Play, mobility and learning pat kane a discussion paper for Urban Learning Space1 20 January 2005
Download 104.94 Kb.
|
- Navigate this page:
- Open innovation commons: building the grounds of (mobile) play
- The Curious Interface: A Design Manifesto in Favor of Play
- Urbanness, ubi-comp and the player
- PLAY, MOBILITY AND LEARNING
- October 28
 Play, mobility and learning PAT KANE A discussion paper for Urban Learning Space1 20 January 2005 T But the image also works, more prosaically, as an evocation of the ubiquity of our connection to data-flows in our physical environments. This data is above, below and beside us, taking its oblique pathways through our hallways and streets. Yet in the image, we are the densest sources of data, both for the information we receive and we transmit. For all the pervasiveness and power of the info-matrix, the actions and intentions of humans are still the most solid entities in this universe.2 This emphasis on human agency within networks is what a consideration of play – its forms and propensities, its culture and psychobiology - can bring to any socio-technical environment. The concept of an ‘Urban Learning Space’ – a city environment in which understanding, wisdom and knowledge accrue, through various systems of learning – is worth examining through a variety of analytical lenses. The notion that a city might provide a meaningful experience through play and players – that is, through games, simulations, rituals, acts of the imagination, energetic mobility – has a long tradition in European culture: from the Medieval religious carnivals to the anti-G8 ‘carnivals against capitalism’; from conceptual artists shaping pedestrian perceptions, to runners and skateboarders transforming inert streets. Yet the ‘meaningful mobility’ that play implies is now enriched by a geninuely new dimension of our daily life in cities: that is, the ever-more-pervasive networks of information and connection that individuals can access as they wish, when they wish, through their own portable, or publicly accessible devices. Whether using mobile phones, or wireless laptops, or the coming ‘everyware’ of sensor and radio-transmitting technology, we move (like the Matrix characters) through a world of increasing, yet never always explicit connectivity. The question of agency, and thus our identities as actors in the urban environment, then becomes crucial. This paper will begin to draw some connections between play, mobility, and learning, in order to answer a general question for ULS: how should one live and thrive inside an ‘urban learning space’? And specifically: what can the practice of play and the experience of the player bring to this? PLAY Play means more than fun (and more than not-work, too) 'Play' has become a fascinating term within a spread of public discourses in the UK around the crisis of work. This crisis is phrased not just in the terms of the usual official 'top-down' anxieties about national productivity or output, but also a 'bottom-up' disquiet about work and its social and psychological toll: a crisis of the 'work ethic' itself. Madeleine Bunting's Willing Slaves revealed the statistic that more production days have been lost to 'sickies' in the 90's than were lost to militant industrial action in the 70's: she calls this an 'individualised mass protest' against an 'overwork culture'.3 As some reviews have pointed out, and as Bunting admits, the perception of an oppressive work culture is not uniform across social levels or occupations (eg, managerial-professional hours may be longer, but there is more part-time working too4). B  ut the rise of 'happiness' research over the last few years - specifically the new nexus between economics and psychology - reminds us that any crisis around commitment to work takes place within a much broader set of anomalies5. The flatlining of life-satisfaction values against the steady rise of GDP in the UK, for example, is only one indicator of a general Western trend towards 'post-materialist' values - emphasising quality of life, personal rights and self-expression over economic gain.6 A 'politics of well-being' has become something of a truism among the mainstream European political establishments. Yet it undoubtedly acknowledges the increasing scepticism of their voters about the automatic validity of 'producing-to-consume' as a model for an active, self-determining life.7 Play, and the figure of the 'player', occupies a curious and not immediately comprehensible position within these debates and trends. In line with the Puritan legacy, play is often entirely equated with leisure, recreation and relationships: a Nov 2004 international NOP poll on "work-play balance" defined play as "watching TV, reading, socializing with friends and spending time with children and grandchildren."8 Even when play becomes visible and discussible within a progressive policy agenda, it is characterised as either a driver for a passionate, though largely leisure-based amateurism (Demos's recent pamphlet on the Pro-Am Revolution9), or as "a pathway to public debate" about "the role of fun and enjoyment" in social relationships and "personal wellbeing"10. Of course, an aspect of play is about fun and enjoyment, pleasurable autonomy and personal gratification. Indeed, it is that free and egoistic play - a subject fully in control of their space and time, able to explore his or her will and desire - that the industrial-Puritan legacy is most keen to literally demonise ('the soul's play-day is the devil's work-day', 'the devil makes work for idle hands', etc). Yet we have to acknowledge that the social semantics of play, as they actually exist in the English-speaking world, are much more diverse than this. If we explore the core semantics of play, we can begin to understand why play escapes from the corral of leisure and non-work, and becomes a diverse indicator of change and process. From its roots in the Indo-European -dlegh, and the old English pleg(i)an, play takes the definitions of 'movement, exercise, engagement'. (The core scholarship on play indicates that the very plurality of play's forms is an 'adaptive potentiation' - a spinning-out of possibilities and strategies by social mammals, in order to survive and thrive with their fellow subjects. This elemental diversity may explain why 'play' and 'player' appear in contexts that are very far from the leisurely and recreational.11) Do a word search on "play + business" or "play + politics" on Google News (www.news.google.com), for example, and a whole world of play-as-movement-and-engagement appears. There are software giants and their "innovation plays", entrepreneurs putting sectors "into play". This matches well with one of the OED definitions, play as "the state of being active, operative and effective", or play as "light and constantly changing movement" - almost a perfect encapsulation of the nature of information-age enterprise. The "players" in a power context (whether politics or money, technology or bureaucracy) are equally well-described by these core definitions. Politicians, for example, both make their "plays" to their constituencies, but also wonder how their policies will "play with them" - meaning, how will this public rhetoric be received, or understood? In an entirely different realm to official politics and markets, a search on the words "hip-hop" and "playa" (the African-American spelling of "player") render up a surprisingly similar definition of player's agency. The "playa" occupies the ghetto or street, and is involved in the grey-to-black economy of clubs, music, drugs and sex. Yet this player is as obsessed with "being active, operative and effective" - and moving quickly with it - as any overground politician or business leader. This brief journey round the social semantics of "play" and "player" - testable from any web browser - is hopefully enough to make the point about the complex and ambiguous resonance of these terms in public discourse. If play is not merely trivial escape and indulgence, nor even just a component of a quality-of-life/wellbeing agenda, but also a principle of movement and engagement that applies across business, politics and subculture (as well as more predictably sports and the arts), then we should invoke it with precision and delicacy. In the context of this paper, it would be especially careless to reduce or trivialise play in the context of both mobility, and learning - particularly when the expanded definition could so interestingly enrich both terms. PLAY AND MOBILITY Play is almost as old as the mammalian record, and mobile phones/mobile computing are together barely two decades old. Yet in terms of play's deepest semantics, the principle of movement and engagement would seem to unite both biological capability, and technological object. Yet it's salutary to remember that mobile communication, in the most basic sense, began in a military context: Marconi selling his wireless telegraphy to the British Royal Navy in 1900. As the historian of the mobile phone Jon Agar notes, "the first mobile radio was restricted to behemoths" - only a battleship had the spare power to drive the sets, and the strategic need to co-ordinate a fleet. The next significant developments - two-way radios in Detroit's police cars in 1928 - again highlight the roots of wireless mobility in surveillance, team coordination, and a battleground of contending forces, actual or potential.12 W  hen we observe the contemporary use of electronic tagging of young criminals under probation - each person fitted with a Global Positioning Satellite bracelet, tracking their movements precisely, which they cannot remove for the duration of their sentence - the command-and-control elements of wireless networks would seem to be very much alive.13 Y  et it is fascinating to note that so much of the cutting-edge design research on mobility - which I sampled at a recent symposium in Vancouver, organised by Nokia Futures - involves a conscious use of mobile urban gaming: where city centres or suburbias are used as the gameboard, where human subjects armed with GPS, Bluetoothed or wireless handhelds are the players, and where the rules are encoded in collaborative software and shared interfaces on each device. More on these later: but suffice to note the rather poignant mirror image - nearly 80 years after Detroit's finest roamed the streets, wirelessly enabled to report on trouble, hordes of design students are now drifting through cities, wirelessly enabled to make some trouble (or at least trouble some perceptions). Open innovation commons: building the grounds of (mobile) play One of the major questions facing an urban learning project, in the face of ubi-comp and wireless mobility, is that of the openness of the available networks. Compared to the internet, the mobile web as manifested through cell-phone carriers is already a much more commodified domain - with information downloadable through customised windows that ensure a micropayment for each downloaded item (from text messages to video clips). O  ver the last few years, wi-fi has developed a much more mixed economy - with a combination of highly-branded wireless service-providers in business and urban contexts (T mobile, BT Openzone); community activists making a virtue of providing free wireless access (see Consume.net in UK, and Bryant Park in New York); and some city municipalities in Europe and the US creating civic wireless zones, available either free to locals and visitors, or as a rate-payers amenity.14 Those who are thinking seriously in local government about an agenda for urban learning, and its relationship to ubi-comp, will have to address the thorny question of what model of mobile network access to promote. This goes beyond the usual arguments about e-inclusion - the financial-capital or cultural-capital barriers to access - and points towards the deeper issue of what values and potentials are released by the very design of these networks. How much mass innovation might they engender, or suppress? The author of Smart Mobs, Howard Rheingold, has recently proposed a "Mobile and Open Manifesto". In this, he wonders about the vested interests that might strangle real and transformative developments in mobility: The devices that most people on earth will carry or wear in coming decades could become platforms for technical and entrepreneurial innovation, foundations for industries that don't exist yet, enablers of social and political change. However, it is far from certain that mobile media will go the route of the PC, where teenage dropouts like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and millions of others actively shaped the technology. Or the internet, where search engines were invented in dorm rooms and innovators like Tim Berners-Lee gave away the World Wide Web for free without asking permission or changing the wiring. Powerful interests recognise the dangers such a world poses for business models that depend on controlling and metering access to content, conduit, or services for a mass market, and they are acting to protect their interests.15 Rheingold goes on to list five points on his manifesto, 'in order for mobile media to benefit those who don't already own an ICT cartel'. The two most interesting, in terms of a vision of play, are 'that people are free and able to act as users not consumers', and 'an open innovation commons'. If "users can actively shape media, as they did with the PC and Internet, not just passively consume what is provided by a few, as in the era of broradcast media and communications monopolies", says Rheingold, then "users will be free to invent" - by hacking hardware, and tinkering with unlocked software (as in open source). What this emphasis on users rather than consumers will enrich is the 'open innovation commons', which Rheingold glosses this way: "When networks of devices, technological platforms for communication media, the electromagnetic spectrum, are available for shared experimentation, new technologies and industries can emerge". I  f a vision of the mobile web inspired by the ideals of the internet - based on 'inventive users, playing on an open innovation commons' - is accepted, then there are clear development and infrastructure choices to be made by urban policy-makers. In terms of these principles, the optimum arrangement for mass innovation in ubi-comp would be a civically free wi-fi network (aware of the progress towards the much more powerful Wi-Max frequencies), with some degree of infrastructural support for networked devices (a proliferation of electricity points in 'third spaces' like cafes, public plazas, etc, a strong local sellers' market for wi-fi devices and add-ons), as well as a coherent wireless city portal and brand, to raise awareness of the benefits of ubi-comp for social, cultural and economic dynamism. From a play-ethical perspective - that is, a conception of 'players' as urban subjects with optimal autonomy and awareness - this model of an open mobile network is most appropriate. Its transparency, genuine ubiquity and civic inclusiveness guarantees the greatest number of players ('teenage dropouts' included), empowered to turn built urban spaces into places of genuine interactive possibility - from art and music production/consumption/distribution, through issue activism, to other forms of private and public enterprise. Yet end-to-end public wifi networks, linking browser-enabled devices, are of course not the only available socio-technical 'architectures of value' (to use Lawrence Lessig's term) Many of the more cutting-edge mobile researchers and developers are beginning to see the darkside of ubi-comp. As Adam Greenfield puts it, if the new schema for internet addressing, IPv6, can genearate some 6.5x1023 addresses for every square metre on the surface of the planet, then every object with a transmitter (from the cheapest radio-frequency chip to full GPS) will be able to communicate with every other object.16 This will be 'everyware', as Greenfield puts it - and a potential disaster for our notion of privacy and free movement. What 'play' or space of possibility could there be in our lives, when our every interaction and transaction can feed into an 'insinuative grid' of locatable and trackable information - stretching from the very surface of the body to a public space fitted with the relevant receptors? Greenfield wisely notes that protests about the surveillant powers of ubiquitous systems, and their potential for authoritarian social engineering, may not find the audience they expect: "Many, many people like the idea that they're always being watched, because they equate that watching with always being cared for... If the most accepted model for pervasive devices to date has been the Assistant, we should never forget that a competing model - one that holds strong appeal for a great many people - is the Superintendant."17 Certainly, many of the principles and manifestos arising out of considerations of mobility agree on one point. The information gathered by our ubi-comp devices should be, as Greenfield puts it, 'self-disclosing' and 'deniable' - with provisions for immediate and transparent querying of ownership, use, capabilities, information relevant to each device, and the ability to opt out of systems at any point. As Alan Munro's ULS paper, and other authorities have said, there is always the possibility of a sousveillance - a 'watching from below' of the operations of power and authority, with recording and location devices becoming a new kind of mobile investigative media. This power play - the agonistic clash of forces in a polis - is as old as human society itself: we should expect that there will be those who resist existing authority with all expressive means at their disposal, no matter how oppressive or inclusive the regime. Yet there might be a march to be stolen by those network providers, and their municipal and urban context-setters, who can develop their mobile systems with an explicit commitment to the rights of the player, than the authority of the controller - a clearly articulated 'mobile jurisprudence' (in Greenfield's words) that protects the right of the ubi-comp user to exercise full agency with their technology. For designers, this presents some interesting ethical questions, which might be worth exploring in some of the Urban Learning Space projects. Nokia's Matt Jones dreams that It's time to remap everything…The context of computing is vastly different from the west coast labs that windows, icons, menus and pointers originated in. It's mobile, urban, rural, outdoors, underground, personal, intimate, immediate...We'll remap technology to the environment, our bodies, our relationships, our places and culture, instead of the other way around. tangible, embodied interfaces will make the world the interface, instead of our interfaces carving our attention from the world18. Yet interaction designer Jane McGonigal writes skeptically about what she calls ‘natural interfaces’, and advocates that design should be more aware of the user-passivity that an over-accomodating ubi-comp might induce. Her manifesto is worth reproducing in full: 19 '  The Curious Interface: A Design Manifesto in Favor of Play'
Ambiguous displays invite interpretation. Mysterious signals demand investigation. Curious interfaces provoke play. OUR BELIEFS
OUR DEMANDS
OUR CALL TO ACTION
When what surrounds us confounds us, when the computable tends toward the inscrutable, only then will users become strategic, resourceful, poetic actors. Through your design, implore your users: Be responsive! So McGonigal, by contrast with Jones, urges that mobile design should, in some sense, be challenging and not immediately comprehensible to the user - precisely to maintain their playful, creative urges. On first sight, without a scrap of context, could anyone make much more sense of the mechanics of a saxophone and its ability to create a melody line, than one could divine the texting function of a mobile phone? Yet isn't the challenge of both devices precisely that they demand a level of interpretation and effort which, when mastered, allow for very individualised and distinctive forms of expression? As Malcolm McCullough said at Vancouver: “just as some great 20th century art is difficult at first, can we conclude that some great interfaces will be difficult at first also? The truly satisfying interfaces in life are the ones that take practice…they don’t say tons about how they are to be used – you learn.”20 And in considering the darkside of ubi-comp - that temptation to surrender aspects of one's informational choices to an omniscient and superintendant 'everyware' - might object-design play a necessary role: that is, to keep users conscious of the networks they are becoming ever more embedded in? Matthew Chalmers’s work at Glasgow University on ‘seamful’ games is an example of this kind of ‘critical’ design: an urban UPS-and-handheld game that operates by users explicitly playing the limits of network coverage in an area.21 Urbanness, ubi-comp and the player  Yet there is something specific about an urban environment for ubi-comp that lends itself particularly to considerations of play. As already mentioned, much of the cutting-edge research on mobile networks sees the primary scenario for research as that of “players in the city”, drawing on many classic ludic resources and traditions. Yet this vision of public players – arguably as old as the agonists that occupied the agora of ancient Greece – brings its own, historic tensions to questions of autonomy and control around ubiquitous networks. Undoubtedly, whatever general theory of urban development you hold, will shape your specific vision for mobile networking. In the words of Salon technology writer Linda Baker, there is already a clear tension beween "pragmatic and playful digital city applications". And as she notes, this tension is rather familiar to urbanists: "Trends within the digital city movement mirror long-standing distinctions in the urban planning community: between those who view cities as compartmentalized centres of production and efficiency, and those who view urban spaces as a kind of barely organized chaos, favoring unpredictable encounters between diverse social groups."22 Intel’s Eric Paulos, a participant at Vancouver, is involved in mobile applications and experiments which clearly hold to a vision of what Salon girl calls a ‘playful digital city’. He says in the Salon piece: Probably the big thing was try to bring the discussion away from the immediacy of things that promote efficiency or productivity...Even though these are important goals, it's important to acknowledge that things we actually cherish in life in home or the city are not always about efficiency. They are intangible; they get at emotional experiences. It's what constitutes the richness of people's lives… People talk about mobile computing as now you'll be able to leave your home and go to a cafe or park and maybe go online and check e-mail. But we're interested in something much bigger than that. We're interested in the social cues that people already perform in urban spaces, in the artifacts that already exist, like trash cans, park benches, and how they will be mapped or reappropriated into a playful network of digital life on the streets. T  he obvious question which could be asked here is: what kind of digital network might play around the existence of a trash can? (Actually, one which “looks into the minutia of our own traces of publicly discarded city debris, enabling us to formulate some notion of collective urban identity across urban landscapes”.23) Another theme of Paulos’s work centres on the notion of ‘Familiar Strangers’ – those faces we recognize in our urban street routines, yet do not attempt to contact or converse with. Could near-space mobile networks like Bluetooth or Wi-Fi help people to build up their sense of urban community, with or without talking or touching?24 These whimsical, poetic, almost (in the case of the trash can) Duchampian strategies for exploring the frontiers of ubicomp are at the outer fringes of the ‘playful’ rather than the ‘pragmatic’ digital city.25 Somewhat more mainstream, and certainly with one eye towards commercial application, is the whole field of urban gaming with mobile networked technologies. A classic example at Vancouver was Liz Goodman’s FIASCO: which used “New York City as a game board and networked telecommunications as dice”, in which “players conquer and control turf – as represented on virtual map of the city – by performing and documenting game moves on the real-world streets of the city”.26 The whole realm of mobile gaming, from commercial devices like N-Gage and the forthcoming PS2 handheld, to leisure and training uses of GPS like ‘geo-caching’27, is one of the great monetary hopes of both the computer game and telecoms sector. The well-charted and emergent phenomenon of cellphone ‘swarming’ in cities as far apart as Tokyo and Helsinki, and the more mindful phenomenon of flash mobs and smart mobs28, is the attitudinal and behavioural groundswell upon which more commercial models of play-based mobile interaction hope to rest.29 I  n terms of the general shift towards a play-oriented culture and society in the developed West outlined earlier, the attitudes of these ‘mobiles’ (as Amy Jo Kim calls them) are worth some deeper consideration. The embrace of mobility by Generation Y or the Millenials is having tangible effects on their mores and ethics. A fascinating report from the advertisers BBDO (part of Omnicom) this year, surveying 1600 young European mobile phone users, found them to be unwilling to fight a war, distrustful of large organizations and national duties, actively filtering their social encounters through mobiles, yet craving new experiences with their chosen peers and friends. This is causing some disquiet to advertisers: the mobile phone "is the ultimate expression of an individualistic society, which I think is the thing worrying everyone," says Dan O'Donoghue, strategic planning director for Publicis, the marketing group. "We are all becoming so individualistic we have no relation to society." 30 This 'networked individualism', as the Netlab's Barry Wellman31 puts it, doesn't imply the end of social bonds, but our ability to play with our sense of connectedness to others.32 With the ubiquity of connection and computation a rising trend, Wellman notes a shift away from definition by place, towards person. In his words, 'the person is the portal': This shift facilitates personal communities that supply the essentials of community separately to each individual: support, sociability, information, social identities and a sense of belonging. The person, rather than the household or group, is the primary unit of connectivity. Just as 24/7/365 Internet computing means the ready availability of people in specific places, the proliferation of mobile phones and wireless computing increasingly is coming to mean an even greater availability of people without regard to place. Supportive convoys travel ethereally with each person.33 Yet at the Nokia Playshop event in Vancouver, the information designer Malcolm McCullough stressed how misleading the notion of placelessness implied by pervasive and ubiquitous ICT could be. Reality, real urban space, is becoming saturated with chips and data - 95% of chips don't find their way onto motherboards… If the goal of ICT is to do anything, anytime, anyplace, then you are nowhere. The truth is that our built environments are becoming more intelligent, and thus our places become more enchanted, not disenchanted. How does this relate to play? We delight in being somewhere - most metaphors are based on the direct experience of being somewhere. The haptic orientation system of the human body craves and demands a sense of place. The challenge for interaction designers in the ubiquitously connected city isn't to create 'eye candy', but foot candy - networks that support our walking, exploring, our passagiata. A more elegant word for it is 'propinquity' - the casual rubbing of shoulders in the city… Our buildings and architecture can set the stage and cue the actions of digital citizens and the playing-out of their lifestyles.34 M  cCullough’s musing on the relationship between a city’s architecture, and our new and ubiquitous informational networks, has the possibility of dismantling that dichotomy between pragmatism and playfulness in urban digital policy – that is, between top down planners seeking efficiency and bottom-up experimentalists seeking thrills and subversions. His notion of a “digital ground” upon which new architectures can be built, or old ones re-purposed, is similar to my own of the infrastructural “grounds of play” upon which self-realising players can sustainably fashion their life-styles.35 Both acknowledge the importance of designing and fashioning the grounds – or as McCullough might also say, the fixity – that enables the flow of a dynamic urban life: You cannot carry all the world about in your bag. It’s important to have someplace to go. Even real nomads do not wander randomly, but instead make their rounds. To them, as to us, it’s important to have some places that you really know how to play, where life really flows…. 36As both hardware and software, both architecture and interaction design compose the fixity necessary for better flow of the tacit knowledge that resides in communities. The word ‘architecture’, which derives from the Greek for master builder, has been appropriated to describe all manner of technological designs that are infrastructural, irreversible and which shape everyday activity in one way or another.37 So instead “pragmatic” versus “playful”, it may be more generative to think of the digital city as occupied by a field of various different players, from enterprise players to prankster players, social players to creative/artistic players – commonly grounded in architectures (both physical and digital) of value, yet all committed to the flow, fluidity and movement of city life.38 PLAY, MOBILITY AND LEARNING How might mobile players fit into a model of urban learning? The Urban Learning Space's own prospectus, outlined earlier this year, makes the context clear: The situation of learning within the non-linear and complex realities of people's lives will be aided by the availability of technology, but will also require good design and the fusion of different creative perspectives ranging from the arts to business. In a world where human performance has been identified as the most important strategic factor by three quarters of executives world wide (ahead of productivity and technology), the availability of effective and efficient learning systems will become an ever increasing priority for individuals, businesses and cities. If 'human performance' is seen as a strategic factor, then play - as both an underutilised (because misunderstood) capacity, and as a growing explicit culture - will be an essential input and context. What is most useful about cultures of play from an urban learning perspective is that they mix together market and non-market forms, collective and individual values, in unpredictable and generative ways. As it operates in the urban fabric, play is always, as it were, a 'public-private partnership'. Yet it is the assumed relationship between ‘human performance’ and ‘effective and efficient learning systems’ that mobile play, and mobile players, trouble and question. Certainly, as the work of Nesta Future Lab and Becta on games, mobile networks, and ubi-comp in education has shown, schoolchildren’s existing and ‘native’ digital literacy in these forms presents a profound challenge to existing institutional forms of learning.39 Their daily usages of mobile phones, console and handheld game platforms, and blogs/chatrooms on the internet (home and web café) is almost a counter-reality - where the “humanity performed” is both relationship-centred and fantasy-seeking, using ICT to be in the streets with friends as much as behind a terminal chasing avatars, both local in direct experience and global in cultural reference. Formal education is largely unwilling (or perhaps unable) to respond to this new ‘liquid modernity’ of the Generation Y/Millenial generation, and particularly its ‘networked individualism’.40 The bildungsoman (or narrative of person-in-society) that a world of mobile and networked players suggests is not yet entirely clear – and without that narrative, schools will be unsure to what efficient and effective ends its learning systems might be put.41 There might even be something of a evolutionary and neurological gulf between a generation of digital natives and their older administrators and educators, as the e-education consultant Marc Prensky notes: The students who have grown up in the last 25 years have had an extraordinary, never-before-seen set of formative experiences: an average of close to 10,000 hours playing video games, over 200,000 e-mails and instant messages sent and received, close to 10,000 hours of talking, playing games and using data on digital mobile phones, over 20,000 hours of watching TV (a high percentage being fast-speed MTV), almost 500,000 commercials seen – all before they finish their A levels. And maybe, at the very most, 5000 hours of book reading. We know from contemporary neurobiology that experiences of this intensity alter the brains of those who receive them in ways that enable them to accommodate and deal with these experiences more easily. So we now have a generation of students that is better at taking in information and making decisions quickly, better at multitasking and parallel processing; a generation that thinks graphically rather than textually, assumes connectivity, and is accustomed to seeing the world through a lens of games and play.42 T  he impact of this digital and ludic generation – what I have called ‘soulitarians’ – is still being reckoned with (though some are already beginning to anticipate what their maturity might mean for all kinds of organizational and public leadership. How might young gamers become adult players?43). The broader enterprise context for urban learning – that cross-generational ability to reskill, reconfigure and transform one’s productive and creative capacities, in the face of incessant changes in society and technology – is equally daunting. The urbanist Richard Florida, in his theses about the ‘creative classes’, has made a genuinely liberating connection between what could be called ‘players’ values – bohemia, lifestyle diversity, artistic primacy – and hi-tech prosperity in cities. Florida sees these realms connected by municipal investment in strong, high-quality, and accessible civic spaces and public amenities (from top-class universities to council-controlled low-rent neighbourhoods) – the reproduction of creativity, rather than simply the reproduction of labour.44 Yet there might still be something overly institutional about Florida’s recommendation of the ‘campus town’ as the ideal model for a truly enterprising and dynamic city. There is something in the concept of 'urban learning' - learning which uses the complex reality and experience of the urban as the occasion for knowledge and understanding – which should be held on to and explored, in the manner of our previously cited ubi-comp researchers. In recent writings, the Catalonian urbanist Manuel Castells has talked of the ‘Catalonia City’ model for urban development in Barcelona – an image of urban living that invests in “the vitality of public space in all sectors” (“not fancy, just good”), the hypermobility of connected citizens (meaning transport systems and cellphones), and “public works as symbolic architecture”.45 What Castells points to is a systemic nurturing of the urban space itself - which, in its emergent potential for networked connectedness between citizens, would provide the “ground” for creative living, playfully and digitally. Perhaps urban learning could become a bridging process, a holding space, between those paradoxical tendencies towards placed-ness and placelessness, that “glo-cality”, which mobile players revel in and seek out in their city lives. One of those “ethereal supportive convoys” mentioned by Barry Wellman, travelling with each mobile player in the urban space, might well be education, in either the informal or formal sense. 46 Urban learning could provoke a necessary shift in our education models from top-down institution to self-determined process – one which has been anticipated for some time now.47 How can meaning and context become accessible to mobile players? Might the very dynamic of cities shape some of the fundamental aims of education? How can learning enrich the vitality of public space? How might a “learning web” support a mass innovation society? Could the institutions that claim to support a culture of “life-long learning” adapt themselves to the lifestyles and desires of networked individualists? Or will ever-more intelligent knowledge retrieval systems (eg, The Semantic Web48), accessible ubiquitously, be enough to resource the enterprising, glo-cally able player? Whatever the answers (or better questions) in response to this list, the players’ perspective will ensure that whatever evolution of the socio-technical “matrix” we face – whether an ‘urban learning space’ or otherwise – the focus will be on the empowerment and imagination of the user, participant and agent. 1NOTES This paper is partly based on my participation in a two-day seminar on Play and Mobility, organised by Nokia Ventures and Futures in Vancouver, Nov 29th-30th 2004. Many thanks to Jonathan Clark at Scottish Enterprise Urban Learning Space for making attendance at this event possible. 2 For a critique of The Matrix as too pessimistic a view of the power of technology to rob humans of their agency and ability to shape the future, see Hubert Dreyfus and Steven Drayfus, “Existential Philosophy and the Brave New World of The Matrix”, essay available at http://whatisthematrix.warnerbros.com/rl_cmp/new_phil_fr_dreyfus.html 3 Madeleine Bunting, Willing Slaves: How the Overwork Culture Is Ruling Our Lives, Harper Collins, 2004 4http://www.newstatesman.com/site.php3?newTemplate=NSReview_Bshop&newDisplayURN=300000084899 5 http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_PublicationDetail.aspx?pid=193 6 http://wvs.isr.umich.edu/papers/globaliza.pdf 7http://www.renewal.org.uk/issues/2003_Volume_11/Summer%202003%20Volume_11_2/Summer%202003%2011_2%20index.htm 8 http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=109&STORY=/www/story/11-08-2004/0002397242&EDATE 9 http://www.demos.co.uk/catalogue/proameconomy/ 10 http://www.renewal.org.uk/issues/2004%20Voulme%2012/Bentley.htm 11 See Brian Sutton-Smith, The Ambiguity of Play, Harvard, 1997 12 Jon Agar, Constant Touch: A Brief History of the Mobile Phone, Icon, 2003 13 See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3620024.stm and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/3620834.stm 14 On US municipal wifi, see http://news.ft.com/cms/s/6261de60-6576-11d9-8ff0-00000e2511c8.html, and http://www.muniwireless.com/reports/ 15 Howard Rheingold, ‘Netlab Probes the Global Village’, http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101262 16 Adam Greenfield, ‘All watched over by machines of loving grace: Some ethical guidelines for user experience in ubiquitous-computing settings’, http://www.boxesandarrows.com/archives/all_watched_over_by_machines_of_loving_grace_some_ethical_guidelines_for_user_experience_in_ubiquitouscomputing_settings_1.php 17 ibid 18 http://www.diepunyhumans.com/archives/000346.html, See also Matt Jones’ presentation to Design Engaged, http://www.blackbeltjones.com/de04/DesignEngaged_RFID_with_notes.pdf. Jones’s website is http://www.blackbeltjones.com/work 19 http://avantgame.com/The%20Curious%20Interface.pdf 20 From a video of the Vancouver conference participants made by Justin Hall, available at http://www.links.net/vita/usc/flix/CTCS505Final.mov 21 http://www.seamful.com, http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~matthew/ 22 http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/11/29/digital_metropolis/index_np.html 23 “As urban places are traversed, used, experienced, and neglected, a pattern or trace of trash is created on the landscape. What does the type and/or amount of trash say about a place and people that frequent (or neglect) it? Can new urban computing technologies influence trash accumulation, collection, awareness? Can we observe and interpret patterns of usage perhaps near a public city trashcan that can reveal a larger story of the place and people that inhabit and traverse it?” http://berkeley.intel-research.net/paulos/pubs/papers/Rubbish%20Workshop%20(CSCW%202004).pdf 24 http://berkeley.intel-research.net/paulos/pubs/papers/Familiar%20Stranger%20(CHI%202004).pdf 25 Anne Galloway is the foremost theorist of the more avant-garde and critical practice of playful mobility with urban ubi-comp. See her paper, Playful Mobilities, and the many ‘street’ projects cited there in. http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org/research_design/papers/Galloway_Playful_Mobilities.pdf 26 http://www.confectious.net/writing/Fiasco_ReflectiveHCI.pdf 27 http://www.geocaching.com/: for training applications, see http://www.playtimeinc.com/products_geoteaming.htm 28 Howard Rheingold’s web-support for his book Smart Mobs is an extraordinarily useful archive on these issues. For news and ideas-items on swarming and smart-mobs, see http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/cat_smart_mobs_and_the_power_of_the_mobile_many.html and 29 See Amy Jo Kim, ‘The Network Is The Game: Social Trends in Mobile Entertainment’, http://www.socialdesigner.net/GDC2004/index_files/frame.htm. Also for regular updates on this sector, see another Vancouver participant, game designer and Nokia consultant Greg Costikian, and his weblog at http://www.costik.com/weblog/ . The Guardian’s Gamesblog (http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/games/) is also useful. 30http://news.ft.com/cms/s/46410b6c-31bd-11d9-97c0-00000e2511c8.html 31 http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/netlab/ 32 The rise of interactive tv shows like Big Brother, which also allow the viewer to see social rituals and codes explicitly ‘played’ with, is perhaps another indicative cultural sign of this ‘networked’ or ‘connected individualism’. 33http://www.thefeature.com/article?articleid=101262&ref=4810135, see also Wellman’s piece in Reciever, http://www.receiver.vodafone.com/11/articles/index05.html 34 From notes taken by author at event. See also McCullough’s ‘Digital Ground: Fixity, Flow and Engagement with Context’ http://flow.doorsofperception.com/content/mccullough_archis_trans.html, and his book, Digital Ground : Architecture, Pervasive Computing and Environmental Knowing (MIT, 2004) 35 See Pat Kane, The Play Ethic: A Manifesto for a Different Way of Living (Macmillan, 2004), for an expanded spectrum of possible players’ identities in a societal context 36 http://flow.doorsofperception.com/content/mccullough_trans.html 37 http://flow.doorsofperception.com/content/mccullough_archis_trans.html 38 ‘Architecture of value’ is the phrase Lawrence Lessig uses to describe the internet as an end-to-end network – a construction/constitution that was explicitly designed to empower end users, rather than central controllers. See his The Future of Ideas: the fate of the commons in a connected world, Vintage, 2002. 39 See NestaLab’s literature reviews - http://www.nestafuturelab.org/research/lit_reviews.htm, particularly Report 8: Literature Review in Games and Learning, Report 11: Literature Review in Mobile Technologies and Learning, and Report 12: Literature Review in Learning with Tangible Technologies 40 See Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity, 2003 41 That a ‘play ethic’ might be the kind of broad social narrative that might legitimate educational reform, see The Play Ethic, Chapter 6, Wisdom Lovers: An Education for Players. 42 Marc Prensky, in LTS Connected magazine, on the http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/connected/connected10/byteback/usetheirtools.asp 43 See Got Game: How The Gamer Generation is Changing Business For Ever, John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade, Harvard Business Press, 2004. For interview with authors, go to http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item.jhtml?id=4429&t=innovation 44 For Florida’s latest response to his thesis, see http://www.creativeclass.org/acrobat/squelchers_document050204.pdf 45 Manuel Castells, "Cities in the Information Age", a lecture in ‘The City’ series, at South Asia Studies department in Berkeley, October 28, 2004. http://ias.berkeley.edu/SouthAsia/city.pdf Quotes taken from blogged notes at http://www.peterme.com/archives/000413.html 46 Barry Wellman, “Physical Place and CyberPlace: The Rise of Personalized Networking”, Barry February 2001, http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman/publications/individualism/ijurr3a1.htm 47 Even considering its late sixties’ technological shortcomings, Ivan Illich’s chapter on the ‘Learning Web’ in Deschooling Society is an extraordinary vision of an education process that takes the city and its affordances as the moment of learning. The ‘Learning Web’ chapter is available at http://www.preservenet.com/theory/Illich/Deschooling/chap6.html 48 Stutt, A. and Motta, E. (2004). “Semantic Learning Webs”. Journal of Interactive Media in Education, 2004 (10).http://www-jime.open.ac.uk/2004/10/stutt-2004-10-disc-paper.html For more information contact Pat Kane at patkane@theplayethic.com, or visit http://www.theplayethic.com Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 104.94 Kb. Share with your friends:
|
