Designing humor for playable cities

Smartness, made possible by intelligent sensors and actuators, is invading our home, office and public environments. This smartness monitors, anticipates and supports our activities, increasing efficiency of our activities. Smartness is usually associated with efficiency, but it also allows environments, virtual humans and social robots to display emotions, empathy and provide environments to introduce and support humorous events. We review examples of playful and humorous street furniture in ‘playable’ cities and projects that allow residents and visitors to interact with objects and environments in playful and humorous ways. We add observations on humor theory, in particular observations that deal with physical, visual and multimodal humor. Our emphasis is on introducing incongruities and on exploring different forms of incongruities in order to introduce humorous situations. Inventories of incongruities are explored. These inventories have been obtained from observing humor in everyday situations, in comedies, in movies, and in TV commercials. Shortcomings of these inventories from the point of view of multimodal and interaction humor are discussed and some preliminary views on additional approaches are provided

More playful user interfaces: an introduction

In this chapter we embed recent research advances in creating playful user interfaces in a historical context. We have observations on spending leisure time, in particular predictions from previous decades and views expressed in Science Fiction novels. We confront these views and predictions with what has really happened since the advent of computers, the Internet, Worldwide Web and sensors and actuators that are increasingly becoming integrated in our environments and in devices that are with us 24/7. And, not only with us, but also connected to networks of nodes that represent people, institutions, and companies. Playful user interfaces are not only interesting for entertainment applications. Educational or behavior change supporting systems can also profit from a playful approach. The chapter concludes with a meta-level review of the chapters in this book. In this review we distinguish three views on research and application domains for playful user interfaces: (1) Designing Interactions for and by Children, (2) Designing Interactions with Nature, Animals, and Things, and (3) Designing Interactions for Arts, Performances, and Sports

Designing for a playful future:a review of how humorous play within the urban realm can make adult play a part of everyday life

Abstract. Everybody plays. It is a behaviour that is common to all people and indeed most species. A person’s inclination to play is dependant, not only on his mental and emotional state, but also on his surroundings. Despite our physiological separation from the rest of the evolving natural kingdom, our brains have scarcely evolved further than those of our hunter-gatherer forefathers. So often the playful side of adults is forgotten, un-nurtured and neglected, much to the detriment of public physical and mental health. In this ever-changing and fast-paced human society, we are constantly trying to avoid or subdue our primal instincts because we believe we are somehow different... “We are not animals”. We make our primal desire to be free and rampant something to be ashamed of, afraid of and even embarrassed by. This thesis discusses the importance of play with regard to mental health and how urban environments can be and become conducive to play in adults. It poses some ideas about how designers can provide opportunities for both active and fantasy play in transitional urban spaces that we use on a regular basis. The thesis addresses the issue of ‘what is play?’ by establishing a working definition of play in terms of an individual adult player and their surroundings. This definition then serves as the basis for evaluating how contemporary urban design uses a wide array of techniques and strategies to incorporate adult play within everyday life through literature review and case studies. Moreover, it tackles the concept of humour and identifies the benefits to encouraging communication of the self through humour and freedom of expression within the urban realm. These observations provide the basic structure for developing some design parameters which an architect or urban designer might utilise in designing spaces and environments that facilitate play and designing humour for playable cities in order to attain the ‘playful’ city

Playing Games with Tito:Designing Hybrid Museum Experiences for Critical Play

This article brings together two distinct, but related perspectives on playful museum experiences: Critical play and hybrid design. The article explores the challenges involved in combining these two perspectives, through the design of two hybrid museum experiences that aimed to facilitate critical play with/in the collections of the Museum of Yugoslavia and the highly contested heritage they represent. Based on reflections from the design process as well as feedback from test users, we describe a series of challenges: Challenging the norms of visitor behaviour, challenging the role of the artefact, and challenging the curatorial authority. In conclusion, we outline some possible design strategies to address these challenges