The Playful

OpenSourcery

2007-08-01T13:16:00.000Z

Great to see Mago Julian and Zachary Lieberman developing magic together. Check out the vid

HE Academy Conference

2007-07-09T08:45:00.000Z

Had a fascinating time at the HE Academy Conference last week. Higher Education in the UK is going through the biggest change since the polytechnics became Universities but few who work in HE seem to have noticed. Luckily the speakers and delegates of the conference are among those who have and there was an air of both concern and excitement.

I ran a LEGO Serious Play workshop and found some new ways of applying the techniques to HE issues.

Mago Julián

2007-06-02T12:03:00.001Z

00057, originally uploaded by medialab_interactivos.

Here is the magician Julián performing in Madrid. He is a great thinker on magic as well as a natural magician. He is working with zachary lieberman to produce effects using video capture and manipulation. Manipulation is a word that both magicians and video workers are fond of.

Mago Miguel Ángel Gea

2007-06-01T14:03:00.001Z

As the theme of Interactivos was Magic and Technology we held a magic circle each evening at a bar near Medialab Madrid called La Marisina. We taught and practiced magic and discussed the theories and philosophies of the magical arts and how they reate to technology and to other art forms.

Here is Miguel Ángel Gea, an incredible skilled magician who studies magic with the master Juan Tamariz.

Miguel, originally uploaded by medialab_interactivos.

Interactivos

2007-05-27T11:14:00.000Z

I'm at Interactivos in Madrid all week. Just been listening to the project ideas and there are some fascinating explorations of magic and technology.

One site to look at comes from lalalab.org who are making augmented reality installations that are very playful.

The DoubleClick Project

2007-05-02T14:07:00.000Z

The DoubleClick Project has been using Lego Serious Play with Creative Technology students at The University of Huddersfield. Check out the smiling faces...
The DoubleClick Project

Interactivos: Magic & Technology

2007-05-01T13:43:00.000Z

I've been invited by Medialab Madrid to give a presentation on Magic & Technology at the start of Interactivos.

This is a two week workshop in which artists make work together and produce a show at the end. This year they are responding to the theme of magic.

I'm looking forward to this a lot. I get to perform magic but also talk about the philosophies of the great magical thinkers. I seldom get to do both of these things.

Citizen Players vs. Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy

2007-05-01T12:12:00.000Z

This is an outline of the talk I gave at the Meeting of Minds think tank on User Generated Content last week. Thanks must go to Pat Kane whose inspiring talk at Lego the week previously and a conversation I had with him while waiting for planes in Billund and Amsterdam helped form much of this talk. The good stuff is probably from him and the dodgy thoughts from me.

Citizen Players vs. Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy

In 2020 cyberspace will continue to be a place for play. I'd like to discuss the tension between positive and negative play and how this relates to citizenship.

I refer to three of the greatest works of predictive fiction to illustrate my pessimistic view.

"The Director and his students stood for a short time watching a game of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy. Twenty children were grouped in a circle round a chrome steel tower. A ball thrown up so as to land on the platform at the top of the tower rolled down into the interior, fell on a rapidly revolving disk, was hurled through one or other of the numerous apertures pierced in the cylindrical casing, and had to be caught." Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

The game of Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy is invented, in part, to keep the machines of industry moving. Throwing a ball to each other is just as much fun but does not need manufacturing. The game is important as a form of social control. To quote Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death

"Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure."

Commentators such as Lawrence Lessig recognise that the Internet is a contested space that must be actively defended from those who wish to control and own it. The Orwellian fear of a captured Internet is real and the coming years will see this battle intensify as the second billion arrive in cyberspace and we face what Ethan Zuckerman has referred to as the problem of the Internets. I will return to this.

In contrast, Huxley's dystopian vision sees the people being distracted by interactive media (the feelies), sex (the Internet), and games. All brought together in the Hot Coffee mod of Grand Theft Auto.

Huxley could not have imagined a Bumble-Puppy as elaborate as GTA let alone Second Life.

But Huxley's dystopia is still a world of inflicted pleasures. What happens when we generate our own pleasures?

I have mentioned both 1984 and Brave New World. My third classic of predictive fiction is the Judge Dredd stories in the comic 2000AD.

In one issue of 2000AD Mega City One has passed a law making all pointless hobbies illegal. Judge Dredd arrests a man who has spent the last 15 years trying to headbutt an egg, dropped from an elaborate mechanism, into a bucket of sand without breaking it. It is a crime because all citizens are required to actively contribute to society and not to distract themselves with useless pleasures.

One look at the present cyberspace is enough to feel a little sympathy for Judge Dredd's position. And as we look forward to 2020 it is possible to see this thread of useless, distracting hobbies becoming a real issue for those of us who are concerned about the level of political engagement in West. It has been said that the reason that the UK has never had a successful political revolution is that there is a flaw in our national character that can be summarized with one word: trainspotting. I fear that this is becoming a cultural trait of cyberspace.

It is easy to see the problem of those who wish to control the Internet though it is not easy to actually fight them. The problem of the Internet as a Bumble-Puppy is harder to see.

So my pessimistic view of 2020 cyberspace is of a space of dumb distractions, mindless chatter, petty bickering, divided energies.

My optimistic view? Let me begin with a critique of the phrase User Generated Content - is a term that reveals more about the incumbent media organizations and those who wish to monetize the creative work of others than it does about the people who make the stuff that it refers to.

I have always disliked the term content when applied to media. It strips creative work of all its emotion, energy and subtlety. A film-maker does not feel that she is generating content - like some kind of factory robot. Neither does she feel like a user - a junkie factory robot perhaps?

People Make Stuff. They always have done. This clarifies the issue for me. What kind of stuff will people be making in 2020 and what does it mean for citizenship.

Although recent MORI polls suggest that 32% of the UK population still know nothing about climate change and there has been little significant lifestyle change trend forecasters as diverse as Marian Saltzman, Rohit Talwar and Faith Popcorn all predict rises in environmental concern, conscientious consumption and moral status anxiety. This trend will favor the locally made over the mass manufactured and I suggest it will influence how we build 2020 cyberspace.

Paul Harris of The Guardian describes The Arcade Fire as a band who were shaped in the innocent 1990 when people talked of the end of history. But then came 9/11, the war on terror and climate change. Their music expresses this climate of angst and the same concerns are palpable in cyberspace. Threaded between the song-mimes of YouTube and the glitter outfits of MySpace are similar serious concerns about terror, war, imperialism and the environment.

This increased seriousness is picked up in the UK by Gordon Brown in this way,

"I think we're moving from this period when, if you like, celebrity matters, when people have become famous for being famous. I think you can see that in other countries too - people are moving away from that to what lies behind the character and the personality... People are wanting the concerns that they have discussed in a rounded way. So I'm not sure that the public are in love with trivia."

David Milliband, a possible candidate for Labour leadership in the UK outlines his new political vision,

"The 1950s were the "I need" era when people required state help with housing, education and health. Then came the 1980s, the "I want era" when everyone yearned for material wealth. Today we are in the "I can" era, where government and the people - liberated and better informed by new technology yet still wanting the reassurance of involvement in community causes - can and must work together to solve the challenges of a chaotic world.... The notion that the country that succeeds will be the country of players not spectators is a very powerful notion. The audience has gone to the stage."

This is a seductive view. People would no longer be spectators of government but players in it. We can note how a similar recognition of the urge to participate meaningfully in the polis as an independent player occurs in Autonomist writers Paolo Virno and Antonio Negri and whose concept of the multitude is particularly relevant to a political imagining of cyberspace in 2020.

The multitude is seen as composed of autonomous individuals who, despite differing cultures, views and political stances, are both willing and able to come together to struggle for its shared goals or against its shared enemies.

By 2020, should we maintain the free use of the Internet, we will certainly have the technological ability to allow the multitude to share concepts about its goals and its enemies. I use the word concepts rather than information because we will have moved beyond a passive swapping of information and will be exchanging something far more powerful - professionally-realized, broadcast-standard stories. These will not just be the work of tech-savvy individual. We have begun to see decision markets applied not just to the rating of media but to the making of media.

A Swarm of Angels is an open source film project, whose aim is to make the world’s first Internet-funded, crewed and distributed feature film. The crowdsourcing project aims to attract 50,000 individual subscribers each contributing £25 to the production.

We will have the ability to come together on political issues and the wisdom of the crowd suggests that given autonomy, communication, and decentralization we could be making good decisions by 2020. But will we have the will to overcome our differences?

To return to Zuckerman's problem of the Internets: We now have more than a billion people online but the idea that we all work and play on a common global internet is an illusion. As Zuckerman says,

"The web is becoming ever more fragmented, and international borders are increasingly visible online. More and more web pages are appearing in languages other than English. China has more than 130 million Internet users and is starting to play by its own rules. Soon to follow are the Middle East, India, Russia and Brazil. Is the technology that we thought was uniting us really dividing us?"

By 2020 the mix of Internet cultures will mean that the stories we tell are more likely to offend one group or another. Frank Furedi has said that a true community is somewhere that it is difficult to leave. The practically infinite size of cyberspace makes it easy to opt-out of of a community and build another.

Either the Internets will segment out and have little to do with each other, reflecting the issues of multiculturalism, integration and citizenship seen by European nation states facing mass migration of workforces, or we find ways to build bridges between online communities and some of the ideals of the multitude are realized.

The eTwinning project uses the Internet to run projects between schools in Europe highlighting the experience of working with other cultures for children. By 2020 we may be eTwinning between the Internets in order to foster multicultural understanding.

It has been suggested that play is intrinsically ethical as it requires the ability to creatively imagine how others perceive you. Such ethical play will necessary to if we are to be player citizens both in Milliband's national sense and as citizens of the Internets.

Pat Kane, author of The Play Ethic, suggests the metaphor of a well-constructed playground for player citizens of the future. The challenge for 2020 is to build such a playground without being distracted by bumble-puppies.

MOM - Meeting Of Minds, Antwerp

2007-04-29T21:43:00.001Z

Had an interesting couple of day in Antwerp at the Meeting of Minds discussing the future of User Generated Content. Great hosts Ann and Stefan of C.H.I.P.S

Loïc Le Meur was entertaining and sharp on why TV sucks.

John Buckman was good on the two different visions on the future of tech taken by Ray Kurtzweil and Bruce Sterling. And I had a great time hunting for puddings and swopping books with him in the bars of Antwerp.

MOM - Meeting Of Minds, originally uploaded by pietel.

The Joy of Not Knowing

2007-01-03T23:16:00.000Z

This article was originally written for the NESTA website Inspire Me section. Since NESTA has revamped its website it has vanished and I've had a number of requests for it so here it is again.

The Joy of Not Knowing

Richard P Feynman, one of the great physicists and communicators of science of the twentieth century, used to tell a story of how as a boy he noticed that the ball in his play wagon would appear to roll to the back of the wagon when he pulled it forward and to the front when he stopped. He asked his father to explain why and his father said, “The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving and things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard.” And then he added, “This tendency is called inertia but nobody knows why it’s true.”

Feynman called this a “deep understanding” - an acknowledgment of the difference between knowing the name of something and really knowing something. It is a fine example of how science can be taught with the mystery intact.

The event that most changed my own view of knowledge occurred at the age of eight having moved to a new school in Mid-Wales. The teacher asked our class if we knew what caused travel sickness and I answered that it was something to do with vibrations on hairs inside your ears, a bit of knowledge I’d picked up from mums A-level biology textbooks. Not only did the teacher, preferring a vibrating-belly theory, deny there was any such mechanism but, confronted with my bratty insistence, fetched another teacher to tell me I was wrong. Producing the textbook a few days later did nothing to win her to my case.

A year later my mum returned from a parent teacher evening having been told that I wasted my time in the library checking everything my teachers said. Unwittingly the school’s bad teaching had resulted in a positive effect. Having realised that teachers didn’t know everything, I discovered that that not being told the answers could be an enjoyable mystery.

I use the word mystery when recounting these learning experiences because how we handle teaching the limits of our knowledge lies at the heart of both of them. Magic tricks are also a source of mystery and it was around this age that I learnt my first trick, a simple thing my father did with two cigarette papers playing the parts of the two little dicky birds Peter and Paul flying away and then returning again.

To most people today magic and science would seem to occupy opposing views of the world, the one concerned with trickery and deceit and the other with revelation and truth. The truth is often more complex as the story of a famous stage illusion will show.

Professor John Henry Pepper became the director of the Royal Polytechnic Institute in 1854 and introduced crowd-pleasing attractions such as the Signor Buono Core who walked through fire and was known as the Italian Salamander. His most famous illusion was ‘Pepper’s Ghost Illusion,’ a carefully constructed combination of mirrors and lighting that combined to produce ghosts on the stage.

The ghost illusion was first demonstrated on 24 December 1862, in an adaptation of a Dickens Christmas story. Pepper had originally intended to follow the demonstration with a lecture on the science behind the effect. But when he saw the effect the illusion had on the audience he realised that he had a winning attraction and kept the science a secret.

Audiences were fascinated. Intrigued spectators returned again and again to ponder the illusion. Keeping the explanation a secret ultimately communicated the science behind the illusion to many more people than an immediate explanation would have done. The Pepper’s Ghost Illusion was extraordinarily popular and was seen by nearly a quarter of a million people. It was licensed to theaters around Britain and a decade later Pepper took the effect to America.

There is something that all those who intend to communicate the wonders of science can learn from Pepper’s decision to keep the mechanics of the illusion a secret. There are times when the wonder must be left alone.

Jim Steinmeyer is one of the greatest living illusion designers having worked with the top stage magicians as well as designing illusions for Disney theme parks and stage effects for shows such as The Invisible Man. He has said, “Unfortunately, science often serves the purpose of actively teaching us to stop wondering about things, of causing us to lose interest.”

There is very little room for mystery in our current science teaching. But signs are that things are changing. We are coming to realise that great scientists become interested in science not because of the things we know but the things we don’t know.

Working with magicians, teachers, youth groups, and toy and game designers I am interested in activities that teach science by explaining some phenomena while keeping the mechanisms behind others a mystery. An activity can sometimes be like a story with an unexplained cliffhanger at the end, a mystery to take away and ponder. It’s often a case of looking for the moments of magic in a scientific story. An example of this is the transition of water from liquid to solid. While this is a mundane effect if it occurs overnight in your fridge, it’s a magical effect if you can pour a small cup of water into your closed fist and open it to reveal snow. This is a simple scientific trick used by both teachers and magicians.

Seneca, Rome's leading intellectual figure in the mid-1st century AD, enjoyed the mystery of the street magic of the time: “If I get to know how a trick is done, I lose my interest in it.” This is more than just appreciating the beauty of a mystery well performed. Seneca understood that knowing how something works can lessen our interest in it, but good scientists and good magicians take pleasure in both knowing and in not knowing.

Good teachers balance these two pleasures so that they work together like cogs that drive our learning. Acknowledging this fact could lead to major changes in the way science is communicated. It could also lead to a new generation of intrigued and fascinated schoolchildren - inquiring individuals who could be the Feynmans of tomorrow.

Digital Creativity Publication

2007-01-03T15:07:00.000Z

I recently published a paper in Digital Creativity journal called Building magical realms: responses to pervasive and locative media technology. This reports on a whole heap of workshops with young people exploring new tech and letting them in on the secrets of participatory design and futurology. Their responses to how us grown-ups go about imagining the future are worth listening to.

Central School of Speech and Drama

2006-12-10T16:01:00.000Z

This week I ran a three day workshop for Central School of Speech and Drama on themes of Interactivity. We used GPS to explore the way we interact with the city and Lego Serious Play to talk about how we interact with each other. Students captured the pocess with video, photos, and stories. A fantastic three days that gave me lots of ideas about developing Lego SP as a creative tool for use in devising performance.

Student Retention

2006-11-09T18:06:00.000Z

With the drive for widening participation in Higher Education comes the danger of students making wrong decisions and dropping out of courses. Dropping out of HE can put a students career back many years so finding ways of helping them to make the right choices and to help them settle and take ownership of their learning is crucial. It appears that communication is a key issue here.

This week I gave a talk at the Student Retention Forum on how my work with Lego Serious Play could help with communication between students as they work with staff to model their sense of where they are in the story of their learning.

Moon Golf Bowie

2006-10-31T20:16:00.000Z

The Playtime day at the London Games Festival last month was the launch of Tim Wright's new project. Tim is one of the few writers to find original ways of telling meaningful stories with websites, mobile phone and email. His collaborations with Rob Bevan as XPT are always fun and can, as with his "90% true story" In Search of Oldton, be delicate, personal and moving.

His new 30 year plan, to play golf on the moon with David Bowie, can be found at Golf On The Moon. As part of the launch of this project we helped Tim think and communicate like an astronaut, had some Bowie karaoke, and played lunar golf on the streets of Soho.

He needs your help.

Hurd Rolland

2006-10-29T16:10:00.000Z

Last week I gave a talk on pitching to the Hurd Rolland Partnership, an architectural practice with offices in London, Rossend Castle and Manchester. A very interesting practice with some impressive projects underway.

The talk covered the importance of play in contemporary design practice and the use of Lego Serious Play as one method of practicing pitching in a playful manner.

After the talk we chatted about the issues that architects face when pitching to clients, not least of which is the fact that, with architectural projects, the client is going to be spending a significant amount of their money and so is generally wary and a little scared. Government clients are particularly unbending, generally for good reasons as they are spending public money but this can make them humourless and unresponsive to creative ideas. It’s an age-old clash of motivation and language. Seen as a battle between Art and Function the conversation can easily stall. We talked about how to reach the understanding that both sides are often after the same thing, an elegant marriage of form and function rather than an ugly compromise.

Helsinki Workshop: Magic, Media and Lego

2006-10-16T14:34:00.000Z

Bruce Tognazzini has argued that knowledge of “the principles, techniques and ethics of magic” are invaluable in software design, suggesting that software designers should study the literature of illusion design and the performances of master magicians and also practice the techniques of conjuring in order to improve their design process.

In August 2006 at The Telecommunications Software and Multimedia Laboratory (TML) in Helsinki, a group of software designers, game designers and TV producers explored this advice through a week-long workshop led by The Playful.

This workshops explored how the practice of conjuring can play a part in the creative technology design process and examined the relationships between: magic, interactive storytelling, game design and user centred design; calm technology, misdirection and the psychology of attention; Disney’s weenies, game world design, and stage illusions; optical conjuring, visualization technologies, and vanishing an elephant; off-beats, video editing and the psychology of rhythm; character animation, natural movement and guilt; affordances, inner scripts, and anthropomorphism; psychological suggestion, equivoque and interface design; play, the illusion of choice and multiple outs; pacing, time misdirection and communication technologies; futurology, disruptive innovation and the technomagical. Issues of software design, HCI, disruptive innovation, play, video editing and manipulation, animation and game design were explored, key conjuring skills and effects demonstrated and case studies presented.

On the last two days we used Lego Serious Play to ask where designing the magical plays a role in the professional practice of the participants.

Here is one of the participants modeling their PhD...

Interactive Central

2006-09-24T11:19:00.000Z

For the second year I will be working with Central School of Speech and Drama on modules where students of Theatre and of Puppetry explore interactivity, technology, and play.

Last year students used handheld GPS devices to explore their relationship to the city through walks that recalled the dérives of the Situationists. Working in pairs but with individual themes they documented their walks with photos, sketches, gesture, and stories.

Sometimes they chose to interact with the city directly.

The next day they gave individual performances based on their reactions to this method of making the familiar strange.

This linked well with our use of methods from game design to explore performative interaction and led into a discussion of conjuring. I taught the students some sleight-of-hand and led magic appreciation seminars where we looked at the performances of master conjurers and discussed the philosophies behind magic as a theatrical art.

This year we'll be using Lego Serious Play as part of an exploration of interactivity. A word of great value to both digital media types and theatre types but with little discussion between the two fields.

Playtime! London Games Festival Fringe

2006-09-22T22:13:00.000Z

The Playful has been invited to run workshops at Playtime! a day of presentations, performances, web & mobile interactions and walk-in workshops that will focus on the role of games and play in all of our lives.

This is part of the first London Games Festival Fringe and looks to be an important first step for the Festival Fringe in raising awareness of the rise in digitally mediated play that falls beyond the scope of the recognised games industry.

The day is hapenning at 01zero-one on the 4th of October.

Hosted by digital writer Tim Wright the aim of the day will not only be to introduce the general public to the many different types of play that can occur away from the console, but also to demonstrate how emerging web and mobile technologies are changing opportunities for serious and not-so-serious play.

Here's a picture of Tim at a Lego Serious Play research workshop organized by The Playful at the RIBA.