Hi everyone! My name is Ferran and I’m here to present our exploration on the playful future of smart cities.
Our paper looks into the playful things people already do in the urban space, and speculates as to how technology could respond to that playful potential.
In particular, our research looked at how to enable new and increasingly playful urban technology configurations from the bottom-up,
in ways that they respond to the kinds of playful and social things that make people thrive in public spaces.
We asked ourselves: What kinds of playful things to people already do in their cities? And how can we design technology that doesn’t disrupt, but actually supports, that kind of playful activity?
Before I get to the real meat of our study, let me give you a little bit of background.
Smart city innovation has a tendency to gravitate towards utilitarian agendas.
But that approach has been long been criticized for being too techno-centric and utilitarian.
The thing is, making our cities more efficient is a respectable aim, but we will possibly agree that it shouldn’t be the only goal of smart city innovation.
Because cities are far more than economic hubs.
I mean, in the city, we don’t only work and consume.
We also play,
we hang out and pass time,
we express ourselves creatively,
we connect with others…
So we shouldn’t think of cities as tools to help us to get things done.
We should think of them as spaces to live and thrive.
And in our project, we’re very interested in exploring how smart city innovation can do that.
We look at play and playfulness as a lens through which we can propose urban technologies that are more socio-emotionally interesting.
And what’s cool is that there is a very exciting body of works that has explored that intersection of play, technology, and the urban space. For example...
location-based games,
gamified urban apps and systems,
civic games and experiences of playful citizenship,
or playful urban installations, among others.
Like all of those works, our research explores how to reconfigure our cities in increasingly playful directions,
What we add to existing works in this space are a series of bottom-up and design-oriented insights on the kinds of playful things people like to do in their streets.
A series of design qualities and directions that emerged from our inquiry into people’s playful behaviors in public settings.
Our study began with contextual research.
We explored ways in which people already behave playfully in the urban space.
And we did that in two ways:
First, we explored social media to look at what playful things people posted related to public spaces.
Second, we conducted a multi-stakeholder workshop where we invited people to share playful urban traditions and street games.
We analyzed those games and traditions to identify qualities that could serve as starting points for design.
The combination of those two activities allowed us to surface a number of playful things people already do in the urban space, naturally, because they like to.
That is what we call play potentials: existing manifestations of playful engagement that are inherently situated and contextually meaningful.
We argue that those play potentials, because they emanate directly from people’s contextual practices, are highly meaningful to them.
So our contextual research resulted in a list of 15 play potentials of urban spaces.
And I’m not going to cover all of them in detail, because you can check them out in the paper,
but for example, one of the items on the list talks about the lovely experience of filling the gaps.
We noticed that many people enjoyed the experience fantasizing about things they knew little about.
For example, a mysterious corner of a street, a funny building, or a stranger passerby.
And we thought that that might help designers to inspire their work.
For example to design interactive urban installations that allow people to learn about and imagine what happened in the past in a particular location.
Our next step was ideation.
We wanted to bring those play potentials down to earth and illustrate how technology could support them.
To do that, we produced a catalog of 13 speculative playful urban technology ideas,
all of them inspired by the play potentials we found in our contextual research.
The catalog features 7 possible design directions for innovative playful urban technology, as well as a number of design concepts that illustrate those design directions.
I won’t describe all of the ideas in this video, because we don’t have all the time in the world, and you can check them out in detail in the paper,
but I’ll show one of them as an example, so you get a sense of what they look like.
One of the design directions I find most exciting is “Shared canvases for collective grandeur”.
It refers to interactive installations that reflect the socio-emotional state of a city and allow citizens to be part of an emergent multimedia spectacle.
That is, it is an umbrella concept for technologies that allow people to collaborate on an emotional level in order to produce some kind of creative, multi-sensorially rich artistic composition.
An example of an idea that instantiates this design direction is “The fountain of whispers”.
Once a day, through a phone app, people can record a voice memo about their mood, or about something that happened to them, and then send it to the fountain.
The fountain will use those data to dynamically react to the citizens’ emotions:
it will reflect the city’s mood by changing the water flow dynamics, by raising or lowering the temperature, by modifying the color of the lights, or by using ambient sounds.
As said, this is just one example of one of the 7 design directions in the catalog.
If you’d like to see them all, please read the paper.
And this brings me to the last phase of our study:
a multi-stakeholder intervention where we shared our catalog with a diverse range of people to see how they reacted to our speculative ideas.
First, we shared the catalog on social media and invited people to have a look and video-chat with us about it.
In those conversations, we invited people to comment on the catalog and to talk to us about their thoughts on adding playful technology to the urban space.
Second, we organised an online co-design workshop with people with expertise relevant to play and urban innovation.
At the workshop, we invited participants to comment on the catalog and to envision alternative ideas of how technology might help people to reclaim the playful character of the urban space.
A thematic analysis of the findings from those two interventions revealed a series of things to consider when designing smart city infrastructure that’s experientially rich.
Because I don’t have a lot of time in this video, I will not cover all of those findings in detail,
but I invite you to read the paper if you are interested.
But let me give you an example that I think is pretty relevant.
One of our findings was that people seemed to appreciate technologies that afforded appropriation, collective creativity, and expression.
They seemed to see a lot of value in those ideas that allowed people to have some creative input into their city, as a way of forming bonds with one another.
The interesting thing is that participants noted that, with the rise of the modern city structure, people may have lost opportunities for modulating their environment to suit their experiential needs.
So they thought that customizable urban technology, if implemented, could help to reverse this trend.
Again, this is just one among the several insights we got from our multi-stakeholder conversations.
I encourage to read the paper to check the other ones out.
So overall, what you can expect from our paper is a three-fold contribution:
First, we provide a list of play potentials of urban spaces.
That is, we present a list of playful things that people seem to enjoy doing in the public space, and that as such could inspire novel, playful, and experientially rich smart city innovations.
Second, we provide a catalog of speculative design ideas that instantiate the play potentials on our list.
We make those play potentials tangible and graspable by showing different ways in which technology could respond to them.
And finally, we share the learnings from discussing our catalog and speculative ideas with people from diverse socio-cultural, geographic, and professional backgrounds.
The insights from those conversations allow us to provide actionable advice for developing playful urban technologies that are sensitive to people’s social, emotional, and cultural needs.
And that’s all from me!
If you have any questions, please reach out. I’ll be super happy to try to answer all of your questions.
Thanks for listening!