BubblesDesigning Digital Play - F2013 IT-University of Copenhagen

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A concept developed by: Isabel Aagaard, Lars Lyskjær-Rudbæk, Michael Haumann Langsager, Nathalie Strandby Lund & Ray Thom Will

AbstractThis project - Bubbles facilitate playful behavior through a digital installation at the Metro station. Bubbles is a simple, exploratory, and creative experience where one can interact with one or multiple bubbles by touching them with a projected shadow figure. The concept aim it to give commuters a playful and enjoyable experience. At the same time it will nudge people to move away from the doors by placing red and green tiles in the floor.

KeywordsPlayfulness, Bubbles, Social play/interaction, public space, Metro station

IntroductionGoalPlay vs. PlayfulnessConceptPrototype Technology The Setup ResultsUnexpected Play The ever-changing Game Shadow Boxing “PONG” CuriositySocial play Homo Ludens Shadow Display The Good LifeWrap-UpFurther WorkBibliographyAnnex Code: Processing Video

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Table of Content & Responsibilities

Isabel

Nathalie & Isabel

Nathalie

Michael

Nathalie & Isabel

Ray

Lars & Michael

All

Lars

All

Nathalie & Isabel

Introduction

“Through play we learn empathy, flexibility, creativity, optimism, and creativity.” (Alison, 2009, pp. 4). Play can be interpreted in many different ways, according to the eye of the beholder. In the art world, play is seen as a spur to creativity. In psychiatry, play is seen as a therapeutic method and for communication specialists, play is a form of meta communication that can be found in humans as well as animals (Sutton-Smith, 1997, pp. 302). Play is not measurable but nevertheless there is a clear positive affiliation with the effect of play.

Authors have through history used children’s play as a metaphor for something that passes quickly, something that is either innocent or foolish. Many suggest that playfulness leaves us when we become adults (Sutton-Smith, 1997), where in contrast Gaver (2009) talks about humans being playful creatures all their life, also defined as Homo Ludens (Huizinga, 1950). Thus designing for Homo Ludens has been the inspiration for our concept.

With playfulness as the core of our project, we wanted to use this to solve a problem. We wanted to implement play in a space where play did not usually exist by “encouraging people to engage with the world in unaccustomed ways” (Gaver, 2009, pp. 5). We were intrigued by the idea of designing for the public space as we find the interaction between strangers interesting. Therefore we decided to focus on the metro stations, where we quickly became aware of a problem; people blocking the doors and thereby making it hard to get in and out of the train itself. With this in mind we made the following research question:

How can we facilitate playful behavior at the metro station through creativity and social interaction? And at the same time nudge people not to stand in front of the doors?

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Goal

Our goal is to facilitate playfulness as a state of mind supported by creativity in everyday life, by creating an open concept based on simplicity without rules and constraints that stimulates ones imagination. As well as a motivator for people to overcome social or cultural boundaries. We hope that our concept will nudge (Sunstein, 2008) people to stand in the right place at the Metro stations, to make it easier for other commuters to get in and out of the metro.

Play vs. Playfulness

“The concepts of play and game are complexly intertwined“ (Harvey, 2006). Play is found on a line between the two poles of play and playfulness, which Huizinga (1950) referred to as Ludus and Paidia (Harvey, 2006), as illustrated below. “In play [Paidia] one is carefree; in a game [Ludus] one is anxious about winning.” (Gaver, 2009, pp. 3; Kaprow, 2003, pp. 122).

Ludus is fundamentally goal-oriented and characterized by rules, “that require the player to demonstrate effort, skill, patience, or intellect.” (Harvey, 2006) whereas Paidia is the counterpoint to Ludus, where play is pure and has “(..)no fixed path or end(..)” (Gaver 2009).

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Our concept focuses on bringing Paidia into the metro stations, by letting people improvise and use their imagination without being constrained by rules. As illustrated on the previous page, we have placed three bubbles; the blue bubble symbolizing where we would place the concept. The pink and green bubble was added after our prototype test, to illustrate how some participants played very goal-oriented and others more exploratory (which will be elaborated on later). The concept should therefore be considered open for all participants to interact and ascribe their own values through improvisation and creativity.

The concept: BubblesBubbles is set to play out when you are waiting at the metro station. We have taken this approach, because we wish to facilitate playfulness in public areas, where people are waiting or are in transit.

When standing at the Metro platform waiting for the train to arrive, one will notice green and red colored tiles on the floor. The red tiles will be placed in front of the doors, and the green tiles in between showing the commuters where to stand. Placing oneself on the green tile, a screen placed on the opposite wall will activate. The person will quickly notice that a shadowy figure is being projected on the screen and multiple bubbles will appear. When the shadows are touching the bubbles, they will react differently; bouncing, popping, spawning or splitting into more bubbles. Bubbles allows single or multiple participants to interact with the bubbles and each other. When the train arrives the bubbles are blown away. This sudden change will draw the participant’s attention back to “the real world” and its surroundings.

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Prototype

TechnologyAfter settling on the concept, we wanted to test how people would interact with the bubbles and each other, we therefore decided to make a hardware sketch. “While a designer can create storyboards to determine whether a phone should vibrate under specific conditions, like the intensity of light in a given space, to get a feeling for what that really means, a working device—a sketch model— needs to be built.” (Dore, 2009).

We decided to use Processing to sketch our concept, because we needed a quick mock-up tool to demonstrate and test our concept. By using the mouse to control the bubbles it was possible to make a Wizard of Oz (Buxton, 2007), which allowed us to create a genuine experience for the participants (Buxton, 2007, pp. 239).

Conducting a Wizard of Oz test allowed us to test the idea of our concept before implementing it in the intentional settings. Hardware sketching is an important tool to the designing technology, making it possible for the designer to experience how changes in the sketch affect the participant’s experience (Dore, 2009).

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The SetupIn the making of the program we decided to simplify the features that we wanted to test on the participants. We wanted to see how the participants interacted with each other and the bubbles rather than focusing on the number of features.

We wanted to simulate how the shadows affected the bubbles by using the mouse. Limited to using only one mouse we decided that 5 bubbles would be as many as we were able to handle and at the same time give our participants a genuine experience.

We wanted to test how the participants reacted to the bubbles bouncing of the walls and their shadows. Furthermore we wanted to test how they reacted to capture and/or drag multiple bubbles around on the screen, and lastly the effect of letting the bubbles go. If a participant would move his hands too fast when holding one bubble or more, he would lose the bubbles.

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We projected the program on a screen and by having the participants stand in front of the projector it created natural shadows. We placed three sheets of paper on the floor; two green with footsteps and one red in the middle to simulate the metro doors.

We had six participants in total in which there were two sets of two participants, because we wanted to observe the interaction between them, and two individual participants. None of them were informed about what the concept was about beforehand, as we wanted to allow room for rules to emerge and goals to be sought, in order to facilitate curiosity and exploration (Gaver, 2009, pp. 4). All the participants thought aloud during the 6-8 minutes participation and afterwards we had a casual chat about the experience.

See a link to the video in Annex on page 21.

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Results

They all noticed the red and green paper tiles on the floor, and quickly understood that they were supposed to stand on the green tiles. However most of the participants explored what happened when they stood on the red tile, realizing that there was no interaction. Also, the participants quickly noticed how exploration was a primary factor of the concept. Some of the participants learned that they could capture one or more bubbles by holding their hand over them, and some of them walked across the paper tiles dragging the bubbles. They also learned that they could bounce the bubbles of their arms, legs, heads and bodies, even their tongue.

Their creativity spanned beyond our expectations, one of the participants tried to trap all the bubbles between his arms. Others applied role-play by making ghostings that were eating the bubbles or doing shadow boxing. It was interesting to observe how the balance between Ludus and Paidia varied from participant to participant. All the participants we observed behaved differently. Some became competitive and made up rules while others played around with creative possibilities of capturing or changing the bubbles direction.

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Shadow boxing Capturing

Many of the participants discussed what the concept was about, in the quest to figure out what the goal was. Some decided that is was a game, where the bubbles could not hit the sides while others explored and played around with the bubbles before settling on a meaning.

We observed different kinds of interaction in all the participants. Some stood on each side of the screen, where they would interact with the bubbles, but not each other. Others quickly started bouncing the bubbles to each other like a game of “PONG”1 or throw-and-catch game. The last set of participants was competitive about collecting all the bubbles. When one of the participants had almost captured all the bubbles the other participant became so competitive that he push all the bubbles out of the others hand.

All though we were not able to follow all the participants’ movements closely with only one mouse, we still feel that the participants had a genuine experience very close to how the actual program will work.

91 http://www.ponggame.org/

“PONG” Throw-and-catch

Unexpected Play

The ever-changing Game“And then, suddenly, we find that we have done this enough. We aren’t tired of having fun. We’re tired of having fun this way. We aren’t tired of each other. We want to change the way we’re having fun together. Maybe we want to do something harder. Maybe we need challenge” (DeKoven, 2010).To create an experience with the right balance between the playing mind and the gaming mind (DeKoven, 2010), similar to Ludus & Paidia (Salen & Zimmerman, 2006), has been the biggest challenge in this project. If done correctly, Bubbles will cater both aspects and will hence be defined as a “Well Played Game” (DeKoven, 2010).

When we came up with the idea of Bubbles, we initially wanted it to be free, voluntarily, joyful and amusing. Allowing one the opportunity to enter a simple interaction and hopefully bring out a little smile once finished. The Wizard of Oz literally was a “game changer” and possibly the biggest positive turning point in this project. The discoveries made from the test did not only provide us with a better understanding of the concept, but it also allowed us to experience how the nature of the concept itself evolved through the interaction. While we succeeded in getting the participants to smile, we also discovered how they became an extension of the concept and the technology.

As mentioned above the different participants had various ways of interacting with the bubbles and each other; such as doing shadow play, passive play and competitive play. It is interesting to elaborate on the three above mentioned types of play based on Salen & Zimmerman’ (2006) four forms of play; Agon, Alea, Mimicry & Ilinx. We discovered how Bubbles is a basic tool capable of supporting all four forms of play.

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Shadow BoxingDuring the first 3-5 minutes they played well; laughing, exploring, helping each others and cooperating. Once they had explored the features of the concept for a while, they got bored. What we thought of boredom to be a negative impact on the interaction actually became the catalyst of creating new challenges. It is not because they stopped to have fun or enjoy the features, they just wanted to find a new way of having fun with each other (DeKoven, 2010). This is where one of the participants started to mimic (Mimicry) boxers by shadow boxing with the other participant and thereby taking the experience out of the digital world.

They began playing with their shadows ignoring the bubbles, but their way of shadow boxing did not involve points, winners or losers. Which is a big part of defining the state of playfulness and pure play (DeKoven 2010 & Salen & Zimmerman, 2006). What surprised us the most was not that they created a whole new game, but the way they did it. To use the installation outside of its technological boundaries and implementing it onto the physical world can be described as thinking out of the box.

“PONG”When running the test on the second set of participants, we wanted to see how a single participant interacted with the concept. Therefore we asked the other participant to wait outside while the first had a few minutes alone interacting with Bubbles. Surprisingly he had trouble figuring out how it worked in the beginning, and could not quite grasp the functions of the green and red tiles on the floor. Although it was not entirely his fault since our Wizard was not quite ready and human error affected the interaction between the participant and the installation. We did not see this as a big issue seeing that it should work optimally if a digital installation took over the human control and tracked the movements more precisely. Nonetheless, he figured out the features quite fast after the initial obstacles.

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What a single participant showed us was how quickly he became bored and did not find the features challenging enough compared to the first set of participants. The time period of playing well depended on the number of participants. A single participant became bored much more quickly than two participants did. When we saw that the single participant was slowly losing interest we asked the second participant to step in and “join the fun”.

The dynamic of the interaction quickly changed the nature of our concept in terms of intensity, energy and goal. Truly showing its competitive (Agon) possibilities, because the participants saw each other as rivals. The second participant observed and quickly learned, as he observed the first player, who had already discovered many of the features. Therefore the second participant did not have to explore as much as the first. We do not know if it is due to the competitive personality of these specific individuals, but they had a common understanding of creating new challenges in which competition and rivalry were a big part of their common goal. To compete with each other does not necessarily mean a less well played game (DeKoven, 2010).

They decided to compete with each other by creating a new way of having fun. The catalyst in the creation of the new game was just one bubble hitting the edge of the screen and the first player simply saying “1 Point!”. Both players started to count points and we suddenly became spectators and the game continued for a few minutes. Due to the lack of “rules” in the “PONG” game, the players did not care about winning or losing by points, they just volleyed back and forth until they did not play well anymore (DeKoven, 2010).

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CuriosityLooking at the foundational idea of the concept, it is basically like playing with one or multiple balloons. This is what the third set of participants accepted as the main point of Bubbles. In contrary to the other participants, this pair just enjoyed having fun with the bubbles. Their hand movements showed us how they were much more curious about the purpose and outcome, rather than creating a new one. A breakthrough in this session of testing, was when one of the participants imagined being penalized for doing something wrong, and by stepping on the red tile he could somehow recover from that mistake. We designed the concept to not have any negative features or giving the player a feeling of losing, however one of the participants seemed afraid to lose if he did not perform well enough.

While it may not exactly fit the definition of chance (Alea) there are certain aspects of the participant’s fear of losing, which supports the fate of chance. He might have had the feeling of not having control over the game, and therefore be penalized by that (Salen & Zimmerman, 2006). To him the chance of losing was bigger than the chance of winning, but the game itself is neither designed to win nor to lose, but rather to explore creativity.

Social Play

In the work “Georg Simmel and the play-forms of social life”, Henricks (1997) describes Georg Simmel as one of the leading sociological theorists of play. According to Henricks (1997) Simmel elaborates on how people interact with one another, creating social life. He also argues how social life does not only occur from one, but from a series of smaller events where “(..) social life is at its basic the comings and going of people - the whispered conversation in

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the hall, the knowing glance, the love affair, the rivalry, the secret, the adventure” (Henricks, 1997, pp. 109).

Arguing for our social life being well connected to our basic needs and emotions. This makes the foundation of a rather subjective experience of being a participant in a social context. Henricks (1997) furthermore describes how these longings can be stimulated through objects, that can penetrate our self-contained world and how these can help express ourselves. We as human beings should therefore be viewed as being hardwired to be social; with other human beings, our own mind or even inanimate objects such as computers (Henricks, 1997). The need to be social is the reason why our participants immediately interacted with each other on the screen. We therefore thought it was interesting to test our concept with respectively one and two participants at a time.

Homo LudensWe are playful by nature and that is how we should interact with everything in all of life’s facets. Gaver (2009) mentions that: “Playing involves pursuing one’s inner narratives in safe situations, through projective interpretation and action” (pp. 13). Bubbles contribute to the engagement of multiple people in an environment such as a metro station, which normally is not very social or playful, as well as creating a room for exploring ideas or different narratives in a social context.

Shadow DisplayThe participant’s shadows are being displayed on the screen, not an actual picture of themselves. This avoids exposing the participants, and leaves the experience of the concept to be somewhat impersonal. By displaying the participants as shadows it creates a form for unity and equality amongst the participants (Henricks, 1997).

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Simmel argues that people wish to be part of something unique, be it concrete or abstract, timeless or momentarily, impersonal or personal. It is a simple part of being human (Simmel 1950; Henricks, 1997). Bubbles creates an unique experience for the participants, allowing people to be part of something greater and have a purpose, while waiting on the Metro. At the same time play is an excellent motivator for people to overcome social or cultural boundaries (Simmel 1950), which is one of our goals for the concept.

The Good LifeWe are trying to cater to people’s intrinsic needs which are associated with eudemonic behavior2, as “(...) we consider living well to involve pursuing intrinsic goals, acting autonomously and volitionally, and fostering one’s own awareness or mindfulness.” (Ryan, Huta & Deci, 2008, pp. 163). We will do this by giving them a playful experience in everyday life, rather than focusing on the extrinsic goals which are associated with hedonic behavior3.

Intrinsic behavior can be seen as way to attain “a good life”. It can be done both individually, but also socially. Our concept facilitates all the above-mentioned qualities for a good life and hopefully by participating in Bubbles it will improve the participants own perception of their lives or just give them three minutes of enjoyment until the train arrives.

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2 Living well in all life’s facets (Ryan, Huta & Deci, 2008)

3 The pursuit of living well, but not in all of life's facets (Ryan, Huta & Deci, 2008)

Wrap-Up

Bubbles is a tool for commuters to engage in a playful behavior in a social context. The concept is open for participants to have various and completely different approaches on how to generate a playful experience.

The concept builds on social interaction, which can be demanding for strangers. By using shadows to display the participants on the screens we have made the participants as equal as possible and create a feeling of unity in order to create the best possible social interaction. Placing red and green tiles on the floor proved to work well in our Wizard of Oz, showing us that it is a possible solution to nudge people to stand in the right areas at the Metro stations. Most importantly we can conclude that Bubbles did facilitate creativity, enjoyment, playfulness and social interaction, which was our main goal.

Further work

DeKoven (2010) talks about how spectators can affect the way we play, as we as players begin to look to the spectators to see if we play as well as we intend to. We experienced this with some of the participants when we did the Wizard of Oz. This tells us that it is something we should be aware of before implementing our concept; how does playing in a public place with lots of spectators affect the participants?

One of the main problems of designing a playful experience in a public area is how to actually catch the potential participants attention and evoke some form of curiosity. The next step of the process would be finding a meaningful and playful way to make people aware of the

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installation and make them want to interact with it. And by that ultimately keep them from standing in front of the doors.

We have had several ideas on how we could guide people to our installation. We have talked about using colored arrows, light emitting pressure plates and even a virtual bubble that guides you from the moment you step onto the escalator down towards the designated area. Lastly we have considered the possibility of making other parts of the Metro station interactive as well rather than just the screens. None of the above mentioned ideas have been tested but the prospect of integrating them into our current project is a tantalizing thought.

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Bibliography

BooksBuxton, B., Designing User Experiences – getting the design right, and the right design. Morgan Kaufman (2007) pp. 239-241.

Salen, K. & Zimmerman, E., The Game Design Reader - A Rules of Play Anthology. Massachussets: The MIT Press (2005) pp. 122-155.

Gaver, B., Designing for homo ludens, still. In Binder, Löwgren, & Malmborg (Eds.), (Re)searching the digital bauhaus London: Springer. (2009) pp. 163-178.

Henricks, T., Play Reconsidered. Sociological Perspectives on Human Expression. Urbana

and Chicago: University of Illinois Press (1997) pp. 109-145.

Ryan, R. M., Huta, V., & Deci, E. L. Living well: A self-determination theory perspective on eudaimonia. Journal of Happiness Studies, 9(1) (2008) pp. 139-170.

Sengers, P. & Gaver, B., Staying open to interpretation: Engaging multiple meanings in design

and evaluation. In Proceedings of the 6th conference on designing interactive systems. (2006).

Sunstein, T., Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness (2008) pp. 1–14

Sutton-Smith, B., The ambiguity of play. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. (1997) pp. 1-17 + 127-150

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Online ArticlesDore, F., Sketching in hardware is changing your life (2009) [online]:http://www.core77.com/blog/featured_items/sketching_in_hardware_is_changing_your_life_by_fabricio_dore__14769.asp [Available 05.12.13] Harvey, Alison. The liminal magic circle: Boundaries, frames, and participation in pervasive mobile (2006) [online]: http://wi.hexagram.ca/?p=12 [Available 05.12.13]

E-book

DeKoven, B., The Well-Played Game - A Player’s Guide to Community. Smashwords (2010) [online]: http://www.neotake.com/ebook/the-well-played-game-a-players-guide-to-communit/ajabop.html [Available 05.12.13]

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Annex

Link to Video: http://isabelaagaard.dk/2013/05/13/bubbles/ ‎

Code: Processing (available at: http://isabelaagaard.dk/2013/05/13/bubbles/ ‎) int n = 5;Bounce[] Balls = new Bounce[n]; //The list is made of objects from the class bounce

void setup() { size(730, 530);

noStroke(); frameRate(40);

smooth(); for (int i = 0; i < Balls.length; i++) { //a for loop to call by balls in the array from the bounce class

Balls[i] = new Bounce(); //my count starts at 0 (int i = 0) and the count is less than my array's length(i < Balls.length) }}

void draw() { background(255);

cursor(CROSS); for (int i = 0; i < Balls.length; i++) { //loop of my array in my bounce class

Balls[i].moveAndDisplay(); //referring to moveAndDisplay function }

for ( int i= 0; i < Balls.length; i++) { // testing the distance of the balls from the mouse if ( dist(mouseX, mouseY, Balls[i].x, Balls[i].y) <= Balls[i].rad && mousePressed ) {

Balls[i].x = mouseX; Balls[i].y = mouseY;

} else if ( dist(mouseX, mouseY, Balls[i].x, Balls[i].y) <= Balls[i].rad) {

Balls[i].xdirection *= -1; // making the balls bounce from the mouse Balls[i].ydirection *= -1;

}}}

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class Bounce {

float rad = random(30, 50); // Making the width of the shape random from 30 to 50 float x = random(50, 700); // Starting position of shape

float y = random(50, 500); float xs = map(rad, 10, 60, 10, 0.3); // reversing the speed to be faster with smaller balls and slower with bigger balls

float ys = map(rad, 10, 60, 10, 0.3); int xdirection = 1; // Left or Right

int ydirection = 1; // Top to Bottom float r = random(0, 255); // just for fun. Setting the red color to random from any red value

float g = random(0, 255); // same for the green float b = random(0, 255); // same for the blue

Bounce() { //constructor }

void moveAndDisplay() { //creating a function defining the ellipse and how it moves smooth();

ellipseMode(RADIUS); // drawn from the middle fill(r, g, b, 90); // just for fun. setting the colors of the balls random and transparent

ellipse(x, y, rad, rad);

x = x + ( xs * xdirection );

y = y + ( ys * ydirection ); // If it does, reverse its direction by multiplying by -1

if (x > width-rad || x < rad) { //bouncing inside the window. xdirection *= -1;

} if (y > height-rad || y < rad) {

ydirection *= -1; }}}

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