PLAYABLE CITIES: THE CITY AS A DIGITAL PLAYGROUND

This workshop will be held as part of the 7th EAI International Conference: ArtsIT 2018, Interactivity & Game Creation, October 24-26, 2018, Braga, Portugal

WORKSHOP PROGRAM

09.30 Registration, Coffee, acquaintance
10.30 Opening and Introduction. Anton Nijholt
11.00 Towards a smart city Braga. Fernando Rui Gomes Martins. Transportes Urbanos de Braga (TUB) & Universidade do Minho
11.30 Citizen Science and Game with a Purpose to Foster Biodiversity Awareness and Bioacoustic Data Validation. Pedro Loureiro, Catia Prandi, Nuno Nunes, Valentina Nisi. Tecnico – University of Lisbon; M-ITI/LARSyS; University of Bologna; Universidade da Madeira
12.00 Discussion
12.15 Lunch
13.30 To design with strings for playability in cities. Annika Olofsdotter Bergström. Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden
14.00 A storytelling smart-city approach to further cross-regional tourism. Nicolas Fischöder, Ido A. Iurgel, Tonguc I. Sezen, Koen van Turnhout.Rhine-Waal University, Germany; HAN University of Applied Sciences, Arnhem
14.30 Re-interpreting cities with play. Urban semiotics and gamification. Mattia Thibault. Tampere University of Technology
15.00 Break
15.15 Saving Face. Playful design for social engagement, in public smart city spaces. Karen Lancel, Hermen Maat, Frances Brazier. Delft University of Technology; Artists duo Lancel/Maat, Amsterdam
15.45 Exploring Requirements for Joint Information Sharing in Neighbourhoods: Local Playgrounds in The Hague. Geertje Slingerland, Stephan Lukosch, Tina Comes, Frances Brazier. Delft University of Technology
16.15 Fostering Social Interaction in Playful Cities. Xavier Fonseca, Stephan Lukosch, and Frances Brazier. Delft University of Technology
16.45 Closing
17.30 Buses leave for sightseeing in Ponte de Lima and the welcome reception at Paço do Vitorino, Ponte de Lima

BACKGROUND

After the success of the first (Utrecht, 2016), the second (Funchal, Madeira, Portugal) we now organize the third one-day workshop on Playable Cities in the beautiful town of Braga.

PLAYFULNESS AND THE (PLAYABLE) CITY

The Playable City is a new term, introduced a number of years ago in Bristol, UK and imagined as a counterpoint to ‘A Smart City’. From the Playable City website (https://www.playablecity.com/background/): “A Playable City is a city where people, hospitality and openness are key, enabling its residents and visitors to reconfigure and rewrite its services, places and stories.”

Cities by their very nature are utilitarian creations built to support the needs and/or represent the image of the communities that build them, however the nature of the urban environment is such that it invites play in both its construction (architecture) and the interactions that take place within its confines and as such the city is an ever changing living organism where the past and the present are intertwined in a myriad of physical and ephemeral facets of the landscape. On the face of it “the smart city” with its array of sensors and actuators designed to bring a higher level of efficiency to the management of urban services is equally utilitarian and banal. However, these sensors and the digital communication networks that unite them offer new opportunities for playful interaction by bringing to life inert objects such as park benches and garbage cans, preserving and visualizing previously lost bits of the urban experience and enabling a host of new interactions and experiences in addition to raising a number of new challenges and concerns.

In this workshop we wish to explore the ways in which the broad gamut of technologies that make up the smart city infrastructure can be harnessed to incorporate more playfulness into the daily life activities that take place within the city making the city not only more efficient but also more enjoyable to the people who live and work within its confines.

Topics of interest for include, but are not limited to:

Embedding playfulness in outdoor daily life activities
Digital art and entertainment in urban environments
Playful interactions with large digital displays
Playfulness and smart city infrastructure
Outdoor play for children and adults
Child-friendly cities
Enabling the disabled through playful interactions
Playful interactions for urban animals (2 legs good, 4 legs better?)
Community building, maker cultures, and playfulness
Robust sensor and actuator technology for urban environment

IMPORTANT DATES

Paper Submission Deadline

1 July 2018

15 July 2018

Notification 29 July 2018

Registration Opens 29 July 2018

Camera-ready Deadline 15 September 2018

Workshop Date 24 October 2018

PUBLICATION

All accepted papers will be published in the official ArtsIT proceedings (LNICST, Springer). The papers will undergo a regular reviewing process by members of the workshop’s program/reviewing committee.

FORMAT AND SUBMISSIONS

Papers should be submitted via email to Anton Nijholt: [email protected], and have to comply with the Springer format (see Author’s kit section).

For any inquiries about the workshop please contact Anton Nijholt: [email protected]

ORGANIZERS

Anton Nijholt (Imagineering Institute, Malaysia & University of Twente, The Netherlands)

Jussi Holopainen (University of Lincoln, UK)

Yoram Chisik (Independent Scholar, Israel)

PROGRAM COMMITTEE

Khaled Bachour, University of Lincoln, UK

Staffan Björk, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

Paul Coulton, Lancaster University, UK

Chamari Edirisinghe, Imagineering Institute, Johor, Malaysia