Carla Cipolla

From Game Design to Service Design

Background. Game designers have long been developing strategies to foster engagement, pleasure and a variety of sensations in game experiences, increasingly applying their research to areas beyond games. This has led to a growing recognition of the use of game elements in non-game settings. In parallel, service designers have been seeking to improve user experience and engagement in services. Method. Drawing on relevant literature about game design, the authors develop a framework that gathers a variety of game design research endeavors to form a practical tool to support service development from a user experience perspective. Its application is exemplified and simulated in a methodological approach to Action Design Research on a selected service. Results. The service is then analyzed and compared ‘before and after’ the utilization of the framework, with no measurement of results. At last, a simplified method to gamify services, the GSF Application Model, is presented, Conclusions. This article presents and describes the development of the Gamification Service Framework, an IT artifact designed to solve a class of problems related to the service field: the gamification of services. The central aim is to provide a new tool for service designers to use game design concepts in their practices, by structuring services in an analogous way to games.

Collaborative Services in Informal Settlements: Social Innovation in a Pacified Favela in Rio de Janeiro

Informal settlements, such as favelas (slums), are complex social ecosystems, characterised by their lack of basic services and by their particular social ties. Favelas in Rio de Janeiro are undergoing rapid changes, and new organisations and relationships are beginning to appear. This is largely as a result of the Rio de Janeiro government’s policy of ‘pacification’ — a strategy to occupy the favelas formerly controlled by drug dealers, aimed at extending citizens’ rights (and duties) in these areas (Fleury, 2012).

Coproduced game-changing in transformative social innovation: reconnecting the “broken city” of Rio de Janeiro

Social innovation is gaining attention for its potential for system transformations. It is often initiated by grassroots collectives, which can become successful through support from other actors and through certain game-changing events or developments. We highlight how transformative social innovation is a highly dispersed, coproduced process of changing social relations. This coproduction is unfolded through a case of interacting interventions in the socio-spatial structure of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Frequently referred to as a “broken city,” the city suffers from various social challenges related to the socio-spatial cleavages between the welldeveloped and the marginalized areas, the favelas. Following a nested-case approach, we describe two policy measures and three social innovation initiatives intended to reconnect the broken city. We analyze their effects as well as their various interactions. The findings give reasons for considering the policy measures as “game-changers” that allow new courses of play. Still, the key observation about these intertwined socio-spatial interventions is that the broken city is undergoing more dispersed game-changing. Further observing how the reconnections constitute different kinds of changing mobility, we conclude with reflections on mobility-related game-changing.