I will be traveling to Barcelona on December 4th to present to the International Congress on Design Research as part of the conference’s 2024 Design and Gaming Experience track. The presentation, titled Locally Made, Locally Played: Co-Designing Local Games and Storytelling Experiences with Libraries, co-authored by Benjamin Stokes, Eric Schoenborn (me), Hazel Arroyo, Meagan Couture, will open a discussion about the Playful City Lab’s design research with 59 local libraries across the United States over the past several years (see our Project EBOW: Engaging Beyond Our Walls). You can read our entire extended abstract at the bottom of this post.
The theme of the conference, Expanding the Margins, is a natural fit for the research we conducted through EBOW at the Playful City Lab and the American University Game Center. Our research investigates deliberately “low tech” paradigms for unexpected game designers to be able to make neighborhood stories without coding skills or prior design training. It’s important we help close the gap between the capabilities of the game design industry and first-time adult designers; residents are typically the best-situated people to create their own neighborhood games and interactive stories tied to local history, group identity and civic change. See our recipe book for some of the scaffolds we are providing the community to create their own neighborhood games.
I’m eager to share our findings with some of the most innovative design researchers from across the globe and learn more about the work of this wonderful group that conference organizers at Open University of Catalunya (UOC) are convening in Barcelona. UOC describes the purpose of this conference as one “to delve deeper into the richness and diversity of approaches to design research, as well as its potential to meet the challenges of today’s society.” Our mission to connect neighborhoods through play at the Playful City Lab is something we care deeply about and it’s important that we connect with researchers who see the importance in expanding the margins. UOC clearly does. #LocallyPlayed#LocallyMade
Our entire submission to the International Conference on Design Research below:
Locally Made, Locally Played: Co-Designing Local Games and Storytelling Experiences with Libraries
Co-Authors: Benjamin Stokes, Eric Schoenborn, Hazel Arroyo, Meagan Couture
This presentation investigates a model for design in the peripheries as public libraries transition to go “beyond their walls,” and become increasingly central to the future of public space and civic engagement. Specifically, we are reporting on “Engaging Beyond Our Walls”, a three-year project to train libraries in 59 American towns and cities to create their own neighborhood games and interactive stories tied to local history, group identity and civic change. Our design research seeks to understand how we can democratize storytelling for pervasive media – which is otherwise dominated by large platforms like Pokemon GO, Yelp, and artists with special technical skill. Specifically, we are investigating deliberately “low tech” paradigms for neighbors to be able to make interactive stories without computer science or design skills. Our approach is rooted in the tradition and scholarship of participatory design with communities (Le Dantec and DiSalvo, 2013), at a critical moment as games and play are transforming the role for libraries as third places (Wyatt and Leorke, 2024).
This study investigates an authoring platform, Hive Mechanic, which can be used by libraries to author games and interactive stories that utilize everything from mobile texting, multimedia messaging and branching phone calls to more advanced services including APIs for neighborhood civic data, pollution monitors, AI services like ChatGPT, multiplayer coordination, and physical sensors tied to the Internet of Things. Of course, technology is often the “easy” part. We find that the primary challenge for libraries is setting up the design process to broaden their vision beyond using established interaction models (e.g. scavenger hunts) and writing neutral information in a linear fashion to genuinely engaging storytelling for physical space (e.g., texting a sculpture that has personality and does “oracle readings”). The tension often comes from libraries wanting to use games as a platform for educating audiences and creating experiences that lack the fun, whimsy, and narrative that a game audience expects.
This study investigates the transition to hybrid online training by contrasting different iterations of our project: (1) local partners in person with some video chat and coaching; (2) a purely asynchronous model of video lessons and one-on-one coaching for a national cohort. Through this contrast, we are able to identify persistent challenges to sharing power with library stakeholders while controlling for the distractions of remote training interfaces. To illustrate our findings, this presentation contrasts two extremes: (1) co-designing a textable installation about local Black Feminism with one of the nation’s leading public libraries in Washington, DC, and (2) developing a playful narrative experience to text with the sculptural birds who stand sentinel in garden outside the Milton Public Library in Milton, Wisconsin. The two have entirely different scales of facilities, budgets, and expertise at the beginning of our engagement, but through different iterations of the project arrived at two similarly successful rich interactive mobile storytelling experiences. Experiences that go far beyond established models and institutional educational games to meet their audiences with unique ludic stories that their communities would expect from games.