Technical/Tangible/Social

Elizabeth Lane Lawley
RIT Lab for Social Computing
Her presentation is on SlideShare.

• What if computing stops meaning being behind a screen, but rather improves our experience
• iPhone as tangibly appealing. A companion. We carry it and pet it.
• Showed emotionally tangible technology
• Botanicalls twitters you when it needs watering.
• Arduino board connects physical world with the virtual.
• Showed Make and Craft magazine
• Lots of techy people are crafty. Showed a picture of people at a conference. People knitting still look at the speaker, laptop users look at the screen.
• Object Oriented Sociality: Ravelry (I LOVE THIS SITE)
• Knitting: objects important, and the metadata is really important, too. Can look up by yarn type, pattern type, etc.
• Etsy: selling hand made, quality goods.
• Moo Cards: tangible part of the cards, very nice to hold, sense of quality crafted goods
• Social hardware: small power strip, allows you to share a plug at a conference
• If you try to chase your users, you’ll never catch up with them. Create a place they want to be and they’ll come to you.

Picture the Impossible: A Technical, Tangible, Social Game

• Game: Picture the Impossible
• ARG, but really a city based adventure game
• Moved RIT Lab to the library because it made sense: interdisciplinary, center of campus, neutral space (though each person still has ties to their department)
• LL: loves games, loves tangible things like crafts, knows about social and hosting events
• Verbs associated with the game: Learn, Explore, Give, Socialize
• Made list of amazing people from the town, places in town, local festivals, the local things that made it really Rochester: put a lot of information out there before designing the information architecture.
• To draw in young professionals, have a big game at the end.
• Developed a narrative for the game: a secret society in town, starting to fragment, young professionals not joining, three factions are fighting over it. When join the game, you join a faction. If you play the game and find your way through it get an invitation to the party.
• Gain points (by revisiting sites), charity with the most visits get a weekly donation.
• Games are more successful if people make meaningful choices right when they join.
• Got lots of donations for small amounts. Fine for pilot, but not great for an ongoing project. Lots of donated time and money works once to prove a point, but not after that.
• Guerrilla marketing
• Showed videos associated with the game.
• Made a FaceBook page about it.
• Parts of the game only takes place in the newspaper.
• Local charities, local venues, local people, local events
• Five webgames, multiple newspaper puzzles.
• Have documentary quizzes, can try again and again, so people are watching the documentaries over and over again.
• Embedded learning, engaged/active learning, iterative, doesn’t feel like learning, feels like fun!
• One part of game: had a list of firsts, had people incorporate all three into one picture.
• Smart phone based scavenger hunt. Send answer to short code, get next clue.
• Recipe contest using five ingredients you can only get at the local public market. Public market ran out of ingredients by 10am.
• Challenges: huge investment, need early connections with local groups, selection of charities needs to be balanced and they need to be fully on board, different organizational cultures makes collaboration hard, selling sponsorship and advertising in something so new is really hard
• Showed forums and really positive results.
• 2000+ players. Committed to game.
• Over 300 scavenger players a week, huge participation in each part of the game.
• Many of the most active participants in the game are women. Many are mothers. 3 of the 4 most active developers of the game are women. When more women involved in game design, design a game they want to play and more women will play. (Even those who aren’t typical game players.)
• See learning, exploration, giving, and social behaviors already happening, and the game isn’t over yet.