Context Engineering and New Media Design for Playful Expression, Creativity, Learning and Social Innovation
As part of the Information Systems Group of CISUC, this lab addresses technical and societal concerns of the confluence between computational technology and human being. The study of this confluence, in context, creates new opportunities and challenges for user interfaces, social media and new emergent extensions of human capabilities.
Technologies, networks and new digital and social media are the techno-fabric of new social contexts, changing the way people behave, think, interact and socialize as persons, citizens, workers and consumers. Understanding the nature and consequences of these changes in order to better shape the digital media is a key success factor for the values and competitiveness of our society.
Objectives and Approach
We will develop the notion of Human-Computer Confluence in new contexts, by developing local and International cooperations for integrating competencies for designing and evaluating new media proposals to support human creativity through innovative approaches to Gameplay Authoring Environments, Personalized Game-based Learning, Playful Multi-sensory Stimulation and Playful Social Innovation contexts.
Our research objectives will be realized by further developing models and methods for Experience Design and Evaluation with interactive media. The study of techniques for designing and managing play behaviors towards specific learning, creativity, stimulation and societal goals, will be our main approach. In this effort we will adopt an Interdisciplinary stance, combining Computation and Networking, Interaction Design, Game Design, Learning, Psychological and Sociological knowledge to further advance the state of the art in Engineering Playful Social Contexts.
Design Research and User Research strategies
We do research by designing and prototyping interactive contexts supported on participatory media technologies. We have taken a particular focus on multiplayer games as experimental contexts, with a focus on technologies for collaboration, creation and learning.
Our research concerns have included the study of participatory processes through experience design and evaluation methodologies, the creation of technologies for digital games, the design of dynamic soundscapes, the study of player-author participation in the creative and design process, and the exploitation of playful media in learning and therapeutic contexts (autism and mild developmental challenges).
Lately we have been working on a linguistic adaptation of the Test of Playfulness, a pattern language for sound design in games, on various techniques for game authoring including a scalable peer-to-peer architecture enabling live editing at gameplay, modeling games with Petri Nets, augmented reality mobile gaming, dynamic soundscape composition in games and, a model for holistic participation-centered game design and experience evaluation.
Keywords: Interaction Design, Media Design, Game Design, Gameplay Experience Evaluation, Creativity Support Environments, Serious Games, Multi-sensory Stimulation, Social Innovation, Playful Contexts
Participatory Media Design
Under the main thread of “Participatory Media Design” we currently aim to research how to design media that empowers user participation and creativity in playful contexts, by addressing these questions:
- How to design empowering new media for playful experience creators?
- How do we interpret and evaluate player participation in playful contexts?
- How to we design adaptive game experiences that promote the authors’ message?
- How can we use playful media for multisensory stimulation, developmental and therapeutic goals?
- How can we support creativity and learning through playful environments?
- How can we exploit generative methods for audiovisual content in games?
To this end we are playing with natural interface technologies and developing a crowdsourcing engine for experimenting with a diversity of game designs along the several research questions, to acquire and analyze large chunks of actual gameplay data, and thus study population responses to diverse design proposals.
We already have begun to lay the foundations of such strategy and the required technological infrastructure and have identified as critical goals:
a) to promote international collaborations across EU research groups with partners on specific research topics and,
b) to reach for adequate EU project financing that can sustain this research initiative.