Empowering Games. Meaning Making by Designing and Playing Location Based Mobile Games.

The article analyses and discusses the use of Location Based Mobile Games to raise awareness on sensitive issues connected to illness and disability. We report on a study grounded on higher education didactic experiences. By means of a multi-methodological approach we analysed the experience of designing and playing games and their fallouts in terms of learning and awareness about the topics addressed. The study is conducted from a design perspective and aims to understand whether designing and playing LBMGs can sensitise designers and players on sensitive topic

ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

Taking students outside the classrooms. Location-based mobile games in education

[EN] The contribution aims at corroborating location-based mobile games as models for the integration of digital technologies in the educational field. They demonstrated to be valid alternatives to formal education in the applied research project: Play Design!, which addressed to high school students, interested in design-related matters, and intends to valorise the Italian design culture, transforming Milan into the stage of a double-sided story. Design is here highlighted both as a cultural heritage and a discipline, inducing the development of two different games sharing a common didactic aim: D.Hunt and D.Learn. The first one is a mobile treasure hunt illustrating the excellences of the creative production of the country, and the renowned protagonists and places of Italy- and Milan-based design: a cultural background to be preserved and valorised. The second one, instead, is a role-play, cooperative and competitive game which depicts the city as a hub for schools and universities, where design is considered a subject for didactic courses, a combination of theories and practices to be transmitted and implemented. Then, the two mobile, location-based serious games exploit this copious and multifaceted material for evident learning purposes, joining the examples of informal education to increasingly follow in future technology developments.Ceconello, M.; Spallazzo, D.; Scianname', M. (2019). Taking students outside the classrooms. Location-based mobile games in education. En HEAD'19. 5th International Conference on Higher Education Advances. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 883-890. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD19.2019.9257OCS88389

Tangible interaction in museums and temporary exhibitions: embedding and embodying the intangible values of cultural heritage

[EN] Moving from a design perspective, the paper explores the potential of tangible interaction in giving shape to intangible contents in museums and temporary exhibitions. Going beyond tangibility intended in the strict sense of touching assets we use here a wider interpretation of tangibility that considers touch in the sense of embodied experience. In this way we consider as tangible all those experiences that foster a strong involvement of the body when interacting with digital content. This includes objects-based and gesturesbased interactions. Tangible interaction is interpreted as a practice able to multiply the levels of the narrative, to make the visit experience memorable and to give materiality to intangible values. This approach uses tangible interaction as a way to let the audience experience practices and rituals linked to the contents and representative of the intangible values embedded in the assets. The potential of tangible interaction to foster the intangible values of cultural heritage is discussed starting from a provisional classification of tangible interaction case studies. In particular four different categories are identified that are: smart replicas/originals, symbolic objects, codified gestures and performing gestures. In conclusion, two possible design strategies that employ tangible interaction for enabling the experience of intangible values of cultural heritage are highlighted. These are: Embedding meaning: it consists in creating sensorised objects that embed in themselves meanings related to intangible values of cultural heritage, and that communicate explicitly this meaning in their physicality; Embodying meaning: it consists in integrating a meaning related to intangible values in gestures, so that intangible values are communicated implicitly in the action performed by the visitor.Duranti, D.; Spallazzo, D.; Trocchianesi, R. (2016). Tangible interaction in museums and temporary exhibitions: embedding and embodying the intangible values of cultural heritage. En Systems&design:beyond processes and thinking. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 160-171. https://doi.org/10.4995/IFDP.2015.3322OCS16017

Digital for Heritage and Museums: Design-Driven Changes and Challenges

In the recent decade, cultural institutions have increasingly embraced digital technologies as key resources for accomplishing their mission and innovating their cultural activities. In the present work, we attempt to disentangle through a design-driven and multidisciplinary approach the challenges brought by digital transformation in the cultural heritage sector. A diversified research team has thus been involved to include scholars with different backgrounds around the common phenomenon of investigation of Digital (Cultural) Heritage, under the Design Think Thank project. The Introduction is followed by a Methodological section, which outlines the approach to select and review case studies from the exploratory literature for producing a state-of-the-art report and delineates the methodology to map the main user behaviours and needs in the digital experience of CH throughout the value chain. The research team identified three relevant and major themes for the investigation which are addressed in the Literature Review Section through the lenses of design research and practices; simultaneously, design knowledge emerges to have an agency in the transformation. The following section tries to triangulate the results from the literature review, and the mapping of users and stakeholders throughout the cultural institutions value chain, to track and highlight their role and interest in changing heritage panorama. The contribution of the present work wishes to consolidate the results gathered in the first phases of the TT, providing the design community of academics and practitioners with a theoretical contribution about digital changes and challenges of heritage and museums based on a design perspective