to take ownership of the game and actively seek knowledge to incorporate their own experiences into the game.
This suggests that play can be a very powerful research and design tool to help connect children and adults too in exploring new topics and concepts related to their everyday lives. The act of exploring, making and creating with the citizens in a playful manner has already showed a dramatic impact on the mentality of the children and parents. Keeping this in mind, we can leverage the use of a co-creator approach to design a system to involve citizens early on in order to empower them to take part in the making and creating of new systems, digital or not. The involvement of the children and parents in the development and iteration of the game was essential in helping us understand the true interest and passion of the children. By sparking their creativity and their natural play instinct, we were able to see the level of impact among the children. Since the design research, ideation and iteration cycles were contained in the greater Rotterdam region, we would need a further exploration and initial working prototype of the game to provide more accurate insights on the resulting impact of this game.
Through their active participation, the children begin to grow an attachment and a feeling of ownership of the game and, in this case, the environment. By fostering this feeling of play and ownership, we can empower children to further apply these techniques to other areas. In this instance, the solution to the problem may be in creating a toolkit and structure that allows children to create their own playful way to investigate their local environment and start creating a local solution. By creating a toolkit, we may be able to further research on the user-as-co-creator approach as a means to engage and empower citizens to exploring, making and creating solutions to problems they find in their neighbourhoods.
6. CONCLUSIONS AND FURTHER RESEARCH
The resulting game was able to achieve its purpose of delivering the necessary data on citizen behaviour, and it was able to begin empowering children to start taking action in the community and in spreading knowledge about environment and air quality. Although the end result was positive, based on the feedback from potential users, both children and parents, there remain specific areas of concern about the game, such as future development, growth and maintenance which will need more attention. Further development of the game and the eco-system need to be conducted before any major conclusions can be reached regarding its impact.
For the future, it would be important to begin investigating how play could become a primary research and co-design method for the development and conceptualisation of more urban activities and solutions to help connect citizens with new, healthier and more sustainable solutions. As this research was conducted on such a small scale, further studies will need to be conducted with users of different backgrounds and from different regions in order to further formulate a research and design method utilising play as the key tool to opening up citizens and users to playful curiosity.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The project was conducted in close collaboration with DCMR, the environmental agency of the greater Rotterdam area. Special thanks to our colleagues and all the participants involved in the current work.
BIOGRAPHY
Jennifer Wong is a human-centred design researcher focusing on the development of methodologies that can contribute to the design of a human-centred smart cities through participatory design research practices. She is currently a part-time researcher and graduate from Delft University of Technology (MSc in Design for Interaction) with a background in Architectural Studies (BSc, University of Southern California).
Ingrid Mulder is an expert in transformative and social design. She is an Associate Professor of Design Techniques at Delft University of Technology with a background in Policy and Organisation Sciences (MA, University of Tilburg) and Educational Sciences and Technology (PhD, University of Twente).
REFERENCES
Björgvinsson, E., Ehn, P., and Hillgren, P.A., 2012. ‘Agonistic participatory design: working with marginalised social movements’, in: Co-Design, 8:2-3, 127–44. Fogg, B. J., 2009. ‘Behavior Model for Persuasive Design’, in: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology (Persuasive ‘09). ACM, New York, NY, USA.
Foth, M., Paulos, E., Satchell, C., and Dourish, P., 2009. ‘Pervasive Computing and Environmental Sustainability: Two Workshops’, in: IEEE Pervasive Computing, 8(1), 78–81.
2007 Gemeente Rotterdam. Vision of the City of Rotterdam. Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Available at http://www. rotterdam.nl/stadsvisie
Keuken, M., Voogt, M., van den Elshout, S., Hoek, G., and Janssen, N., 2011. Levensverwachting Rotterdamse bevolking met jaar verlengd door verbeterde luchtkwaliteit in 1985–2008. Report, Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
Smeets, W. and Hammingh, P., 2013. De kosten en baten voor Nederland van het Commissievoorstel ter vermindering van de nationale emissies van luchtverontreinigende stoffen. Analysis report for Textcetera, Den Haag. Visch, V., Vegt, N., Anderiesen, H. and van der Kooij, K., 2013. ‘Persuasive Game Design: A model and its definitions’. Paper presented at Designing Gamification: Creating Gameful and Playful Experiences Workshop, held in conjunction with CHI 2013, Paris, France, 27 April–2 May. Wong, J. Y., 2014. Sensory citizens: Empowering citizens to share their insights on environment & air quality. Master’s thesis, Delft University of Technology.
New configurations and temporalities of social-spatial relations are intensifying the already pluralistic dynamics of public space, further challenging the traditional notion of the designer’s privileged hand in its formation.
Historically, and by habit, designers have been strongly tempted to seek unifying strategies, whether in aiming their assumedly neutral work towards an unspecified public, or, in taking sides and teaming up with specific publics. In either case, many designers’ methodologies, even if open and ambiguous initially, eventually filter and steer towards a single consistent outcome—a clarifying resolution. This reflex towards univocality and its implications in terms of urban form, dialogue, participation, the public and democracy can be critically challenged and experimented with through dialogical approaches rooted in the concept of multivocality.
As the design paradigm continues to expand its emphasis on processes and purposes, the multivocal can open up a new role for design in the dynamic formation of public space: designing with and for multivocality.
This call is an invitation to rethink the formation of public space and to
reconceptualise design aims and methodologies in terms of multivocality—both figurative and literal. Might design processes, in producing difference and diversity in a dynamic interactivity, become public space? And, might this lead to an expanded notion of participation as a democratic cultural practice?
Chairs: Catharina Dyrssen & Jon Geib (Chalmers University of Technology)