Call for Workshop Papers
3rd International Workshop
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 (http://artsit.org/)
Workshop Date: 24 October 2018
Paper Submission Deadline: 1 July 2018
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 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 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
- Community building, maker cultures, and playfulness
- Robust sensor and actuator technology for urban environments
IMPORTANT DATES
Paper Submission Deadline: 1 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 formatted according to Springer LNICTS Author’s Kit. See the ArtsIT webpages for practical information. Unlike regular ArtsIT papers, workshop papers should be submitted for review by the program committee to Anton Nijholt, a.nijholt@utwente.nl.
ORGANIZERS
Anton Nijholt (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
Christian Geiger, University of Applied Sciences, Düsseldorf, Germany
Rilla Khaled, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada
Michiel de Lange, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Valentini Nisi, Universidade da Madeira, Funchal, Portugal
Dennis Reidsma, University of Twente, The Netherlands
Miguel Angel Sicart, IT University, Copenhagen, Denmark
Benjamin Stokes, American University, Washington, USA
Alberto Vanolo, Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy
Valentina Vezzani, Universidade da Madeira, Funchal, Portugal
Annika Waern, Uppsala University, Sweden
Richard Wetzel, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Art
Annika Wolff, Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland