Pervasive Gaming: Testing Future Context Aware Applications

More and more technical research projects take place that weave together elements of real and virtual life to provide a new experience defined as pervasive. They bank on the development of mobile services to drive the expansion of pervasive applications and in particular pervasive games. Using geolocalisation, local networks and short range radio frequencies technologies like RFID or other tagging technologies, pervasive games rely on a close relationship to the environment and thus explore the space between fiction and reality. This is their main quality but possibly their main weakness as the development relies on the production of specific contents in relation to the context of use. In this article, we propose to explore what this entirely new paradigm for game design implies in terms of production and how to overcome the limitations due to this dependency of contents and context. Based on our experience of three pervasive games developed within research projects on adhoc wifi (ANR-Safari and ANRTranshumance) and RFID networks (ANR-PLUG), this paper presents different options to reducing the cost of content production relying on either traditional editors or grass root contributions.pervasive games, content production, game design, geolocalised technologies.

From ANT to Material agency: a design and science research workshop

International audienceThis paper studies a design workshop that investigates complex collaboration between fundamental physics and design. Our research focuses on how students create original artefacts that bridge the gap between disciplines that have very little in common. Our goal is to study the micro-evolutions of their projects. Elaborating first on Actor Network Theory (Latour, 1996; 2005) we study how students' projects evolved over time and through a diversity of inputs and media. Throughout this longitudinal study, we use then a semiotic and pragmatic approach to observe three "aesthetical formations": translation, composition, and stabilization. These formations suggest that the question of material agency developed in the field of archeology and cognitive science (Knappett & Malafouris, 2008) need to be considered in the design field (Renon, 2016) to explain metamorphoses from the brief to the final realizations

A method story about brainstorming with visually impaired people for designing an accessible route calculation system

In this paper we describe a brainstorming session with visually impaired users, a sighted locomotion trainer, as well as sighted and blind researchers. This brainstorming session was part of a larger project on designing accessible guidance systems for visually impaired people. In this session we specifically addressed the design of an accessible route calculation tool. In a method story, we describe how this session took place and report our insights from this experience on adapting brainstorming to a non-visual world

Invention technique et " objet intégratif "

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Design and Creative Mediation in ICT Research Projects

Dans les projets de recherche, ingénieurs et designers partagent la volonté de créer des objets qui non seulement fonctionnent mais ont du sens pour ceux qui les utilisent. Cette interrogation sur le sens s'incarne, entre autres, dans des récits et des mises en scène qui permettent de définir la technologie émergente, de lui donner ses limites et d'en qualifier les potentiels dans une mise en cohérence narrative où les exigences de figuration contribuent directement à l'invention. Nous avons choisi d'observer ce travail de « médiation créative » en relevant, derrière les expressions communes, une diversité formelle qui engage l'objet technique dans des voies spécifiques

The In-discipline of Design. Bridging the Gap between Engineering and the Humanities

International audienceDesign is a conceptive activity which is usually presented as a sensible, sequential process and action. This book claims that design cannot be reduced to the rational, effective planning and organization that most models (such as design thinking) present. The author suggests another type of rationality which is based on what the humanities call aesthetics, writing, composition, and style: a rationality based in imaginary elaboration and coherence. The chapters, therefore, demonstrate that design practice is about creating not only functional tools, but planes of reflections that challenge norms. To support this claim, this book analyzes research programs, art works, and design projects that produced new information and communication technologies (ICT). This is detailed using examples in each chapter. From these examples, two types of conclusions are derived: a first level considers the lessons that we can draw from these examples in terms of design practice while the second level starts a theoretical discussion based on these analyses of use cases. The goal is to develop an understanding of conception in its different forms. This book brings the use of these neglected methods to the foreground as a way to explicate the design process. Taking into consideration the humanities within design contributes to the discussion on pluridisciplinarity. The book posits that design as a historical and situated activity is a truly multidisciplinary endeavor that bridges the gap between engineering sciences and the humanities