6–18 19. Nilsson E (2010) Arkitekturens kroppsliget: Staden som terräng. ISBN 978-91-7740-100-1 20. Petrescu D (ed) (2007a) Alternative practices: feminist politics and poetics of space, 1 New edn. Routledge, London 21. Petrescu D (2017b) Being-in- relation and reinventing the commons. In: Schalk M, Kristiansson T, Mazé R (eds) Feminist futures of spatial practice: materialisms, activisms, dialogues, pedagogies, projections, pp 101–110 22. Ponzanesi S (2002) Diasporic subjects and migration in Europe. In: Griffin G, Braidotti R (eds) Thinking differently. A reader in European women’s studies. Zed Books, London, New York, pp 205–220 23. Puig de la Bellacasa M (2011) Matters of care in technoscience: assembling neglected things. Soc Stud Sci 41(1):85–106. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312710380301 24. Puig de la Bellacasa M (2017) Matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press, Minnesota 25. Rosner KD (2018) Critical fabulations: reworking the methods and margins of design (design thinking, design theory). MIT press 26. Stenros J, Montola M (2009) Historical influences on pervasive games. In: Montola M, Stenros J, Waern A (eds) Pervasive games theory and design. Morgan Kaufmann, Burlington 27. Stenros J, Montola M (2009) Pervasive games genres. In: Montola M, Stenros J, Waern A (eds) Pervasive games theory and design. Morgan Kaufmann, Burlington

‘Forget Your Gadget, Let’s Play Outside!’: Traditional Play in Jakarta, Indonesia Fitri Arlinkasari, Debra Flanders Cushing and Evonne Miller

Abstract Using a case study of two designated child-friendly public spaces in Jakarta, this chapter draws on affordance theory to explore how low-tech traditional Indonesian games are intended and actualised as play experiences for children from low-income families. The research used drawing activities, group interviews and observations with thirty-four children aged 6–12 years old, as well as interviews with the onsite managers of the child-friendly public parks with community centres (known as RPTRA sites) and a coordinator of the local youth organisation called Traditional Games Returns (TGR). The TGR organisation encourages Indonesian children to ‘forget their gadgets’, and instead play traditional Indonesian games outside. This chapter discusses: (1) the application of social affordances in a non-virtual game; (2) the actual social interactions of the children playing the traditional games; and (3) suggestions for how children’s play opportunities can be better facilitated in a low-tech context. Keywords Traditional games · Play · Affordance theory · Public spaces · Indonesia

1 Introduction Cities are critical sites for play. By 2050, seventy per cent of the world’s population will live in cities [44], with many of these urban residents children—aged 18 years and under. Unfortunately, the rapidly changing physical and social landscape of most cities means the current urban environment is often not child-friendly. Urban problems associated with population density, including crime, poverty, congestion, F. Arlinkasari (B) · D. F. Cushing · E. Miller Creative Industries Faculty, School of Design, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Qld, Australia e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] F. Arlinkasari Faculty of Psychology, YARSI University, Jakarta, Indonesia

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traffic, housing shortages and lack of green spaces and playgrounds, means children’s access to outdoor play and playful outdoor experiences in nature is often restricted [4]. There is, as Professor Klaus Schwab, the founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, argues, an urgent need to redesign cities, so that they better meet the needs of children, “providing them with access to play and education, and facilitating their social and cultural interactions” (Schwab, cited in [2, p. i]). Changes in urban form and societal values have combined to reduce opportunities for children to engage in unstructured play outside. Instead of enjoying active, creative and free-range childhood experiences, playing in local parks, climbing trees and building forts, children across the globe spend less time outdoors and more time inside—on tablets and phones, watching television and playing computer games [23]. While technology can facilitate playful physical activity outside, most research suggests green time has been traded for screen time. A new structured play culture is being formed, with designated-toys, virtual games, and internet activities keeping children’s learning inside [38]. Heightened perceptions of risk and safety also mean parents are less likely to let children freely roam neighbourhoods, with researchers also identifying physical and programmatic elements of the environment, predominately created for adults and directed by adults, as barriers to children’s outdoor play [13]. With fewer opportunities to play outside, children have fewer interactions with their community [23]. Yet, playing outside is critical for learning life skills. It offers abundant opportunities for social interaction without prescribed rules, enabling children to interact with each other and learn to negotiate, collaborate, compete, and resolve conflicts—required skills for adult life [18, 27]. In looking at what motivates children to play, a survey of over one thousand young people in America found that 84% play outside to meet friends [26]. The survey also showed that sociability is at the heart of play in childhood, enabling children to develop their ability to socialise in the community and remain emotionally and physically healthy. Although the new culture of indoor screen-based play offers a variety of positive experiences for children, it also generally offers fewer opportunities for children to interact socially within authentic community settings. There are numerous examples of digital play that are designed to encourage interaction between players within real-settings (e.g. Pokemon Go), yet these may not be relevant interventions for low-income families, who struggle with day-to-day living expenses and schedules. Low-income neighbourhoods face many inequalities, not only in terms of economy and education but also related to accessing environments with interactive smart-technology (Hud User [19]). In this chapter, therefore, we explore how low-tech traditional games are being used in Indonesia to re-activate children’s play opportunities that support their development—fostering playful, child-friendly spaces in the city. First, we unpack the experiences of children’s play for low-income Indonesian families to provide the background of why this study was conducted. Second, we describe the designated child-friendly public spaces created by the Jakarta government through Integrated Child-Friendly Public Space, the “Ruang Publik Terpadu Ramah Anak” (RPTRA) program that provides the sites for a local organisation to support children’s play

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opportunities. We focus explicitly on a campaign for traditional games. Third, we present the definition of traditional games in Indonesia and describe how social affordances can be used as a theoretical frame to evaluate traditional games. Fourth, we discuss the intended and actualised social affordances provided by Indonesian traditional games gathered through semi-structured interviews with the games coordinator, the onsite manager of the RPTRA sites, and the participating children. Finally, we discuss how traditional games are still relevant for modern Indonesian children, concluding with recommendations for how these games can be better facilitated in the Indonesian and global urban context in order to create playable cities.

2 Background 2.1 The Experience of Play for Low-Income Children in Jakarta, Indonesia Unfortunately, income can restrict opportunities provided to children. In Indonesia, those from high-income families tend to have better access to safe, well-designed play spaces inside and outside the home [4]. Inside the home, upper-income families give their children greater access to leisure activities, particularly those involving computers and the internet [3]. Outside the home, more advantaged children have greater access to leisure activities within safe places [36, 37], such as ticketed parks and indoor playgrounds (e.g. Playparq and Kidspace). In contrast, children from disadvantaged families often struggle with their dayto-day living expenses and may find it difficult or cost-prohibitive to access the designated play spaces. Instead, children living in low-income neighbourhoods in Jakarta create opportunities to play outside with their friends in non-designated places which are not always safe [8]. These self-created play spaces include small alleyways, pedestrian paths, road-sides, bridges over rivers, mosque terraces, vacant lots, cemeteries, and traditional markets. Mass media reports often document children playing in hazardous areas, such as on the road (Fig. 1), the area beside railway tracks (Fig. 2), flood-affected areas, and slum areas with significant garbage. These informal urban play spaces in Jakarta are putting children at high-risk for serious injury or sickness, diminishing the benefits of free play. In addition to not having a safe physical environment, children from low-income families in Jakarta usually live in large, extended families with parents working as casual workers—who do not have a steady income and can struggle to feed their family because of intermittent employment opportunities. Older children usually share responsibility with the parents to care for younger children and domestic chores, which can impact their social behaviour and play opportunities [9]. Being a casual worker in Jakarta quite often limits the opportunity for quality family time, with observations in low-income Jakarta neighbourhoods noting that fathers were never in the company of their children [9]. Due to this reduced parental supervision, children

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Fig. 1 Children play on the road (Wisnu Agung Prasetyo/Tempo.co, “Anak-anak bermain bola di jalanan Manggarai”, [31]

Fig. 2 Children play beside railway tracks (Pradita Utama/Detikcom, “Anak-anak bermain di taman bermain pinggir rel kereta api, Kampung Bahari, Jakarta Utara”, [45]

from low-income families usually have more opportunities for outdoor play and travel greater distances within their neighbourhood [47] However, these children are also vulnerable to the negative aspects of their neighbourhood, especially in Jakarta which has several hotspots of crime and violence [42]. Like their counterparts across the globe, Indonesian children (particularly those who live in urban areas) frequently use technology and the internet [10]. Jakarta children, aged 9–15, often have regular access to a television, mobile phone, and video games in their home and bedroom [17]. Children from both low and high-income families have high levels of screen time and are heavy screen users—averaging 3.2 h per day on weekdays and almost 6 h per day on a school holiday [17]. Jakarta’s low-income children, who commonly have no internet access at home, also often go to internet cafés (“warung internet” or “warung rental PlayStation”) and spend one or two hours after school playing online games and doing internet activities [17].

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This extensive use of media and the internet can limit children’s time for outdoor free play within their immediate neighbourhood environment.

2.2 Top-Down Intervention: The RPTRA Program Implemented by the Jakarta Government Redesigning the urban form to be more liveable for all people, especially children, is a priority for Indonesia, given that at least twenty million children aged 0–17 years old live there [40]. Indonesia’s committed to ratifying the United Nations Convention on Rights of the Child, which later became operational as Law Number 23 on Child Protection in 2002 [41]. To ensure children’s rights are protected during urban development, the government created a Child-Friendly City (KLA) policy, introduced by the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment in 2005. In Jakarta, one way the KLA was enacted was through the provision of integrated child-friendly public spaces, the RPTRA program. Initiated in 2014, the RPTRA program is designed to improve citizen’s quality of life, especially children in poor neighbourhoods, by fostering play opportunities through the creation of managed green spaces and adjacent community centres. RPTRA sites are modern child-friendly spaces, equipped with various support facilities, such as sports areas, library and playground, and serve as community centres for the neighbourhoods [46]. As of 2019, a total of 293 RPTRA sites had been built, predominantly located in densely populated and middle to lower income areas [20, 22]. RPTRA sites have become popular among children, regardless of their family background; although the sites are gated for safety reasons, they are free for everyone and thus foster the development of community connectedness. Although the nature of the RPTRA program is relatively top-down, its actualisation and development are open to bottom-up processes. The RPTRA sites and programs invite local organisations and companies, as well as international partnerships, to initiate programs for local residents, which are facilitated by the onsite managers of RPTRA. The types of programs vary widely and include activities such as storytelling sessions, workshops, sports initiatives, and traditional play initiatives—the focus of this chapter.

2.3 Bottom-Up Intervention: The Return to Traditional Indonesian Games Since the RPTRA program was created, external partners and local citizens have collaborated to develop the programs and activities on offer—a synergy between the top-down and bottom-up processes [43]. In 2015, a group of university students in Jakarta formed the Traditional Games Return (TGR) community. Concerned about the waning of traditional Indonesian games, along with the loss of safe opportunities

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for children to play outside, the TGR slogan is ‘Forget Your Gadget, Let’s Play Outside!’—the title of this chapter. Beginning with a single campaign event at RPTRA Cililitan in 2015, TGR has now established itself as a community-based organisation with more than 70 ambassadors across 20 provinces of Indonesia. TGR has received official support from the Ministry of Women’s Empowerment and Child Protection of the Republic of Indonesia (KPPPA RI) and the Child Protection and Population Control (DPPAPP) Service Office of DKI Jakarta Province, and Sayangi Tunas Cilik Foundation (partner of Save the Children). As an organisation, TGR is dedicated to “realising children’s rights through traditional games with an attitude of cooperation and togetherness”, with three key aims: to preserve traditional games as a distinctive heritage of Indonesian culture, to challenge technology use by reviving traditional games and empowering children and adolescents through traditional games.

3 The Value of Traditional Games Traditional games, or folk games, are defined differently across disciplines and countries but have common features which differentiate them from modern games and sports. Scholars (e.g. [15, 33]) have identified several characteristics of traditional games: 1. Do not include commercial products (e.g. board games), but may include equipment or pieces which can be used multiple times (e.g. marbles, ropes, twigs); 2. Require specific skills, strategies or chance, or a combination, including dancing and singing; 3. Have no written rules, but have agreed rules; 4. Typically played in pairs or groups of children aged 6–12 years old; 5. Passed from generation to generation and may be named differently by each generation; 6. Based on historical-cultural backgrounds, and may transfer societal values to younger generations. Traditional games have different characteristics than technological or commercial games—open-ended, imaginative, and ever-evolving, combining physical activities and social interactions in an authentic-setting, while ‘modern games’ often tend to be more sedentary and solitary [28]. Traditional games can typically be played anywhere, rarely need equipment, and cater for a wide range of ages, abilities, genders, and number of players. Yet, with children having less time, opportunity and space for unstructured outdoor play, traditional games that have long been part of our play culture (such as tag, hopscotch, and hide and seek) may disappear. Traditional games can help children learn how to solve real-life problems by acquiring basic social interaction skills (e.g. collaboration, competition, and coopetition [25].

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3.1 Traditional Games in the Indonesian Context Traditional games are greatly valued in Indonesia, with Table 1 illustrating the type, range and basic definition of twenty popular traditional games. Overback (cited in [1]) documented at least six hundred Indonesian traditional games, important symbols of rich national culture, ancestral origins and unique social values from each province in Indonesia. Consider, for example, “Rangku Alu” (best translated as Bamboo Foot Dance). A traditional game from East Nusa Tenggara, this game was initially played during the harvest season as a symbol of celebration and happiness. It is accompanied by songs and dances which require high levels of collaboration from all players, indicating that a good harvest results from effective cooperation between all society members [50]. Like “Rangku Alu”, which requires bamboo, many of the Indonesian traditional games utilise natural materials which can be used multiple times, such as: “Gasing” (Spinning Top) which uses wood or bamboo; “Congklak” (best translated as Seeds Game) which uses seeds or conch shells; and “Enggrang batok” (Stilts) which uses coconut shells or bamboo. Other properties that are embedded with traditional games are songs and rhymes like those in “Cublak-Cublak Suweng” (best translated as Stone Guess), where players sit in a small group, singing, as they pass a small stone around and guess which hand it is in. Although children in urban areas still play some of these games, many have essentially disappeared, along with the decline of outdoor play in contemporary childhood. Two factors have contributed to the rapidly decreasing use of Indonesian traditional games: (1) limited interventions to preserve the games, with time-poor parents, grandparents and other family members not sharing their knowledge about these traditional games with the next generation; and (2) a lack of safe play spaces, (Najmi et al. [29]. Several studies have also investigated children’s behaviour and attitudes toward traditional games. However, the studies on traditional Indonesian games focus predominately on formal-settings for children (e.g. schools), in which traditional games are used as a catalyst for children’s learning activities in the classroom (e.g. [15, 49]). These formal settings contradict some of the features of traditional games which are voluntary, less structured, and often include informal social interactions. Therefore, in this chapter, we focus on traditional games facilitated within public spaces to ensure alignment between the characteristics of the games and the settings. Other chapters in this book have documented the value of digital technology and games for playable cities, with this chapter purposely focussing on a low-tech approach for several reasons. First, the local Indonesian context is significant. As discussed above, low-income families in Jakarta have limited access to mobile technology, with any large-scale technological interventions a low priority for the government. Second, RPTRA sites in Jakarta ban children from using mobile technology, changing the site Wi-Fi password daily. Third, to date, there has been limited successful digitization of traditional games in Asia. Chepa and Yahaya [6] describe the challenges, reflecting on how current versions of the three most popular Malaysian Digital Traditional Games (dam Haji, congklak, and dam kapit) do not engage play-

Rangku Alu is a traditional Indonesian game originating from Manggarai, East Nusa Tenggara and played using two pairs of bamboo sticks in motion and song until the opponent’s foot is jammed between the bamboos

Rangku Alu (bamboo foot dance)*

Petak Umpet (hide and seek)

Kena-jaga (tag)/tak jongkok (squat and tag)/tak buaya (tag the crocodile)

Dampu kapal (hopscotch)

2

3

4

5

Hopscotch—played by several players. One by one, the players jump on the drawing square, with only one foot for single squares and two feet for double squares. Each player has a flat stone, which should be thrown onto one square and then the player jumps onto that square

Similar to tag. One player chases a group of players. In squat and tag, the chaser cannot tag the players who are in a squat position. In the game of tag the crocodile, players who climb something or stand on a higher surface than the chaser (e.g. a tree, bench, chair, table, gazebo or slide) cannot be tagged

Hide and seek

Similar to soccer, but the number of players is flexible, as long as two teams have equal members

Bola (soccer)

1

Definition/rules

Name of games

No.

Table 1 Twenty traditional Indonesian games and their rules

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= sBHeXmZWztw

Squat and tag: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= bfiFSW0BkKs Tag the crocodile: https://youtu.be/SZrnVAC0ICc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= PdbFLEVOOfU

Online tutorial videos

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Played by two players. Each player takes their turn to circulate the seeds into each hole in the board. They play one by one, based on their turn until the seeds on his/her board’s side are empty. The player who gets rid of their seeds first is the winner

Congklak (seed game)*

Lompat karet (jumping rope and skipping)

7

8

The rope is made from many rubber bands looped together into a long rope. One child takes turns jumping over the rope, while two others hold the rope at both ends. If played in groups, the game usually involves at least three children. The rope is stretched with graded height, from the lowest to the highest. Those who are good at jumping the highest is the winner or the winning group. While the losers will change positions to become rope holders. Solitary games can also be done by skipping. The game has been modified into several types of jumping, such as mixed-jumping and hand jump over the rope

The players are divided into two groups. Each group has a “fortress” (which could be a tree, pole, pillar, or wall). They should compete with each other in groups to occupy the opponent’s fortress by touching it and saying, “Benteng!” They are also able to catch or tag opponent group members when the opponent members are outside their fortress

Benteng (fortress)

6

Definition/rules

Name of games

No.

Table 1 (continued)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= zBVu8JMXrOY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= wZQuKgwe5eU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= g938NDFYG5M

Online tutorial videos

(continued)

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Name of games

Kambing jewer (moving hand

Adu gasing (spinning top)*

Adu egrang (stilts race)

No.

9

10

11

Table 1 (continued)

game)*

Stilts is a traditional game which needs two shells made of bamboo or coconut shell with pedestal bottoms. Usually played by two or more players as a racing game

Two children play against each other. The goal of the game is to try and knock the opponents’ top outside of the ring until it stops spinning

Similar to paper, scissors, rock (or in the Indonesian context, it’s more like human-ant-elephant) played in a group. Two groups with equal members are needed and located in two different spots within the same square/field/area. Each player on both teams takes a turn to do the hand game. Every time each player wins the hand game, they step or jump once towards the opponent’s location. The winner of this game is the group that has all members capture the opponents’ spots

Definition/rules

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 1i8jYzmIKFI

https://youtu.be/aFwJrUSTmXo

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Name of games

Bekel (jacks)

Botol flip (flipping bottle)

Ular tangga (snakes and ladders game)

No.

12

13

14

Table 1 (continued)

Similar to snakes and ladders game. However, in RPTRA site, the board game is created by onsite managers or governmental bodies who use the game as a medium to introduce specific topics to children (e.g. health issues, bullying prevention, etc.)

A group of players sit in a circle. Each player gets one chance to throw a bottle and flip it into its original position. Every player who successfully reverses the bottle has one more chance to throw and flip the bottle. Flipping the bottle is carried out alternately until all players get an equal chance

The game is similar to the game of jacks (or Jax). When the game is started, the jacks are all held in the hand of the player and are dropped as the ball is allowed to bounce one time. The player then starts to play by attempting to pick up the jacks one at a time without disturbing any of the other jacks within the time it takes the ball to bounce once. If the player successfully has picked up all of the jacks, the player then drops them again and starts the second set of the game. The winner is the player who firstly finishes all three sets

Definition/rules

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= 9XvHJVcX0x4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= DKgfFSv6q_E

(continued)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7w9yLhfi_ 5Y

Online tutorial videos

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Each player holds their hands together, interlocking their fingers—apart from the little fingers of both the left and right hand, which are extended. Players take turns hitting the protruding fingers, hoping to divide them. The player that can strike and divide the fingers will win the game

Patil jari (hand war game)*

Galasin/gobak sodor (go back through the door)

16

17

“Gobak Sodor” or “galasin” consists of two teams, of three or more people. The rule is to intercept the opponents without escaping to the last line in a back and forth. To determine who is champion, all team members must complete the process of going back and forth in a predetermined area of the field

“Hom pim pa” (palm up or palm down) is usually played in the very beginning of the group games. At least three players are needed for this game. Each player must sing “hom pim pa” and decide whether they want to show their palm up or down. If there are only three players, the only player with a different palm position should be the first one to take a turn in any game they are playing. If there are more than three players, the players are grouped according to their palm position (the palms up-team and the palms down-team)

Hom pim pa (palm up or palm down)*

15

Definition/rules

Name of games

No.

Table 1 (continued)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= bUDL8Q6XfSg

https://youtu.be/7_dSmdcP6Rw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= MhOJl8xolnY

Online tutorial videos

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The game requires four or more people to play. The children sit in a circle. Each puts the palm of their right hand, palm up, on top of the palm of the left hand of the person to the right. After that, one person starts by clapping their right hand on the person’s hand on the left, who claps their right hand over to the right hand of the person on the left. It goes on like that, in a chain, until the end of the rhyme “Cublak-cublak suweng” is played by three or more children, one player kneels on the floor and closes his/her eyes while others sit around and put their hands on the back of the kneeling player. They start to sing the “cublak-cublak suweng” song together, at the same time small gravel is moved from hand to hand. When the song ends, the kneeling player guesses in which hand the stone is

Domikado (palm chain)*

Cublak-cublak suweng (stone guess)*

19

20

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35rL_ V7Nw-E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= SBWxn35XyU4

https://youtu.be/Uc54RKfrues

Online tutorial videos

we have taken the liberty of creating English names for these games. It is also possible for children to create or change the name for the games they play, so the rules are ever-changing

* Please note in Indonesia, the name of a traditional game can differ across provinces, and there is currently no equivalent English name for this game. For clarity,

Similar to ‘Scissor, Paper, Rock’ but played in a group. If a player loses, he puts his hand flat on the ground. When everyone’s hand but one is on the ground, the game is over, and the last survivor is the winner. Then all the losing players raise their hands from the pile

Ongsongan (group hand pile

Definition/rules

18

game)*

Name of games

No.

Table 1 (continued)

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ers or motivate them to return to the game, as these traditional games have simply been digitalized without integrating the levels, rewards or challenges that define successful digital games. See Soute et al. [39] for a broader discussion on the challenges of creating engaging digital games for children that promote social connections, rich learning and physical activity. For these reasons, our focus in this chapter is how urban play in childhood might be facilitated by physical—not digital—interventions.

4 Affordances of Games In exploring how Indonesian children engage with traditional games in RPTRA sites, we are guided theoretically by Gibson’s affordance theory. Opportunities for specific actions or activities provided by an environment or object are known as affordances. Developed by J. J. Gibson in the 1970s, affordance theory helps identify how individuals interact with the features (physical and programmatic) of the environment, resulting in activities which take place in a specific context [14]. The opportunities are communicated and perceived through cues, or visual elements designed into the environment that indicate what activity a person can partake in within that specific space [11]. For example, a playground is designed to provide opportunities for children to play. However, the intended or designed affordances of a playground may be actualised differently across multiple contexts which vary in time and place, cultural values and the perceiver’s motivations. A space that has limited shade in the hot summer may indeed provide play opportunities (play affordances), but if the space is too hot, children will avoid playing there. This perceived affordance never becomes actualised due to the specific contextual factors of weather. Children’s play, as seen through the lens of affordance theory, is the core developmental activity which enables the mastery of skills needed for the next developmental stage—stated more simply, play has developmental affordances. A game that is accommodated by the design of space (through its size, surface material, the presence of fencing, etc.) and is considered a programmatic feature of children’s environments, can provide opportunities for children’s developmental-driven activities. These can include not only physical affordances (e.g. opportunities for running, catching, kicking) but also social affordances (e.g. opportunities for cooperation, rules formation, conflict resolution). Social affordances represent opportunities for social interactions, both among the same age group as well as across generations, and learning about the cultural norms for socialising in public places. Therefore, designing a play intervention using games should offer children the opportunities for social interaction, as well as other domains of their developmental needs [12, 48]. Social affordances of games have been extensively researched in the HumanComputer Interaction (HCI) context (see for example [7, 21]) as it is important to understand better how people interact within a technology-centric environment. Yet, there is little research on social affordances in the context of physical environment settings. However, it is notable that the design of many videos and virtual games are inspired by real-life experiences and events (e.g. The Sims, Kholat, YIIK, and The

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Fig. 3 The RPTRA Cililitan site

Dragon-Cancer), including experiences of playing traditional games or board games (e.g. Ludo, chess, and archery). The interactions are often created to be as similar to that of the traditional games. This chapter also aims to address the gap in research on the social affordances provided by traditional games which take place in authentic community settings.

5 Case Study Methodology In order to better understand the social affordances offered by traditional games within an Indonesian context, we employed a case study methodology. From December 2018 to February 2019, the first author conducted in-depth qualitative case study research at two RPTRA sites in Jakarta, Indonesia: RPTRA Cililitan and RPTRA Rasela, illustrated in Figs. 3 and 4. Formal ethical approval was obtained prior to data collection. All child-participants and their parent/carers gave their consent to be involved in the research activities, and to protect the participant’s anonymity; pseudonyms are used. This research presented here is part of a larger project, exploring the design and experience of child-friendly public spaces in Jakarta. Thirty-four children from both sites (sixteen from RPTRA Cililitan and eighteen from RPTRA Rasela) first engaged in drawing activities (drawing their favourite parts of the RPTRA), were then observed as they played (via behaviour observations) and

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Fig. 4 The RPTRA Rasela site

then participated in group-interviews, discussing their experiences and expectations of social interaction and playing traditional games at RPTRA sites. A total of twenty boys and fourteen girls participated, ranging in age from 6 to 12 years. Interviews with three RPTRA managers and one TGR coordinator were open-ended, investigating the possibility of children’s social interaction through playing traditional games and which, if any, aspects of the RPTRA sites afford opportunities to play the traditional games. Using thematic analysis, we document the experience of managers and children and reflect on how public spaces could be designed to promote traditional games—and more broadly, outdoor play and playful urban spaces.

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6 Findings 6.1 The Intended Social Affordances of Indonesian Traditional Games Before describing how children engaged with the traditional games, we first discuss the unique perspective of the onsite RPTRA managers and the TGR coordinator. A thematic analysis highlighted the intended social affordances of Indonesian traditional games and the programmatic elements within the sites, specifically (1) why RPTRA sites were chosen as the space to foster traditional games; (2) their positive impact, in terms of fostering collaboration and learning about social values; and (3) the challenge of engaging time-poor parents.

6.1.1

RPTRA Sites as Playgrounds for Traditional Games

TGR purposely chose the RPTRA sites as their first partnership to support their campaign for traditional games because the sites are considered the most child-friendly spaces in Jakarta, with features that allow children to play freely but safely. RPTRA sites have indoor and outdoor facilities and include spaces that allow flexibility to play various types of traditional games. Moreover, the onsite managers coordinate programs and activities at the RPTRA sites which positively engage the community, thus reinforcing the TGR intervention of traditional games. As the TGR Coordinator explained: The facilities in RPTRA sites are very complete… the indoor, as well as outdoor areas, allow flexibility for children to play the traditional games. I can say that RPTRA sites are also safe for children to play. The onsite managers will always be there to supervise children. The programs and events that have been managed by RPTRA with the community have been very positive for children. Some RPTRA sites are already equipped with materials for traditional games, such as “congklak”, hopscotch, snakes and ladders, and ball. So, TGR did not take a long time to introduce the program to children, because they [the onsite managers] facilitate the community activities. (TGR Coordinator).

To maintain the continuity of traditional game events in each RPTRA, TGR usually cooperates with the children’s forum (“Forum Anak”) available at every RPTRA site. The children’s forum is an organization that is located in almost every district (“kelurahan”) and is coordinated with the provincial Children’s Forum. In this context, the RPTRA site has become a space for active participation of children in empowering themselves, which opens greater opportunities for the fulfilment of children’s rights to play in the city. We were helped by the Children’s Forum… the Children’s Forum was very enthusiastic taking charge of our campaign, and until now they are our valuable partner. (TGR Coordinator).

The success of the intervention is demonstrated through several indicators, including children’s preferences and behaviours while playing traditional games. TGR con-

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siders the primary indicator of success to be when children switch their interest from gadgets to traditional games and play outside more. After a workshop, we usually ask about children’s experiences after playing traditional games, then we usually ask, ‘which one do you prefer, mobile phone or traditional games?’… We want to observe how children’s play in the RPTRA site or other places in which we organised the workshop. Sometimes we ask the onsite managers, how children play at the RPTRA sites. We will be happier if the RPTRA sites have more materials to facilitate children playing traditional games… [children also play the traditional games] at home, with their parents, but I understand if they may have barriers such as [parent’s] time and [game] materials.” (TGR Coordinator)

6.1.2

Fostering a Sense of Community Through Collaboration and Learning About Social Values

TGR chose to promote Indonesian traditional games because they were considered to encourage children to socialise within their immediate environment, as almost all traditional games need more than one person to play. Feedback from onsite managers and the TGR coordinator suggests that introducing traditional games to the RPTPA sites was overwhelmingly positive, as the quotes in Table 2 below illustrate. The collaboration that occurs during traditional games is very fluid and very open to the interaction among players with diverse characteristics—gender and age, for instance. In addition, traditional games can engage children in competitive activities, but in a positive way. Healthy competition helps children work hard and develop empathy for other players at the same time. Referring to “galasin” (Go Back through The Door Game), the TGR Coordinator explained how she observed children learning to collaborate, to work with others to achieve the same goals and to have empathy for the losing team. She explained that learning about values and morals can be very effective if delivered through traditional games because every game has rules that represent the norms in society.

6.1.3

Challenging Digital Reliance—The Possibility of Using Traditional Games to Promote Bonding Between Child and Parent

While the RPTRA sites became important playgrounds for engaging with and enjoying traditional games, there was little evidence they promoted connections or bonding between children and their parents. Parents rarely accompanied children to play during the week, but most parents come to the RPTRA sites on the weekends. During school holidays, we observed many parents left their children at the RPTRA site to work in the morning and pick them up in the late afternoon. During a day such as a weekend, the children can go back and forth to the RPTRA site and their home. The children are supervised by the onsite managers, although the onsite managers deplore the attitude of parents who tend to ignore the needs of their children. Children

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Table 2 How traditional games foster social interactions and societal values and the challenge of technology Fostering interactions

Positive social behaviours

Parental distractions

“Most of the traditional games need someone else to play the game… it can be their friends, other visitors [of RPTRA sites], and parents… So basically, traditional games invite interaction within the environment… The interaction can be actualised into collaborative activities when discussing strategies with teamwork, solidarity and cooperation… After all, those interactions encourage children to grow the love for their environment… to friends, to the neighbourhood, because the traditional games emphasise the need for socialisation… So nobody should feel lonely, [because] in the game, they rely on each other” (TGR coordinator)

“It would be difficult to explain the philosophical background of each game to the children, although it is very relevant to their social life… Children learn through concrete experiences, so it’s easier if they develop positive social behaviour through habits that they learn from traditional games. For example, when children play “congklak”, they have to be an honest player if they want to win the game. If they [intentionally] cheat on another player, they may win, but the game will be ruined as well… [causing] other players to lose trust in them. The habits of ethical behaviour presented during the game encourage children to perform the same behaviour in their daily lives.” (TGR coordinator)

“Parent’s awareness of the importance of play for children is essential, so they can provide a supportive environment at home for children to play without gadgets… It’s not always necessary to provide toys or gadgets at home, but more important is spending time together [with kids]…. In the future, we will seriously invite parents to come to our events and play with their kids, like a playdate.” (TGR coordinator)

“When playing ball, the younger children can play with the older ones because they have to team up to start the game… Or like playing “congklak”, we can see those older children invite the younger ones to be the opponents. Sometimes both are [the “congklak” players] sisters; sometimes they are friends from different grades” (onsite manager of RPTRA Cililitan)

“When they play [at the RPTRA site], sometimes we noticed that they have friendship conflict at school before they come to the RPTRA site, but they basically understand that play will stop if everyone in a “silent war”. Usually, after play, suddenly they have become friends again” (onsite manager of RPTRA Cililitan)

“It is common for children to come here without their parents. However, usually, the parents come to the RPTRA site on weekends to join the gym activities or to jog. After that, they usually sit around and tend to let the children using their [parents] gadget to play so the parents can talk with other parents. If I witness it, I will approach and encourage them to play with the children, and say come on “bunda” [mother—in Bahasa Indonesia], don’t let them play with the mobile phones… here [in RPTRA site], we have many facilities for “bunda” and children to play together.” (onsite manager of RPTRA Rasela)

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seem to be “entrusted” in care the RPTRA site even though the onsite manager does not serve as a carer for the children at the RPTRA. An onsite manager even stated that a few children were there all day without being provided with food or drink by their working parents. Showing compassion, sometimes the onsite managers bought or cooked food for them. Through their playing campaign, the TGR strongly emphasised the importance of parental involvement in children’s play activities. Parental involvement during the event held by TGR is very important so that parents know about the benefits of play for children, especially those afforded by traditional games, and so they have an understanding of alternative play activities, besides the use of gadgets. The quotes in Table 2 illustrate how often, these parents, like parents across the globe, were more engaged with technology than playing with their children. On these occasions, onsite managers have an important role in stimulating parental participation in children’s play activities within the RPTRA sites by encouraging parents not to be fixated on gadgets but also to communicate with children through joint play activities. This means that the programmatic elements of the site must support all users in order to activate play affordances. In the following section, we discuss the actualised affordances that were indicated by the children at the RPTRA sites, or through behaviour observations of their activities.

6.2 The Actualised Social Affordances of Traditional Games This section presents social affordances actualised by children through traditional games as indicated by (1) behaviour observations and drawings to identify children’s experiences of playing traditional games facilitated within the RPTRA sites, and (2) interviews to assess children’s perceived experiences of their social interactions mediated by the games. Themes related to the social interactions are divided into type of activities which include collaboration, competition, and coopetition. Finally, children’s perspectives provide insight into the factors that regulate their opportunities to play traditional games within RPTRA sites, divided into physical and social elements.

6.2.1

Children’s Experiences of Traditional Games

Analysing data collected during a minimum of ten visits to each site for a duration of two to six hours each, we found that children aged six to twelve years old commonly play at the RPTRA sites after school on weekdays, and anytime from morning until evening on weekends. Their visit on weekdays usually lasts for one to two hours, but on weekends they can spend longer hours there. However, children, particularly our participants, usually go back and forth to the site as their home is nearby. Many children go home for lunch and prayer, then promptly return to the RPTRA sites. Using observation, we identified numerous games played by the children. The type

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of games we present in this section is limited to traditional games, although we also observed a few children playing with commercial products such as Lego, which we exclude from this chapter. A few times we observed children playing with their mobile phones within the RPTRA sites, but the onsite managers did not share the Wi-Fi passwords and restricted children to play with gadgets at the sites. As described above, we invited the children to participate in a drawing activity with an informal interview to further explore how they perceive the games and the RPTRA sites. Table 3 illustrates the game experiences of the child participants. The equivalent English name, with a description of the games, was presented earlier in Table 1. However, it is important to note that Table 3 does not represent the children’s preferences for the games or the frequency with which the games were played, as we did not define or control the games that children acknowledged before conducting the observations. Most of the traditional games identified are flexible in terms of the area required and the characteristics of the players. The column listing the area in Table 3 identifies where children played the game according to our observations. Although we observed some children playing games indoors, it does not mean those games cannot be played outdoors. In fact, from the interviews, we discovered that the play area used is regulated by environmental factors of the RPTRA sites, such as weather, interventions from the onsite managers, and the presence of other visitors. Indeed, one girl explained that “If the field is full with the boys or other visitors, we [the girls] could only play in the hall” (Venus, 10), while others explained that if the space was wet, “the onsite managers won’t allow us to play outside, so we move into the hall… play hide and seek” (Grey, 8). Children were most often observed playing with friends, including siblings. The children played with others, regardless of their gender or age, and also played with the onsite managers. However, children often prefer to play with friends of their age as almost all games (17 of the 18) were played by children of the same age. On some occasions, children engaged with different-age players when they needed others to play. For example, when a few boys wanted to play soccer but did not have enough players, they would ask any boys at the RPTRA site—younger or older: “I will call all the boys, no matter what their age or skill [of playing soccer], to come down to the field, so we can quickly get the game on.” (Green, 8) At both RPTRA sites, the onsite managers encourage the children to play traditional games by introducing and initiating the game. Figures 5, 6 and 7 show the onsite managers facilitating the games. In RPTRA Cililitan, we observed an onsite manager invite the children to play “adu gasing” (spinning tops game) at the hall, deliberately letting the children take over once it started. In RPTRA Rasela, children described how they appreciated when onsite managers actively taught and involved them in the game: “We just knew kambing jewer [moving hand game] from Pak Rahmat [an onsite manager of RPTRA Rasela—pseudonym], he taught us how to play the game, and sometimes he joined us to play galasin [go back through the door game]… and Pak Rahmat makes the games more fun!” (Kale, 11). At both sites, hopscotch was observed to be the most flexible game, which can be played both outdoors and indoors, by multiple ages and different genders at the same

Equipment

Plastic ball

n/a

n/a

n/a

Drawn court

n/a

Seeds/conch shell

Rubber rope

n/a

Bamboo top

Coconut shell/bamboo

Bouncy ball and jacks

Name of games

Bola (soccer)

Petak umpet (hide and seek)

Kena jaga/jadi (tag)

Tak jongkok (squat-and-tag)

Dampu kapal (hopscotch)

Benteng (Fortress)

Congklak (seeds game)

Loncat karet (jumping rope)a

Kambing jewer (moving hand game)a

Gasing (spinning tops game)

Enggrang Bambu (bamboo stilts)

Bekel (jacks)a x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

F

x

x

CA

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

SA

M

In

Out

Typically played by and/or with

Area

Table 3 Children’s experiences of traditional games within the RPTRA sites

x

x

x

x

OM

x

x

x

x

Coop

x

x

x

x

Col- com

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

Par

(continued)

Indcom

Perceived type of social interaction

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Plastic bottle

Self-created board

n/a

n/a

n/a

n/a

Song

Botol flip (flipping bottle)a

Ular tangga (snakes and ladders)

Tak buaya (tag the crocodile)b

Patil jari (hand war game)b

Galasin/gobak sodor (go back through the door)a

Ongsongan (hand pile game)b

Domikado (palm chain)a

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x x

CA

x

x

x

x

x

x

SA

x

OM

x

Coop

x

x

x

x

Col- com

x

x

Indcom

Perceived type of social interaction

x

Par

Males; F Females; CA Cross-age; SA Same-age; OM Onsite manager; Coo coopetition; Col-com Collective competition; Par Parallel; Cross (x) indicates the behaviour was observed at least once from the beginning to the end of observation, showing that each possibility are being actualised by the children

x

x

x

x

x

F

M

In

Out

Typically played by and/or with

Area

a Not observed in RPTRA Cililitan; b Not observed in RPTRA Rasela; M

Equipment

Name of games

Table 3 (continued)

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Fig. 5 Pak Rahmat joined the “Go Back Through The Door Game” in RPTRA Rasela

Fig. 6 An onsite manager in RPTRA Rasela demonstrated “Stilts Game”

time. The image and quote below illustrates how one six-year-old boy in RPTRA Cililitan ascribed meaning to hopscotch as a game that affords new friendships, praising especially the attractive design: “I love the hopscotch court [in RPTRA Cililitan], it is so colourful, I also like its position in the centre of the jogging track. I met Magenta [a pseudonym name of a participant] for the first time at the hopscotch court, she taught me how to play hopscotch and since then we became friends” (Red, 6) (Figs. 8, 9 and 10).

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Fig. 7 An onsite manager in RPTRA Cililitan initiated the “Spinning Top Game”

Fig. 8 Children played Hopscotch game in RPTRA Cililitan

6.2.2

Actualising Social Interactions Through Indonesian Traditional Games

During interviews with the child-participants, we further explored how children perceive the social interactions afforded by the traditional games. We found four types of social interactions that are perceived and actualised by the children, which include collaboration and competition (coopetition); collective competition (one player competes with a group of players); individual competition (one player competes with

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Fig. 9 Hopscotch court in indoor area of RPTRA Rasela

Fig. 10 Hopscotch, the apple of RPTRA Cililitan (a drawing by Red, 6)

another player); and parallel (one or more players interact in the same game but are not observed collaborating or competing). As intended, traditional games afford opportunities for children to collaborate. The collaborative activities are actualised since the children intend to play, and they perceive that every child wants to play—which is the common goal. Thus, they work together to create the play opportunities once they arrive at the RPTRA sites: “Every kid who comes here has the same intention: to play! So, if we are already in here [RPTRA site] we must play… play anything

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Table 4 How traditional games teach collaboration and kindness Traditional games need cooperation

Changing rules for younger kids

Learning persuasion

“Many traditional games need good cooperation within the group if we really want to win the games… [in terms of cooperation] we usually discuss who will do what… [for example] in galasin, we must decide who will enter the opponent’s gate for the first and last time …Or if we fail in the first attempt, we will change our strategy in the next attempts” (moon, 9 and venus, 10—negotiating strategy)

“If we have to play hopscotch with younger kids, we usually change the rules because sometimes the younger kids cannot jump with one foot properly [not balance]. So, we let them jump with two feet, although it is not how we jump in hopscotch game.” (magenta, 8—negotiating the rules)

“Some games have clear rules, such as “congklak” and snakes and ladders, but some are not. We made it. For example, when we play fortress, we need to tag as many as members from the opponent team, but sometimes if we are too tired chasing them, we persuade [verbally] them to join our team.” (moon, 9—negotiating the rules)

with anybody… [for example] I come to the field, start kicking the ball, then wait for a while, other kids will be joining me for sure!” (Navy, 12). The quotes in Table 4 illustrate how collaboration is an activity that begins with negotiation. Children recognise that to start playing traditional games, there should be someone or a group to negotiate the team members, rules, and strategies. We frequently observed children taking a break with their team to have a secret discussion of strategy, especially during games which need two teams to compete. Children expressed the idea that many traditional games are interesting because of the competitive opportunities. The competitive features of the traditional games encourage children to check their current skills by comparing their ability to others like an evaluation for further improvement of specific skills needed for the game. With the positive process of self-evaluation, children will develop self-efficacy in a specific ability, which contributes to the formation of a sense of competence in middle childhood. However, competition may also result in children’s negative feelings, particularly if they experience loss, or perceive unfairness during the game: “[The situation] I dislike is when I have to be the one who must chase everyone [a group of players] and tag them. Sometimes they cheat on me, like going or hiding somewhere else outside the organised play area, so I cannot tag anyone” (Plum, 10). However, losing the game or any perceived unfairness enables children to learn how to evaluate the conditions and understand other players’ feelings. In observation of “Tak Buaya” (Tag the Crocodile Game), we observed a participant who felt bad for another player who was always the chaser without any success tagging anyone during the game. He then came up with an idea of swapping his position with the chaser and suggested the players modify the rules—limiting the time for each chaser and keeping eyes on all players to watch if the chaser had successfully tagged someone (so one chaser will not always be the chaser). Others explained how they made sure no feelings were hurt: “When my friend and I want to play galasin [go back through

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the door game], we should be divided into two groups… we should discuss who will join my group, and who will join another group… to avoid personal feelings, we simply do the Hom Pim Pa [palm up or palm down] until each group has equal members” (Deimos, 11—negotiating the group members). Some games are actualised as parallel activities, especially by children who have limited knowledge and skill required to play the games. We observed some children playing bamboo stilts and bamboo top by themselves so they could learn the rules and how the game pieces or components work. They made several attempts and then asked onsite managers to demonstrate the game. Although children’s interactions with each other were limited during a parallel game, the game itself attracts other children to see how it works, which later encouraged them to play together by chance and exchange knowledge about the game. As with starting the games, children can end them quite naturally and with flexibility. For games of individual competition, children usually finished the game when one player comes up as the winner. Conversely, in the coopetitive and competitive games, children decided how they wanted it to end. When children end the game, it does not always mean they stop playing. They often take a rest for a while and pick up where they left off or start a new game: “Yeaaa… if we were too tired to chase other players with no luck, we end the game… It’s almost impossible to finish the game as it has to be” (Ochre, 10 and Azure, 8) (Figs. 11 and 12).

Fig. 11 Two participants in RPTRA Rasela were observed in a parallel game of bamboo stilts, in which they helped each other balance on the stilts

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Fig. 12 The girl-participants in RPTRA Rasela were ready for the “competition” once they had achieved the required skill of walking on the bamboo stilts

7 Discussion In this chapter, we discuss how traditional games on offer at RPTRA sites which are designated child-friendly public spaces for urban play, can teach societal values and help connect children with their cultural heritage. In accordance with the child-friendly cities mandate, play has been positioned as both a developmental and community-building technique. Our analysis highlights how the TGR intervention at the RPTRA sites—a synergy between top-down and bottom-up initiatives—is an exemplar for how a child-friendly city should be planned, managed, and developed, critical to communicative-collaborative planning [35]. As a top-down program, the designed features of the RPTRA sites allow them to function as public spaces that meet the needs and interests for community members—including critical opportunities for play for children. RPTRA sites offer valuable support for TGR, and other local organisations, by providing the context to facilitate their ideas to address community problems. Although playworkers and facilitators are often present in private daycare centres or playspaces to encourage play, it is uncommon for them within public parks in highly urbanized contexts. With children’s use of technology currently banned in RPTRA sites, this project has explored the value of engaging with low-tech traditional games and their social affordances. TGR is working to ensure Indonesia’s traditional play culture is not lost, through low-resource, low-tech traditional games that encourage children to play with the bamboo, sticks, stones and other materials found in nature.

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7.1 The Relevance of Traditional Games for Modern Children This research revealed that most of the social affordances of the traditional games are actualised by children as intended. Children actualised the sociability and flexibility of traditional games into types of social interactions ranging from parallel to coopetition. Children may start the game using parallel activities, where they enjoy the game by themselves. However, the game is a draw for other children to observe, transfer knowledge, and scaffold the required skills—a stepping stone for collaboration. Children’s negotiation also represented flexibility during play from the start to the end of the game. They learn to express ideas, understand the condition of other players, pick the best solution, evaluate its effectiveness by having cooperative attitudes, and recreate the games and rules to facilitate everyone’s aspirations. In the cooperation type of games, children felt these games allowed them to learn to cooperate and compete at the same time. The collaboration with their group is an opportunity to develop cohesion, while competition with other groups allows children to learn the importance of hard work and problem-solving. These two types of interaction are social skills needed for daily living—representing the process of developing a sense of belonging within their community [30], as well as developing the potential to contribute to the community [5]. Play is an effective way for children to explore the world and understand societal values [12]. If society values play as a way to support developmental and social activities, programmatic aspects of the environment must provide children with opportunities to play—and opportunities to engage in traditional games that reflect unique cultural heritage. Unfortunately, we found that parents rarely engaged in these traditional games with their children, and in fact, would often leave their children at the RPTRA sites to play all day without their supervision—reflecting the tension and reality of low income lives in Indonesia. Parents are a critical part of the child’s social environment, and TGR had expected greater active participation of parents during children’s engagement with traditional games. Potentially, the engaging digitalisation of traditional games might better engage parents with children, as popular digital entertainment and location-based augmented reality games often foster collaborative and physically-active intergenerational play. As a large body of research has outlined how digital technology can foster playful interactions between children and adults, for example through wearable computing, digital art and entertainment, there is much opportunity to digitalize culturally-meaningful traditional games and better integrate these into the fabric of our urban environment.

7.2 Implications for Stakeholders and Planners This research has highlighted the importance of designing for play and providing opportunities for playful experiences and interactions within our urban spaces. Gov-

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ernmental organisations can provide policies, spatial-use regulations and communityoriented environments designed for free play—for example, the continued creation of RPTRA sites—and can also foster bottom-up processes, which allow participatory actions from the community to develop interventions that resolve their problems and improve empowerment [24]. The environments must effectively provide opportunities appropriate for children of all ages and multiple activities, with affordance theory adeptly explaining these opportunities for action provided by the physical environment and the objects within it. Based on the children’s experiences of play within the RPTRA sites, we learned that these sites are ideal environments for children to play and they opened up children’s options for different games and activities. These children relied heavily on the RPTRA sites, as they have limited play spaces within their neighbourhood area; the sites were extremely popular, and the high ratio of visitors to space meant that children found the regulations for using the space restricts their play opportunities. Clearly, there is an urgent need for increasing the quantity and quality of playable, child-friendly public spaces, within Jakarta. Although adding additional space is not always feasible in dense urban spaces, creating more informal play spaces within neighbourhood areas that offer safe and supportive opportunities for all children to play outdoors must be a public policy priority. In terms of the TGR campaign, two key factors supported their bottom-up intervention in the local community. First, to engage children in specific neighbourhoods, TGR worked in collaboration with RPTRA as a top-down program. RPTRA offers valuable support for TGR (and other local organisations) by providing the context to facilitate their ideas to address community problems. Second, in the process of resolving the community’s problems, TGR coordinated with the children’s forum, which represents children’s active participation both as partner and user of the interventions. As a partner, the presence of the children’s forum in each district is a positive sign of the fulfilment of children’s rights to be involved in the decision-making process, through association and active participation (Lansdown in [32, 34]). Children’s active participation opened up opportunities to experience program management by facilitating members’ aspirations—capabilities needed for adulthood [16]. Children playing traditional games within the RPTRA sites is a sign that the TGR’s intervention is on the right track to fulfil children’s rights to play. Traditional games should not only be socially valued—as exhibited by the Indonesian governmental program and local actions— but also developmentally valued in society. This means children’s opportunities to play traditional games must be valued as part of children’s core development, focused on the skills they need as community members. Hence, children’s play interventions in the future should emphasise children’s immediate environments (e.g. family and neighbourhood)—which may be limited in current society, particularly in low-income urban areas. In closing, this chapter has explored the social affordances provided by traditional games for children within two sites in Jakarta. Other chapters in this book have outlined how sensors and digital infrastructure can inject fun and play into urban environments. We have taken a different approach, outlining how purposeful sites and programming of activities can also offer affordances for playful interaction—fos-

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tering children’s development and social interactions while preserving Indonesia’s rich cultural heritage. As we have highlighted, play is a critical developmental and community-building activity that must be much more front of mind in city-making processes and decision-making.

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Part VI

Who Controls Your City’s Playability?

City Residents as Videogame Characters in Smart Urban Environments Anton Nijholt

Abstract In this chapter, we argue that residents in future smart cities will have a role that can be compared with that of non-player characters in videogames. They can play, but their play is supervised, there is no free play, there is no spontaneous play, and there will be a McDonaldization and Googlization of play all over the smart world. This view is contrary to the notion that smart technology and citizens’ access to such technology will allow them to reconfigure their urban environments to make them playful. We will illustrate this view with some current examples of control, management, and privatization of urban environments. These examples clearly show that future smart city citizens will not be allowed to use this technology in creative, collaborative, and competitive play; instead, their play will be controlled by smart technology. Will urban operating systems really differ from the engines that control videogame environments? Do we play smart environments, or do these environments play us? Artists and urban activists have commented on these developments with playful yet critical activities and art. Keywords Playable cities · Urban games · Videogames · Smart cities · Face recognition technology · Gait recognition technology · Social credit systems · Citizen monitoring · Privatization · Narrative environments · Subversive games · Non-player characters

1 Introduction Digital smartness will not only invade our home and work environments but also be present in the environments where we shop, recreate, play sports, and exercise. Digital smartness will be present when we travel, use public transport, and move around in urban environments. Sensors and actuators will be embedded in wearables and objects in the environment and be invisibly embedded in the environment (buildings, A. Nijholt (B) Faculty EEMCS, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2020 A. Nijholt (ed.), Making Smart Cities More Playable, Gaming Media and Social Effects, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-9765-3_16

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streets, street furniture). This will make citizens nodes in the Internet of Things: they can sense, they can be sensed, they can actuate, and they can be actuated. Smart urban environments are not owned by their residents or the communities that have emerged. There are governmental rules and regulations as well as rules issued by regional and local authorities, and the management and control of public spaces are increasingly being transferred to large commercial companies. Public spaces are thus privatized; that is, their ownership or management is transferred to companies. This is done in such a way that local authorities and companies agree on what will be offered to residents, what the residents must pay, and how they must behave. Residents ‘pay’ by having their behavior monitored and controlled. For example, the way in which they are allowed to consume the facilities offered by the city is controlled (i.e., their city consumption). Smart monitoring allows the detection of the residents’ preferences and their affect feelings towards urban environments and what these have to offer. At the same time, this monitoring provides information about appropriate and inappropriate behavior, although the meaning of ‘appropriateness’ can differ between a public smart environment and a privatized smart environment. Citizens can benefit from a city where public transport, energy distribution, food logistics, and waste management are organized and handled in an efficient way. Citizens can be provided with personalized and contextually relevant information in their daily and recreational activities. Their wearables and the sensors and actuators that are embedded in the environments in which they move about know about them, their moods, and emotions and based on such knowledge can assist them to do what they want to do. However, there is not necessarily a match between the interests of the smart environment owners and the interests of its inhabitants. The urban environment and the owners of the smartness embedded in these urban environments have control of the things that are present in these environments, including the ‘things’ that represent human beings as well as when, where, and how these ‘things’ want to enjoy themselves. In this chapter, we survey the various issues involved in determining which future smart cities will transform into cities where spontaneous playful activity and unauthorized enjoyment are banned. Smart technology allows the monitoring of citizens—not only their physical behavior and activities but also their preferences, moods, and emotions. In a smart city, this information can be used to persuade, convince, or force city dwellers to behave in an appropriate and desirable way, including desired moral behavior. This ability so can make the city a more efficient machine. There are also some global trends, which at first sight appear less technology driven, that have an impact on how city dwellers will experience their cities and neighborhoods. McDonaldization and Disneyization have been mentioned in the past as trends that cause cities all over the world to look alike. Another influence that contributes to making cities and the behavior of city dwellers more uniform is privatization. In addition to the large information and communication technology (ICT) companies selling smart city solutions to city administrations, there are also private companies being hired by city administrations to manage public spaces. Their aim is profit-making, and that leads to restrictions on how city dwellers can make use of the public spaces,

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which are thereby transformed into semi-public spaces. The Googlization of urban environments follows the Googlization of the World Wide Web and home environments. In the next sections of this chapter, these seemingly unstoppable trends will be introduced and discussed. We will also pay attention to gamers, hackers, and artists who have provided critical views on these issues and have introduced playful and ‘subversive’ installations in the urban environment. Until now, their focus has been mainly on the comprehensive presence of security cameras in big cities, with these camera networks playing a role in their game design, hacking activities, or artistic projects. From this chapter, it will become clear that there are many opportunities that can be seized to introduce such ‘subversive’ and entertaining activities in public spaces where sensors—not only cameras—and actuators are embedded in the urban environment. Embedded smartness in an urban environment, whether it has been provided by a city’s administration or by information technology and service companies, can be explored by a local community, a research team, or by game designers, hackers, and activists in order to engage in smart technology-supported playful activity in the urban environment.

2 McDonaldization, Disneyization, and Gamification The embedding of smart technology in urban environments aims at making cities more efficient. Part of making cities more efficient involves predicting and controlling the consumption and physical behaviors of citizens through persuasion and enforcement. This can be done by civic authorities, but they can also delegate such tasks to commercial companies or even sell public spaces to commercial companies and allow them to introduce regulations for their privately owned public spaces that are more restrictive than those maintained in public spaces. Moreover, these commercially owned spaces can be organized in such a way that the behavior of their visitors is almost fully enforced by the commercial company, with the aim to reduce costs and increase profits. Companies can exploit smart technology to achieve such a goal. Making a city smart, more efficient, and sustainable are also aims of city authorities. Privatization is perhaps an easy way to achieve this, but it is necessarily accompanied by a loss of privacy and a restriction in the ability to move freely in urban environments. We can take social media as an example. We use Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and obey their rules of use. We provide them with personal information and accept that it is used to change our behavior and that of others. We provide Google with information about our interests. We accept that this information is used to guide and influence our consumption behavior. Software on our PC, laptop, and smartphone register how this information is used, the YouTube videos we watch, our (illegal) downloads, the Netflix movies, the Spotify music, the TV series or documentaries we are interested in, our Facebook likes, et cetera. It is not a technical problem for

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Microsoft, Google, or other companies to monitor and analyze our digital communication. Both city governments and companies have an interest in predicting citizens’ behavior, which includes methods for persuading or enforcing particular behaviors. Could the smart city take over the role of social media, not only monitoring what we are doing but also persuading or enforcing us to restrain our behavior, impulses, and emotions in exchange for certain rewards while we use public spaces? The owners or managers of an urban environment that have access to voluntarily and involuntarily user-provided content can use this content to support their aims. There are also some global and worldwide developments that have an impact on the use of urban environments by their residents. In the following sections, we discuss McDonaldization [1], Disneyization [2], and gamification [3]. Privatization and Googlization are then discussed in a later section.

2.1 McDonaldization Ritzer [1] defines McDonaldization as “…the process by which the principles of the fast-food restaurant are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as of the rest of the world.” He distinguishes four principles that lie at the hearth of McDonaldization: efficiency, calculability, predictably, and control. McDonaldization of society simply means that these principles take priority over other principles that might be seen as important. We can see these principles at work in McDonald’s drive-throughs, where customers follow the rules that are displayed at the entrance or are already familiar with them because of earlier visits. They follow the rules of ordering and paying, and they know they have a responsibility to dispose of waste in an orderly manner. There are no surprises. The environment controls one’s behavior. It is important to be efficient, or others waiting in line will show their displeasure. McDonald’s is happy because these customers do not require (uncomfortable) seats, and they do distract employees with their small talk. Behavior can be measured, not only that of customers but also that of employees, in order to increase efficiency. This notion clearly resembles the time-and-motion studies of Frederick W. Taylor’s from the late 19th century, and its corresponding dehumanizing aspects are similar to what is depicted in Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis and found on assembly lines, where people have to work like human robots. Principles are decreed and maintained by those that own or lease the environment and its residents and visitors. ICT companies that own or have been given control of public spaces due to the trend of privatization may choose to follow these McDonaldization principles to reduce their costs and increase their profits.

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2.2 Disneyization In addition to McDonaldization, there is the Disneyization point of view. As Bryman [2] explains, “Disneyization is the process by which the principles of the Disney theme parks are coming to dominate more and more sectors of American society as well as the rest of the world.” Clearly, the principles of fast-food restaurants also apply to Disney and other theme parks. They adopt McDonaldization, but more specific trends can also be recognized, including theming, hybridization of consumption, merchandising, and performative (emotional) labor. In a smart, ICT-controlled city, all four trends can be present and offered to residents. Here, we focus on theming and performative behavior. Our environments are being themed: hotels, restaurants, shopping malls, and public spaces tell us how we are assumed to experience them from different perspectives. We and our companions are categorized as good hotel guests, diners, shoppers, Airbnb guests, Uber users, or, more generally, good users of public spaces and their facilities. We are being themed, and we follow the environment’s theme narrative, which has been designed for us (and others) or been suggested to us, and we allow ourselves to be persuaded to comply. Hotels, malls, and public spaces can have themes. We are persuaded, by digital technology, to engage in such a theme and narrative. We are rewarded for doing so, and we are punished for not doing so. Sensors and actuators can persuade us to change a routine or can even tell us lies to enforce certain behavior and activities. Telling untruths is not always wrong. When it helps to evacuate people from a potentially dangerous situation, it is quite acceptable. But, of course, the same technology makes it possible and attractive (from an economic and efficiency point of view) to nudge or force citizens to adapt their behavior to the environment for efficiency and profit-making reasons. Our environments are also increasingly inhabited by people that have jobs that require performative labor. Taking Disney park characters as an example, performative labor involves interacting with Disney Park guests. Disney Park characters are human beings that are dressed and behave as Disney characters. When interacting with guests they have to display positive affect and empathy. These performative acts, displaying affect and empathy, are part of their job. This is not that different from what we expect from office and hotel receptionists, shop personnel, or information desk advisers. Many of these jobs could be taken over by virtual agents or social robots that know about the environment and the preferences of the users. However, these virtual agents and social robots have not necessarily been created to serve their users’ interests alone. Why should they be eager to help us? They have been programmed to do so, and they have been programmed to display affective behavior as part of their job. Humans, being nodes in the Internet of People and humanoid characters, whether they are virtual or physical, can be embedded in smart urban environments and displayed on screens as virtual humans, holograms, or physical robots. Anthropomorphization makes it possible for residents to interact with buildings, street furniture, and other elements in public spaces as if they were human conversational partners.

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These ‘human’ conversational partners can certainly help to persuade and enforce behavior that serves the aims of the owners or managers of the public spaces. In addition to McDonaldization, we can expect to see the Disneyization of smart cities and their public spaces. In an extreme form, we can see that happen in historic towns. Public spaces in historic European inner cities such as Venice, Florence, and Amsterdam—but it happens in China as well—are dominated by tourists, rather than by citizens. These spaces are commercialized, Disneyized, and museumized, become exclusive leisure districts and are excluded from community life. Starting from 2019 Venice has introduced an entry fee for short-stay visitors.

2.3 Gamification Appropriate or inappropriate behavior in McDonaldized, Disneyized, and privatized urban public spaces can be rewarded or punished, respectively. This is especially true when urban environments become smart, are able to monitor the behavior of city dwellers, and there is the possibility to provide immediate feedback to the users of urban public spaces. These environments can become gamified. That is, videogame design elements and mechanics can be transferred to urban environments. A sensorequipped gamified environment can implement a point scoring system, comparable to earning points in a videogame, allowing comparisons with other users of the environment, its services, and its products. As predicted by Schell [4], cheap sensors and processing units will become disposable technology, and therefore “…every soda can, every cereal box, is going to be able to have a CPU, a screen, a camera, on board it, and a WiFi connector so that it connects to the Internet…”. In gamification, points, badges, rewards, and leaderboards provide competitive motivation. Points can be earned by brushing your teeth, performing fitness exercises, taking public transport, congratulating your boss on her promotion, et cetera. Maybe the world should be redesigned by game designers? Gamification can be used to persuade people to behave in the desired way [3, 5]. It can also address product, service, and civic engagement. How can we affect attitude and behavior using game elements in daily life activities? A game-like reward system can nudge people to change their behavior, persuading them to engage in desirable and appropriate behavior. Gamification can trigger competitive motivation. It has been mainly applied to health, education, energy, water and waste management, public transport, traffic, and loyalty programs. Zica et al. [6] lists many applications, including a game that is meant to capture users’ opinions about improvements in their city. Companies apply gamification in their marketing strategies and loyalty programs. Schools use gamification to increase the engagement of students with their educational programs. Gamification can be fun, constructed in a playful way that leads to enjoyment and satisfaction and results in a positively experienced behavior change. Civic managers who want to run their city more effectively or companies that aim

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at generating more profits can make use of smart technology embedded in urban public spaces to introduce gamification in urban environments and persuade city dwellers to follow the rules of the urban gamification. With the trend to privatize urban public spaces, we can also expect that gamification will be used to support the commercial interests of the companies that are involved in designing, implementing, and managing smart cities. In the gamification of ‘our’ urban environments, we earn points for appropriate behavior and lose points for inappropriate behavior. Privatization allows companies to introduce rules in ‘their’ urban environments that define what they consider to be appropriate behavior. Can we be criticized, punished, or rewarded because of the way we are behaving in themed public spaces? Are we expected to like the theme and adapt our behavior to this theme? Obviously, this kind of gamification is not about spontaneous play and playfulness. Points, levels, and leaderboards, as they are part of these gamified systems, are not the primary features of games and play. In gamified systems, they are introduced to enforce certain behaviors. Hence, they diverge distinctly from game definitions such as “the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles” [7, p. 55] or “meaningful inefficiencies” [8]. There can be fun, point scoring, rankings, incentives, and competition, but the ultimate aim of gamified systems is to change behavior, where the change is about buying more products, to help to improve a city’s efficiency and sustainability, or to enforce appropriate behavior in public and privatized public environments. Gamification, in particular its commercial exploitation, has been criticized by game designers. Bogost [9] argues that gamification is “marketing bullshit” invented by consultants to be used in big business with the sole purpose of deception and profit. Others have mentioned that gamification is also a perfect method of algorithmic surveillance. Clearly, gamification can degenerate into a mass surveillance system and a Social Credit System, as discussed in Box 1. McGonigal [10] provides many examples of alternate reality games. However, unlike Schell’s view on gamification, in alternate reality games there is not necessarily a reliance on smart technology, and many alternate reality games have a social and idealistic focus rather than a commercial or efficiency-related focus. Nevertheless, they also have point scoring, competition and ranking levels, and awards. Another perspective on urban gamification is presented by Thibault [11], who proposes punk gamification as an alternative to the mainstream gamification explained above. In his view, punk gamification should be a bottom-up activity, that is, designed by users, possibly critical and confrontational rather than introduced by city administrations or companies, and designed to guide the users’ behavior. We will return to this view in Sect. 6 of this chapter.

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3 We Know About Cities: Cities Know About Us Living in and experiencing a city result in affective feelings for the city. We can feel proud to be a New York citizen, love London, long to pay another visit to Venice, or look forward to going back to the village or city where we spent our youth. When living in a city, we may feel safe or unsafe in certain areas. We avoid specific areas or happily take a detour that brings back positive memories. Smart environments know about our preferences, routines, use of public transport, shopping, and recreational activities. Sensors can recognize our affect towards cities, city parts, public spaces, and city activities. Measuring this affect provides a city with knowledge about its residents; measuring this affect and providing feedback also allows city dwellers to become aware of their behavior, alternatives, and potentially decide to change their daily routines and their behavior. For example, they may find a safe route to jog, or avoid environments with bad smells, low air quality, or lots of noise [12–14]. Smart urban environments can detect appropriate and inappropriate citizen behavior. Some years ago, the city of Wellington (New Zealand) implemented a project to embed sensors in public spaces to detect acoustic activity, such as screaming, shouts, and breaking glass. Sensors were even planned that could pick up the scent of paint fumes that indicated graffiti. We can find similar projects in many other cities. The Wellington project ended in 2018 when the company involved refocused its activities, and the city was left alone with its aims to monitor begging, fighting, and other anti-social behaviors. In other cities, we can find examples of handgun, gunshot, and aggressive behavior detection, with police officers notified when necessary. In the Dutch city of Eindhoven, experiments are being conducted involving light intensity changes and diffusing the smell of oranges to calm people down in nightlife streets. Good behavior in smart urban environments can be rewarded while inappropriate behavior is punished. Cyclists in Enschede, also in the Netherlands, can install an app on their smartphones that connects to traffic lights and reduces the time they have to wait for a red light. Obviously, an app like that can also be used to check whether a red light has been run. Citizens can be persuaded to behave as required by the smart environment. It can be fun to use ‘piano stairs’ rather than an escalator, to throw waste into a bin that makes a funny sound when it accepts it, or have a pedestrian crossing that provides entertainment while waiting for a green light. Other, more confronting examples are billboards with smoke detectors that display coughing sounds when people pass them while smoking or pedestrian crossings that emit the sound of squealing car brakes when people attempt to cross while the light is still red. More examples of how to deal with inappropriate behavior in smart urban environments can be found in China and its control of urban environments. Rather than persuading, the strategy is to enforce the preferred behaviors.

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Box 1: Orwellian Gamification in China Presently (2019) China has about 170 million CCTV cameras at work, the number is expected to grow to more than 500 million in the next years. Face recognition technology makes it possible to use these camera’s to identify individuals in crowds and those traveling by plane and train. There is surveillance of targeted people (ethnic minorities) that are not allowed to leave a particular area. Facial recognition technology is complemented with gait-recognition technology that allows the identification of individuals based on their body shape and the way they walk, so they can be identified when their face is obscured. Police officers are being equipped with smart eyeglasses to identify individuals in crowds by making photos and matching them with pictures in state databases. This technology will be used for the Social Credit Score system that is beginning to take effect. Inhabitants are judged on their behavior. Pro-social behavior, for example, volunteer work or donating blood, will be rewarded. Violating traffic rules, smoking in non-smoking areas, unruly behavior on flights, jaywalking, and bad ratings by customers, will decrease a score. If your score is low then there are consequences. Examples of possible punishments that have been mentioned and reported are not being able to take out loans from banks, being banned from jobs, reducing access to good schools, slower internet speeds, being banned from flying and using a high-speed train, slower access to healthcare facilities, no access to dating sites, or not being allowed to own pets. In addition, there can be public shaming. Frequent jaywalkers are identified by face recognition technology, are notified via instant messaging, and are fined. This will affect the offender’s social credit score. Moreover, their acts, pictures, and names are displayed on large screens at major intersections (Fig. 1). It has been reported that to date (2019) more than 23 million blacklisted citizens have been banned from taking flights. Cities and villages can have different implementations of the Social Credit System and mass-surveillance systems. In the village of Yangqiao (eastern China) the household rankings are posted by every front door and on a community bulletin board. People can report neighbors for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deeds. In Xinjiang (western China) police and government officials use a mobile app with facial recognition technology that allows them to pay attention to various ‘person types’ with characteristics ranging from VPN or WhatsApp use to not socializing with neighbors. In Xuchang, a city in central China, high schools have webcams installed in classrooms that provide live-streaming on websites that are open to the public. Students who misbehave, don’t pay attention, or daydream are caught on camera, and so are lax teachers. Schools in Southwest China have adopted sensor-equipped intelligent uniforms for their students. These uniforms allow the tracking of the students and information is sent to parents and teachers. An alarm is activated if a student leaves or enters a building without permis-

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Fig. 1 Xiangyang, Hubei, China, June 5th, 2018. Screens display photos of jaywalkers alongside their names and I. D. numbers. © Gilles Sabrié

sion. Facial recognition technology is used to prevent students from swapping uniforms. Sources: Josh Chin. Chinese Police Add Facial-Recognition Glasses to Surveillance Arsenal. The Wall Street Journal, Feb 7, 2018; Charles Rollett. The odd reality of life under China’s all-seeing credit score system. Wired, June 5, 2018. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/china-social-credit; Beijing to Judge Every Resident Based on Behavior by End of 2020. Bloomberg News, Nov 21, 2018. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-21/beijingto-judge-every-resident-based-on-behavior-by-end-of-2020; Jamie Fullerton. China’s ‘social credit’ system bans millions from travelling, Mar 24, 2018. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/03/24/chinas-social-credit-systembans-millions-travelling/; J.C. Hernández. In China, Daydreaming Students Are Caught on Camera. The New York Times (2017), Apr 25, 2017. https:// www.nytimes.com/2017/04/25/world/asia/in-china-daydreaming-studentsare-caught-on-camera.html; B. Schmidt. China’s Mass Surveillance More Sophisticated Than Thought (2019). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/ articles/2019-05-01/alibaba-backed-face-scans-show-big-tech-ties-to-chinas-xinjiang; S. Yan. China Uber-rates its citizens…A harmless nudge? Or sinister surveillance society? The Telegraph (2019). https://www.telegraph. co.uk/news/social-credit-in-china/.

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4 From ‘Home’ to ‘Urban’: Googlization, Privatization, and Commercialization Many years ago we wrote about Google taking over our home environments and having a Google Home device installed in our home that knows about our activities and experiences and even allows us to retrieve and re-experience them [15]. Can we expect that Google or similar existing or future companies will take over our environments and collect, analyze, and interpret data about us and take actions that benefit us or those who own our environments? Companies involved in collecting and interpreting such data use and sell the data and provide other companies and authorities with the results of their investigations. So-called big data is analyzed and interpreted using machine-learning techniques that can predict or even control our behavior. The environment can persuade us—not necessarily telling us the whole truth—to behave and move in certain ways. Who is deciding on what is considered appropriate behavior, how people should be persuaded to adhere to a particular or a company’s preferred behavior (whether inspired by McDonald, Disney, or Google), and how to enforce such behavior? Smart city technology and big data owners (Alphabet/Google, Cisco, Intel, Siemens, etc.) are pushing their technology to civic authorities in the hope of becoming responsible for a city’s smart city technology development, providing the urban operating system, and controlling how citizens should behave in order to make the city smarter and more efficient. In our 2008 Google Home paper, we took the view of Google taking over control of our home environments. This view included asking Google to retrieve our past experiences and even allow us to re-experience them in an immersive way. Activities can be recorded and interpreted in a way that allows retrieval. Multisensorial sensors can capture real-time behavior in domestic environments. Information captured from smartphones and social media will help to obtain a complete picture of the activities. This also requires that companies have access to our past and current activities as well as how we experienced them. Smart home companies (e.g., Google Nest) provide us with products in our home that we must adapt to. Future versions of Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri, and Cortana will take over control of our home environments. Our personal digital assistants can be personalized, but we will not own or control them. Indeed, they can have their ‘own’ ideas about how to inform us about the world around us. Cheap sensor and actuator technology in urban environments will make similar development possible for public spaces in urban environments. Googlization is a term that has been introduced to describe the expansion of Google’s services from email and web search and retrieval services [16] to services that manage our domestic needs—and therefore know about our home activities, presence, activities, and behavior in public spaces. This may include knowledge about our preferences, moods, and emotions. Hence, Googlization is not restricted to traditional personal computer web services and search engines; it involves the Internet of Things, whether those things are connected in a domestic, urban, or natural environment. And, of course, Googlization and the Internet of Things do not stop at national borders. In addition

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to using the term Googlization for searching the Web and digitizing libraries, it has been used to denote developments in accessing and using health data, satellite data, traffic data, street view data, data to be used by self-driving cars, and collecting and interpreting surveillance data. Games and play can make use of this collected data. However, as Leorke [17] observes, “The commercialization of location-based games within the app economy reflects a broader trajectory whereby locative media technologies—once the purview of artists and amateurs—have been subsumed within the corporate infrastructure of technology giants like Apple and Google.” Commercial urban games make both entertainment and surveillance possible. Municipalities lack the requisite knowledge to deal with all aspects of digital technology and network developments. Moreover, ownership and management are not necessarily decided by local municipalities; they must follow rules issued by national governmental bodies or beyond. Traditional public services offered by municipalities are taken over by companies. They decide how we should consume energy, take care of our homes and families, and how we are allowed to make use of shopping centers and make gamified use of their public spaces (streets, squares, parks, playgrounds). Ground and air, public services, education, playgrounds, and public spaces can be leased or sold. This makes public spaces vulnerable to changing company interests. Global corporations, like authoritarian and totalitarian rulers and elites, do what is best for them. Contracts between companies and cities to develop or maintain smart city technology could be discontinued because of changing company interests. As an example, in Wellington (New Zealand), the multinational Company NEC was involved in equipping the city with sensors that could monitor visual and acoustic activity to identify anti-social behaviors, such as fighting, screaming, engaging loudly with friends, and sleeping in public places. Scent sensors were supposed to detect the paint fumes from graffiti. However, the smart city partnership ended in 2018, when NEC decided to refocus its business activity in New Zealand, leaving Wellington with its unfinished projects.1 In addition to introducing smart city technology in existing cities, companies are involved in initiating greenfield smart cities. These are initiatives to build smart cities from the ground up. Songdo (South Korea), Belmont (Arizona), NEOM (Saudi Arabia), Masdar City (Emirates), and Dholera (India) are examples of such projects. Sustainability, as well as smooth traffic and the accommodation of autonomous vehicles, are the primary motivations. Long before this, Disney had already shown an interest in future cities. Umberto Eco on his 1975 visit to Disneyland (California) and Disney World (Orlando) considered these ‘absolutely fake cities’ to be models of the urban agglomeration of the future [18]. It is not clear whether what he saw matched Walt Disney’s original ideas. Disney, who died in 1966, had strong ideas about the cities of the future. His aim was to build one near Orlando. It should be called EPCOT (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), a real city, a blueprint of the future. He did not succeed.

1 https://www.stuff.co.nz/dominion-post/news/107217782/big-brother-has-left-the-capital--for-

the-time-being.

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Instead, EPCOT became a theme park in Disney World, partly based on his ideas but in a very watered-down form.2 In a movie called The Original E.P.C.O.T. Walt Disney’s original vision for his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (Walt Disney Productions, shot October 27, 1966) we can hear Disney explain this prototype. There will be a highspeed rapid transport system, roads for cars and trucks below the pedestrian level, homes in green areas, paths for children going to and from school and playgrounds, always completely safe and separated from automobiles. In fact, due to the city’s transport system, citizens will drive their automobiles only on weekend pleasure trips. Explained by Disney himself: “…the most exciting, by far the most important of our Florida project, in fact, the heart of everything we will be doing in Disney World will be our experimental prototype system of tomorrow, we call it EPCOT, … Experimental Community Prototype of Tomorrow … everything in EPCOT will be dedicated to the happiness of the people who live, work, and play here … and most important of all, when EPCOT has become a reality and we find the need for technologies that don’t even exist today, it is our hope that EPCOT will stimulate American industry to develop new solutions that will meet the needs of the people…”. Narrator (talking about the central core of the city): “…But most importantly, this entire fifty acres of city streets and buildings will be completely enclosed. In this climate-controlled environment shoppers and theatergoers and people just out for a stroll will enjoy ideal weather conditions. Protected, day and night, from rain, heat and cold, and humidity.” The Canadian city Toronto aims at a public-private partnership with Google’s sister company Sidewalk to develop part of its Quayside waterfront into a smart city neighborhood: “the most measurable community” in the world. It would have self-driving taxibots, garbage robots, flexible buildings, flexible and walkable streets, and AI traffic flow sensors. The paving system will feature plug-and-play panels and lighting that can be used to direct traffic and repurpose the street during the day. The pavement can be heated to melt the snow. A building raincoat protects the sidewalk from the elements and helps to maintain a comfortable temperature. A personal account will give an individual access to public services and the public sector: “Use your account to tell everyone in the building to quiet down, to get into your gym, or to give the plumber access to your apartment while you’re at work.”3 The plans have met with criticism and opposition. In April 2019, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association filed a lawsuit about the Quayside project. There are worries about mass-capture surveillance, lack of privacy protection, and private companies taking over urban governance and monetizing citizens’ data for their own benefit. A local headline proclaimed that “Google wants to run cities without being elected.”4 2A

real Disney city, quite different from the early EPCOT plans and rather looking like a mid-20th Century white middle class small town is Celebration, also in Florida [19]. Parks and benches are only for residents. 3 https://www.wired.com/story/google-sidewalk-labs-toronto-quayside/. 4 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/24/google-alphabet-sidewalk-labstoronto.

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Technology writer Evgeny Morozov warned of cities becoming too dependent on private companies: “The culmination of the smart city is a privatised city.”5 From Google Home to Google Urban?

5 City Residents as Players and Non-players Videogames have non-player characters (NPCs): characters with no or very limited intelligence whose behavior is controlled by the environment designed by the game designers and the actions of the (role-playing) gamer. In videogames, we have a fully controlled 2D or 3D graphical environment in which we, as gamers, can interact with what we see and hear. When playing a videogame, we have control of our own character. Obviously, the game places restrictions on this control. We have to accept the game’s narrative and our role in the game. The game has virtual sensors and actuators that guide and restrict our behavior. In smart cities, we have real sensors and real actuators that monitor our behavior and act on the urban environment so the environment can provide useful information to the city dweller or visitor. Both city dwellers and visitors can be persuaded or enforced to behave in a particular way. Humans can sense and understand the environment and adapt to or make changes to it. In a smart environment with sensors, actuators, and processors that are all connected, humans are ‘nodes’ or ‘things’ in the Internet of Things. Their activities and behaviors are being sensed by the smart environment and may lead to changes in the smart environment that can be considered as feedback to the user of the smart environment. The user can have smart wearables (smartphone, smartwatch, smart textile, smart glasses) that provide information to the smart environment. In Google’s Jacquard project, touch and gesture interactivity are woven into jackets, allowing them to know their location and even to provide notifications in the event of an incoming call or if one’s phone is left behind. In a smart city’s Urban Operating System (UOS), the citizens are among the ‘things’ in the city’s Internet of Things. A narrative can guide their behavior in an implicit way. Persuasion and enforcement, making use of smart technology, are other ways of guiding these human nodes toward preferred and appropriate behavior. As discussed in the previous sections, Disneyization and McDonaldization of cities and their public spaces will have a unifying effect on the behavior of city dwellers. Privatization will also enforce the rules of appropriate behavior on city dwellers. Marshall McLuhan’s predictions in 1962 about the world becoming a global village might come true, but they should be considered in light of who is controlling the world’s global village. Who will control a smart city and its connections with other cities? In previous work, we discussed how humans become avatars or NPCs in videogame-like smart environments [20]. Videogames have virtual sensors and actuators, and there are playing characters and NPCs. The playing characters are human 5 https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/mar/01/smart-cities-data-privacy-eindhoven-utrecht.

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gamers, who are immersed in the narrative and play by the rules. The game environment only allows the gamer to perform a restricted set of actions. NPCs are virtual characters that are fully controlled by the videogame environment. In other words, the game environment decides how each NPC acts and responds to the gamer’s actions. A comparison between video games and smart environments is now easy to make. Smart cities will have a UOS that controls the real—rather than virtual in the videogames—sensors and actuators that restrict the freedom of movement and activity of the city’s residents. These residents are living nodes in the smart city. Their actions are captured by sensors, whether embedded in the environment or in their wearables (devices, clothes, glasses, implants). Rather than ‘playing the game,’ citizens have to ‘play the city’ in order to perform their daily activities. Smart city technology can persuade smart city residents to perform in a desired appropriate way when using the city. Smart technology can also restrict the possible ways a city resident can behave in a city and make use of its services. Hence, future smart cities will resemble videogame environments, with humans as playing characters, or even as NPCs.

6 Playful Surveillance Art and Activism Gamers, hackers, and artists have criticized smart city developments and introduced playful and ‘subversive’ installations (disruptive artivism) in urban environments. In the past, the focus has often been on the use of security cameras in these subversive games. But, many examples can also be given of games and entertaining activities in public spaces, where sensors and actuators are embedded in the urban environment, and games, entertainment, and so-called subversive activities make use of this embedded smartness, whether it has been provided by the city’s authorities, introduced by a local community, or exploited by an individual researcher or activist. Hackers and media artists have looked at possibilities for hacking and exploring smart city initiatives to express their concerns regarding the developments in smart urban technology. Typically, they address the uneasy feeling of being monitored twenty-four hours per day. The emphasis is on the use of cameras that monitor city residents’ behavior and misbehavior. However, in smart urban environments today, many more types of sensors can be used to monitor and address the users. Sensor networks are distributed across the city, and audiovisual media are embedded in public spaces to display messages. Even so, most attention has been given to the overwhelming use of cameras in urban environments. This will be discussed in the next section. In Sect. 6.2, some examples of art and activism are provided in which other sensors (and their actuators) have been employed.

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6.1 CCTV Art and Activism In previous decades, there have been many mobile and media art projects devoted to surveillance issues.6 In particular, the proliferation of CCTV (closed-circuit television) in the UK inspired activists, game designers, and artists to develop ‘surveillance art’ and games. In Middlesbrough, for example, human-operated talking CCTV cameras were installed to publicly shame offenders in public spaces. Loudspeakers were fitted to town center cameras that were already attached to lampposts. This allowed the camera operators to intervene in the event of disorderly behavior and let the offender know that his or her anti-social behavior had been spotted and recorded. In a report from the British Security Industry Association (BSIA) entitled The Picture Is Not Clear, it was estimated that there were between the 4 and 6 million CCTV cameras in the UK in 2018. Indeed, artists raised counterarguments against mass surveillance at the beginning of this century. For example, for the movie Faceless, Manu Luksch allowed herself to be filmed by CCTVs at different London locations and then requested the recordings through the British Data Protection Act of 1992. The filming authorities were legally required to hand over the material, although the other persons that appeared in the recordings had to have their faces blurred so that they could not be recognized. This required an enormous effort on the part of the authorities. The surveillance recordings with one recognizable individual walking and running in crowds of persons with blurred faces were composed into a narrative, with the artist as the protagonist [21]. More artists took the anti-surveillance challenge. In 2005, Gloria Sed introduced a Counter-Surveillance Headdress. The wearer uses a reflective cloth to cover her face and head. She can also activate a laser on her forehead, which creates a burst of light that masks her face. We can compare this to Adam Harvey’s CV (Computer Vision) Dazzle art project of 2010, in which hair styling and makeup served as protection against automated face detection and recognition systems. More recently, antisurveillance clothing and glasses have been introduced. For example, heat-reflective materials can cloak the wearer’s thermal signature. Glasses have been introduced with frames that include infrared LEDs that emit light that is disruptive to the sensors of cameras. There have also been scientific attempts to fool surveillance systems. Thys et al. [22] demonstrates how the weaknesses of person detection systems can be exploited to fool the systems. Obviously, techniques for deceiving a system and evading detection will be followed by defenses against evading detection, and so on. CCTV Treasure Hunt (2009) is a crowdsourcing and sousveillance game that aims to map the locations of all cameras in the UK’s camera surveillance network. The team receives masks, a map with the meeting location, and the area that has to be explored and then has one hour to photograph as many CCTV cameras as possible7 and upload the pictures to a website. This is an example of sousveillance, the recording of an activity by a participant in the activity. Sousveillance is not always appreciated [23]. Artist James Bridle was photographing security cameras around 6 http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/cat_surveillance.html. 7 https://cctvtreasurehunt.wordpress.com/the-game/.

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a hotel when security guards detained him and turned him over to the police. This experience can be compared with that of a Finnish media art group that took part in a festival in San Jose in 2006. In their performance, they implemented a surveillance network covering the downtown area of San Jose. One of the nodes in their network, a cellphone hidden in a hotel lounge, was confiscated by the police because it was thought to be a bomb detonator. It was confiscated as evidence and could not be returned until the case had gone to court and the group’s innocence was proved. More aggressive urban surveillance games exist as well. In the 2013 game Camover, participants could earn points by trashing security cameras in the German U-Bahn trains. Bonus points were given for original methods of destruction. Videos of Camover activity needed to be posted on a website [24]. To give another example, graffiti writers in Barcelona, Madrid, and elsewhere participate in a game in which they sneak into metro stations and train museums to spray-paint train carriages. An important part of the game is dodging security cameras, police, and security guards [25]. Place-hacking [26] is another example of illegally exploring buildings and city environments that are closed to the general public.

6.2 Playful and Critical Comments on Smart Urban Environment Developments Artists and researchers have designed playful installations for urban environments to warn against overly enthusiastic usage or potential misuse of smart technology. In this section, we provide some examples (for more examples, see Pop et al. [27]). In particular, media artists have expressed their discomfort with certain uses of smart technology in urban environments. Too Smart City (2009) is a project by Joo Youn Paek and David Jimison. They designed a smart bench that dumps a person off when he or she spends too much time on it, a smart trashcan that spits the trash out if the wrong trash is placed in the wrong opening, and a street sign that displays (overly) personalized messages [28]. German artist Bern Hopfengaertner designed Belief Systems (2009), a video scenario in which facial expressions are captured and interpreted to show the possibility to read, evaluate, and alter people’s behavior and emotions.8 The Belgian artist Dries Depoorter designed a Jaywalking installation (2015) that automatically catches jaywalkers in webcam footage and gives users the choice to press a button and send an email with a screenshot of the violation to a local police station (see Fig. 2).9 Interestingly, such artistic projects are now overtaken by reality. Benches are designed in such a way that they are not comfortable, and music and scents have been introduced in environments to repel the homeless. Trashcans have been designed that reward correct behavior. And, as we saw in Fig. 1, in some Chinese cities jaywalkers 8 https://berndhopfengaertner.net/projects/belief-systems/. 9 https://driesdepoorter.be/jaywalking/.

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Fig. 2 Jaywalking installation by Dries Depoorter (MU, Eindhoven, 2018). Photo courtesy of Dries Depoorter, photo by Boudewijn Bollman

are photographed and identified using facial recognition technology and displayed on public screens. In addition, they lose points in the Chinese social credit system. In Paris (France), there have been some playful experiments in which pedestrian crossings make the sound of squealing tires and a crunching collision when a pedestrian crosses when the crossing light is red. This terrifies the offenders, whose pictures are taken and displayed on a billboard as a warning to others. This jaywalking example shows how persuasive design and technology can be used to change behavior. Rather than focusing on punishment, the negative consequences of certain behaviors and alternatives are shown. Smart billboards with embedded sensors can be used to display humorous messages that relate to the events that occur near the billboard. For example, there are billboards in Sweden that can sense an arriving train or recognize (using a scent or smoke sensor) that someone is smoking near the billboard and display a message about the dangers of smoking. Open Urban Television [29] is a project in which an artist-owned network of cameras monitors public spaces and acts as a public communication system. The network focuses on places of protest in Madrid. The camera network can be accessed by any citizen 24/7, and the content can be displayed on media façades in public spaces as well. McNeil [30] provides some general observations on (anti-)surveillance art. Communities can introduce self-developed sensors in their environment to measure air quality or street noise. This real-time tracking information can be visualized in a humorous and playful way on street information displays, generating publicity and drawing the attention of drivers [31]. Tripwire is a project by Tad Hirsch. He hid noise sensors in coconuts hanging in trees near San Jose International Airport (Fig. 3). When the audio pollution produced by planes increased above a certain threshold, an automatic call to the airport’s noise complaint line was triggered [32],

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Fig. 3 Coconut hanging in a tree. Noise sensor in coconut. Picture courtesy of Tad Hirsch

and a pre-recorded complaint was played. The project can be considered as an example of friendly and humorous mischief using sensors and actuators. Many more possibilities for humorous digital mischief can be found in [20].

7 Conclusions The aim of this chapter was to provide a critical look at the future of playfulness and playability in urban environments. Can we really expect playability to be an issue that will receive the attention of city planners in the future? Can we use digital technology to help make cities more playable? Many chapters in this book have expressed that view, while at the same time making it clear, as we did in this chapter, that it is not a matter of course. We should mention that many initiatives for making cities more playable and child-friendly do not rely on the use of digital technology. Rather, there are pleas for traffic-calming measures, more facilities for cyclists and pedestrians, more playgrounds and more adventure parks. Sometimes arguments take the form of activities. An example is Park(ing) Day. It is a community-initiated project that has become a worldwide annual event. It is an example where a local movement can spread replications across the world using the Internet and social media. Although originally seen as a subversive act, in various cities around the world Park(ing) Day has become a yearly fun event where a city’s local communities take over the metered parking spaces in their neighborhood. This activity can be considered as a peaceful and temporary hacking of urban space. The parking meters are paid, but instead of using the spaces as parking places, they are for one day transformed into tiny city parks.

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On a more global level, we can mention the Slow City movement [33, 34], which received attention in the first decade of this century. It can be seen as opposing corporate-centered urban development. In the Slow City movement, the focus is on livability and quality of life. It resists the homogenization and globalization of towns around the globe and promotes cultural diversity and the uniqueness of individual cities. Other aims include protecting the environment and reducing noise, electromagnetic, and light pollution are other aims. The movement is an outgrowth of the Slow Food movement, a movement that started after a McDonald’s was opened at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome in 1986 and that was immediately followed by the establishment of a ‘Save Rome’ committee. In the past, there have been views emphasizing the role of a city and its public spaces for social interaction and, as mentioned by Lefebvre [35] in his book Le Droit à la Ville for “building collected life.” These viewpoints were meant to reclaim the city and allow city residents to participate in decision-making about their city’s development. City residents have the right to decide about the use of urban space. Obviously, such a view opposes property rights of urban space. It assumes citizen’s access to urban resources, such as public spaces and street furniture. However, according to Mark [36], nowadays we have to deal with technology that is not visible anymore: “The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.” In [37] this is further elaborated as being a physical and a mental disappearance. Indeed, the disappearing technology in urban environments, as predicted and made possible by computer scientists, and promoted by civic authorities and private corporations, will be hard or impossible for city communities and individuals to access. There is no single use any more of public or private-public spaces and urban furniture, and not every use can be easily recognized. Maybe we should also mention the impact that the fear of terrorism can have on the playability of the city. Spontaneous, unexpected, and unusual behavior in public or private-public spaces can be understood as threatening. Unattended usual and unusual objects that have a role in a play can play a role run the risk to be reported, taken away or destroyed. Filming, photographing, recording, and unusual use of smartphones can be considered suspicious. Due to a number of terrorist attacks on pedestrians, cyclists, and buildings, barriers have been installed in buildings and in public spaces in many cities [38]. This does not always look inviting (see Fig. 4). Under such circumstances, we can expect people to do self-policing. On the other hand, due to the feeling of increased security, it may also increase a relaxed feeling that invites playful behavior. The Playable City movement does not confine itself to the views on playable cities as expressed in Bristol’s playable cities projects. Rather, it accepts all the possible views of urban designers, media designers, artists, researchers, pedagogues, architects, gonzo urbanists, provocateurs, hackers, makers, and artists on playful urban projects. Instead of using lampposts for gunshot detection, lampposts and other street furniture are used for unsupervised children’s play and enabling independent travel for children from home to school. The intention is to should make it possible to

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Fig. 4 Various forms of stylized bollards on Wall St. Photograph ©Alice Sweitzer

enjoy public spaces and public transport without feeling obliged to dance and smile in order to get a green pedestrian light for crossing the street. There are many initiatives to make cities more playable. This chapter and book are meant to stimulate such initiatives, rather than accepting the pessimistic idea that smart city initiatives will necessarily fail to address the ways we want to enjoy smart urban environments; we want our children to play and enjoy future smart urban environments. For that reason, it is useful to point out, as has been done in this chapter, the potentially negative consequences of smart city developments.

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