DLI: Mobile Quests that Remix Public Events for Social Change?

In this workshop, small groups will design their own "quests" to hack public urban events.  Mobile phones are at the center of our approach, and we will help participants explore how locative media can intersect with public events like festivals, parades and tours.  The workshop builds on our experience designing quests within a large Los Angeles event called CicLAvia, which regularly transforms 10+ miles of downtown L.A. into a car-free zone for 80,000 people to re-imagine their city.

Our designs will be based around a timely question: As more cities host events like CicLAvia that open the streets, how can we collaborate with community-based organizations to plant mobile "hooks and triggers" for longer-term civic learning and social change?  (This notion of hooks and triggers is borrowed from game design as discussed by Katie Salen.)

Our approach is aggressively democratic on several fronts.  We emphasize mobile designs that work in poorer communities and ideally avoid smartphones entirely.  The workshop will introduce several technologies, including one that allows for basic phones to create and exchange multimedia using basic text and picture messaging.  (This is based on the system designed with day laborers in Los Angeles called Mobile Voices.)  Another technology we will cover is a branching text-message tool akin to choose-your-own adventure books. 

We also seek to democratize innovation by going beyond technology, and looking to design the social fabric.  Social change is sustained and secured with organizations.  This necessitates a kind of design which targets community-based partnerships as much as user experience.  For this workshop, the small groups will be challenged to create designs that support multiple organizations operating quests in parallel, each with its own social change objectives, including research efforts based at universities. 

This workshop will demo and modify the ParTour system we tested in Los Angeles this fall.  On our pilot, we rapidly trained more than 70 individuals and sent them on quests as urban storytellers, mappers and photographers. 

For the workshop, small groups will each tackle a recurring event in a major city, and develop a plan to hack it with a combination of mobile technology and community partnerships.  We will borrow rapid prototyping techniques from the world of game design, using role play and paper designs.  Yet all groups will also be asked to apply some of the mobile technologies we will teach.  After groups demonstrate their designs by city, the full group will debrief on implications of this exercise for both research and mobile practice.

Organizer(s): 
Benjamin Stokes
Francois Bar
George Villanueva
Participants: 
Benjamin Stokes
Francois Bar
George Villanueva
Otto Khera