System Cities: Building a ‘Quantitative Utopia’

There is a connection between theoretical schemes such as Archizoom's No‐Stop City and the virtual and augmented worlds of today. Guest‐Editor Luke Caspar Pearson, Director of the Undergraduate Architecture Programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, explores video‐game spaces and his own architectural gaming environments, demonstrating their resonance with avant‐garde concepts

Age and experience: ludic engagement in a residential care setting

The “older old” (people over eighty) are a largely invisible group for those not directly involved in their lives; this project explores the ways that technology might strengthen links between different generations. This paper describes findings from a two-year study of a residential care home and develops the notion of cross-generational engagement through ludic systems which encourage curiosity and playfulness. It outlines innovative ways of engaging the older old through “digital curios” such as Bloom, the Tenori On and Google Earth. The use of these curios was supplemented with portraiture by three local artists, nine school children and the field researcher. The paper describes four technological interventions: “video window”, “projected portraiture”, “blank canvas”, and “soundscape radio”. These interventions attempt to reposition “off the shelf” technologies to provide a space for cross-generational engagement The notion of interpassivity (the obverse of interaction) is explored in relation to each intervention

Playing to Learn

This creative project explores some major issues about visual communication in digital games. The project will continue to address new questions and invite questions from my visual and communication design colleagues. My hope is that, through this document, designers will see digital games like photography was seen around the turn of the century, and movies in the 1950\u27s and 60\u27s. In other words, as a rich new medium that offers creative people a virtually unexplored environment in which to work and create.&#0

Designing Familiar Open Surfaces

While participatory design makes end-users part of the design process, we might also want the resulting system to be open for interpretation, appropriation and change over time to reflect its usage. But how can we design for appropriation? We need to strike a good balance between making the user an active co-constructor of system functionality versus making a too strong, interpretative design that does it all for the user thereby inhibiting their own creative use of the system. Through revisiting five systems in which appropriation has happened both within and outside the intended use, we are going to show how it can be possible to design with open surfaces. These open surfaces have to be such that users can fill them with their own interpretation and content, they should be familiar to the user, resonating with their real world practice and understanding, thereby shaping its use

Playful Capitalism, or Play as an Instrument of Capital

This article applies Gray and Suri’s concept of Ghost Work and Ekbia and Nardi’s concept of Heteromation to the analysis of Quick, Draw!, a game-like product developed by Google. The article argues that digital capitalism uses play as an instrument to make exploitative labor practices feel more engaging, while camouflaging their being work