Call for Participation
Urban Play and the Playable City: A Critical Perspective
A workshop held as part of DiGRA 2020
2 June 2020
Tampere, Finland
https://sites.google.com/view/theplayablecity/home
Submission Deadline: 10 February 2020
Recently the notion of the playable city has emerged as a counterpoint to the “smart city” whereby the array of sensors and actuators that enable smart city infrastructure can be harnessed to create novel interactions and playful experiences within the city by lending an ear to trees, giving a voice to park benches, stairs and garbage cans or reviving the shadows that pass in the night thereby enabling a host of new interactions and experiences and raising new challenges and concerns about distraction and duplicity.
Building on three previous workshops that focused specifically on the notion of the playable city and that were held as part of Intetain 2016, Intetain 2017 and ArtsIT 2018, In this full-day workshop held as part of the Digital Games Research Association 2020 Conference (DiGRA 2020), we aim to compare and contrast the various forms of play that occur in urban environments from simple hide and seek games to augmented reality games such as Pokémon Go and The Walking Dead: Our World with the notion of the playable city, i.e. urban installations or environments in which the sensors, actuators and digital communication networks that form the backbone of smart city infrastructure are used to create novel interfaces and interventions intended to inject fun and playfulness into the urban environment both as a simple source of pleasure and as a means of facilitating and fostering urban and social interactions while exploring current innovations and the future potential of the ideas and technologies involved with the intent of producing an edited volume of the collected articles and ideas.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
- Play in the city – reimagining the playground and the notion of urban play
- Play with the city – incorporating play and playfulness into the very fabric of the city
- Play for the city – using play and gamification to address urban issues from infrastructure maintenance to social and environmental issues
- Are we playing with the city or being played with? Critical perspectives on the notion of the playable city
- Wearable technology and the (smart) city
- The autonomous vehicle as a mobile playground or an urban plaything
- Interactive street art, augmented storytelling and other forms of urban “play”
Prospective participants should submit an anonymized position paper (which may be up to ~5000 words, excluding references) as a PDF file created using the Microsoft Word or Latex DiGRA submission template via easychair by 10th February 2020. All submissions will undergo a blind peer review process and will be selected based on their quality and relevance to the workshop with an eye for future publication as part of an edited volume. At least one author of each accepted position paper must attend the workshop and pay the appropriate DiGRA 2020 registration fee.
IMPORTANT DATES
Submission Deadline: 10 February 2020
Notification Deadline: 18 February 2020
Workshop Date: 2 June 2020
ORGANIZERS
Anton Nijholt, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands
Yoram Chisik, Independent Scholar, Haifa, Israel
Ben Schouten, TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands
Mattia Thibault, University of Tampere, Finland
MORE INFORMATION
For further information see: https://sites.google.com/view/theplayablecity/home