From Smart Cities To Playable Cities. Towards Playful Intelligence In The Urban Environment

In the last decade, we have seen the rise of urban play as a tool for community building, and city-making and Western society is actively focusing on play/playfulness and intelligent systems as a way to approach complex challenges and emergent situations. In this paper, we aim to initiate a dialogue between game scholars and architects. Like many creative professions, we believe that the architectural practice may benefit significantly from having more design methodologies at hand, thus improving lateral thinking. We aim at providing new conceptual and operative tools to discuss and reflect on how games and smart systems facilitate long-term the shift from the Smart Cities to the Playable one, where citizens/players have the opportunity to hack the city and use the smart city’s data and digital technology for their purposes to reactivate the urban environment

Scaffolding in Indoor and Outdoor Mobility a Wearable and Mobile Application for Senior Tourism in a Playable City

The growth of urban population and the challenges of an ageing society have brought to the fore the need of innovative ways to re-invent sustainable healthy ageing lifestyles and meet the growing demand on transport and residents’ assistance with ageing-in-place. Fatalities involving older adult pedestrians is a major problem in EU urban areas, given the general lack of information about traffic and road conditions. Indoor and Outdoor Mobility are also likely to affect Senior Tourism and older adults’ travel patterns. This paper proposes a digital application designed for wearables and mobile devices that engages the users in a set of missions and routes that are customized to their context and mobility condition, based on a multi-peer review system.This work was supported by FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia) and ESF under Community Support Framework III – the project SEDUCE 2.0 nr. POCI-01-0145-FEDER- 031696.publishe

From Word Play to World Play: Introducing Humor in Human-Computer Interaction

Humor is important in our life, whether it is at home, at work, or in public spaces. Smart technology is increasingly becoming part of our daily life. Can smart technology, sensors and actuators, not only be used to introduce smartness in our environments, but also to introduce amusement? So far understanding of humor has escaped algorithmic approaches. Nevertheless, humor research knowledge is available and is increasing. First philosophers, then psychologists, then linguists and AI researchers made humor topic of their research. The aim of this paper is to introduce humor research to the human-computer interaction community. In particular we look at how our digitally enhanced physical worlds, or smart environments, can facilitate humor creation

Keynote Talk 4:Virtual and Augmented Reality Animals in Smart and Playful Cities

Our future urban environments are smart. Sensors and actuators are embedded in these environments and their inhabitants. We have an Internet of Things, where the ‘Things’ include objects, cars, tools, buildings, street furniture, and w hatever can be equipped with sensors and actuators, including human and non non-human animals. Augmented humans and augmented animals have their senses extended with digital technology. Their smart wearables connected with the smart environment make humans and animals smarter. Rather than on living animals, in this survey paper we focus on non non-living virtual and augmented reality non non-human animals that will inhabit our smart and playable urban environments. They will co co-exist with robotic animals and (digitally augmented) humans and nonhuman animals. We include observations on augmented humans interacting with virtual and augmented reality animals. The paper is meant to raise awareness for the possibilities of augmented reality to introduce virtual animals for s ocial, entertainment, and educational reasons

Incongruity humor in language and beyond: from Bergson to digitally enhanced worlds

Humour research is often about verbal humour. Language allows us to play with words and with its syntactic, semantic and pragmatic aspects. It provides us with building blocks that can be composed in unusual ways, introducing ambiguities, confusion, inappropriate language use, and incongruities. This allows the design of humour, whether it is word play, verbal jokes, or humorous remarks triggered by conversational interaction. Design and analysis of verbal humor has become part of computational humor studies.\ud \ud Language is not the only tool that can be used to design and construct humor. In our daily life we often encounter situations that make us laugh and that we consider to be humorous. We may even help to provide conditions that lead or hopefully lead to humorous situations. Being able to control a physical environment and the way its inhabitants can interact with the environment has now become possible due to advances in sensor and actuator technology. Increasingly we see sensors embedded in our environments that monitor and interpret our behaviour. They include cameras and microphones, position, proximity, and wearable physiological sensors, they gather knowledge about our activities, interpret them in real-time, and anticipate future activities and behavior. Based on such perceptions and interpretations actuators make changes to the environment, its appearance and its interaction and display facilities, including augmented and virtual reality display and interaction possibilities.\ud \ud Until now, computational humor research has been concerned with modelling verbal humor. But many observations on more general forms of humour can have a computational implementation as well. Or, at least, humour creation by human inhabitants of such environments can be facilitated by humor intelligence embedded in these environments. In particular this intelligence knows about incongruity humor theories. This knowledge allows the environment to introduce incongruities and it allows inhabitants of the environment to use such incongruities to create and exploit humorous situations while interacting with the environment and other inhabitants. Unlike the single-modal incongruities that can appear in language, in the physical world we can have cross-modal incongruities, where our senses reach a conclusion, based on partly incomplete and partly conflicting information, that later has to be revised based on newly received information. We have been tricked. Or, in the words of Douglas Hofstadter: “Pulling the wool over the human perceptual system.”. Various categories of incongruities have been introduced. Attention need to be given to incongruities that follow from the introduction of new technology as has been visualized in Chaplin’s Modern Times or Tati’s Mon Oncle and PlayTime. A more recent view has been taken by Stone, who identified our social media and internet behavior as an attempt to be a ‘life node’ in our networks, displaying scanning behavior and doing multitasking, and therefore always being in a state of ‘continuous partial attention’, leading to mental mismatches and unintended juxtapositions of events, leading to incongruous and humorous situations

Hybrid Ludic Engagement: A Manifesto

A manifesto is partial, not balanced. A manifesto is normative, not analytic. A manifesto movesin declarations, not arguments. A manifesto wants to affect change here and now, not describeeternal truths. A manifesto is as much a formal performance of its own program as a descriptionthereof. A manifesto, in short, is a rhetorical intervention that expresses an aesthetic/politicalvision through form and content in order to shape the present. (Caws 2001