Robb Mitchell

Participatory business modelling

How to generate business is at play in most innovation projects today. Not only Internet-based businesses, but also traditional manufacturing companies with conventional product sales are currently challenged to consider alternative business models: service design, project sales, direct sales, etc. In participatory innovation the core assumption is that a broad spectrum of people, including users, can contribute to innovation. But is it possible to open up the process of business model innovation to participation from a wider circle than those marketing managers who typically devise new business schemes? In this article we discuss two participatory approaches to business modelling that move beyond spreadsheets and Post-it® Notes: one of using tangible objects to redefine business elements, and another of people themselves role-playing how an organisation can create, deliver and capture value. These approaches were developed in companies and educational settings and have proven extraordinarily successful in initiating conversations about how to innovate business in cross-disciplinary and cross-functional groups of participants. Relying on design theory, we study the ‘moves’ that participants make towards a new network configuration; in particular as such conceptual ‘moves’ are likely to be associated with the concrete, physical movements of people and objects. We claim that these approaches prove very engaging because business model innovation needs a focus on redefining the concepts we use and the roles that actors play in relation to each other.

Sensing mine, yours, theirs, and ours: interpersonal ubiquitous interactions

To effectively leverage human sensorimotor abilities, this paper urges going beyond the traditional five senses. When users share physical space or location with other people, a crucial but neglected modality is arguably the sense of ownership. If, how, and what someone can see, touch, hear, feel, and taste is normally strongly influenced by their perceptions as to who something belongs to. This is illustrated by presenting preliminary results from an ongoing design space review of wearable computing experimentation concerned with encouraging interpersonal interactions between co-located people. Drawing upon urbanism theory helps show how different variations of territorial blending can articulate tactics for increasing sociality through interactive garments. These insights are offered to aid understanding of the design space for developers directly concerned with influencing co-located interactions through interactive apparel, and to address wider challenges of designing socially acceptable ubiquitous interaction.

Reindeer & wolves: exploring sensory deprivation in multiplayer digital bodily play

Games designed around digital bodily play involve bodily movement and expression to create engaging gameplay experiences. Most feedback in these games takes the form of visual stimuli. To explore the gameplay mechanics afforded by depriving players from these visual cues, we designed Reindeer & Wolves, a role-playing game where blindfolded players capture other players relying on their hearing alone. Based on our design and play testing, we devised four strategies for designing games that incorporate sensory deprivation as an element of the core mechanic.

Blind Running: Perceptual Team Interdependency for Self-less Play

This paper introduces self-less play - a novel perspective upon how technology can foster teamwork through facilitating interpersonal interdependency. We illustrate this by presenting and analysing Blind Running - a wearable game platform comprising a pair of different headsets, each worn by one of two players standing back to back. The headsets deprive both wearers of directly seeing the world exterior to their helmet, but a camera on the outside of one helmet transmits live video of the environment for viewing by a screen on the interior of their partner?s helmet. We report upon initial playtests that set pairs the challenge of performing a variety of navigational and manual tasks against the clock. Participants and spectators found the experience provoking and entertaining. We offer four attention points to support developers interested in exploring the facilitating of self-less play through similar technical set ups.

The toilet companion: a toilet brush that should be there for you and not for others

In this article we present the Toilet Companion: an augmented toilet brush that aims to provide moments of joy in the toilet room, and if necessary, stimulates toilet goers to use the brush. Based upon the amount of time a user sits upon the toilet seat, the brush swings it handle with increasing speed: initially to draw attention to its presence, but over time to give a playful impression. Hereafter, the entire brush makes rapid up and downward movements to persuade the user to pick it up. In use, it generates beeps in response to human handling, to provide a sense of reward and accompanying pleasure. Despite our aims in providing joy and stimulation, participants from field trials with the Toilet Companion reported experiencing the brush as undesirable, predominantly because the sounds produced by the brush would make private toilet room activities publicly perceivable. The design intervention thus challenged the social boundaries of the otherwise private context of the toilet room, opening up an interesting area for design-ethnographic research about perception of space, where interactive artifacts can be mobilized to deliberately breach public, social, personal, and intimate spaces.

Cyrafour: an experiential activity facilitating empathic distant communication among copresent individuals

Distant communication relies mostly on a non-embodied representation of participants (e.g. textual in chats, photographic in videoconference, auditory in telephony, etc) that lessens the sensory richness of conversational interactions. Cyrafour is a novel activity that explores the implications of using human avatars (cyranoids) for empathic interpersonal remote communication. An unscripted conversation between two individuals (the sources) is transmitted through radio waves and reproduced by two copresent subjects (the cyranoids) following certain conversational guidelines. In particular, the Sources were invited to discuss about a topic, play a conversation game and comment on an opinionated video. All Cyrafour sessions were video-taped and participants interviewed afterwards in order to support analysis and discussion. Cyrafour could be considered as a playful embodied identity game in which cyranoids are simultaneously together in and aside from a conversation generated elsewhere. This puzzling circumstance seems to allow for an empathic embodiment of the meaning transmitted and appears to create a frame for further discussion on the topics raised.

Tracking Well-Being Design Explorations Through Object Theatre

We introduce Object Theatre for Design as a hands-on approach to enable healthcare tracking to move beyond numbers and empower patients to monitor and convey their subjective well-being. A transformed perspective on relating to artifacts will drive tangible and bodily explorations in order to collaboratively create mockups for logging and expressing emotions and perceptions in novel tangible forms.

Beating the City: Three Inspirational Design Patterns to Promote Social Play through Aligning Rhythms

This paper offers three inspirational design patterns for sparking social play between unacquainted people in public and semi-public spaces. The intention is to support developers in appreciating and articulating possible approaches in creating physical or digital artefacts as interventions that encourage unacquainted people to play together in urban areas. As part of a broader selection of design examples with such social effects, we present three inspirational design patterns related to the notion of rhythm: “Sharing Vibrations”, “Actions That Need Another”, and “Crosswire Outputs”. Although the creators of our accompanying design examples did not explicitly propose them neither as games, nor urban interventions, we believe that they have strongly playable qualities that can help inspire opportunities to increase playability in unexpected moments in city places.

Towards Dynamic Perspective Exchange in Physical Games

Video has been used to give people sensations or insights into another persons perspective via providing real time feeds of first person viewpoints. Less explored is rapid and dynamic perspective changing that can introduce uncertainty for users concerning whether their feeds are manipulated, and if they are viewing themselves or another. We report on initial trials of a 3-person wireless headset system. Each headset incorporated an external video camera and an internal screen that provides its wearers with visual information. Camera transmissions are rapidly and automatically switched to be received by different headsets, thus providing wearers with a continuous cycling through 1st, 2nd and 3rd person perspectives. Based upon testing several physical games activities, we offer suggestions to assist developers in designing intense embodied perspective changing experiences.

The kraftwork and the knittstruments: augmenting knitting with sound

This paper presents a novel example of technological augmentation of a craft practice. By translating the skilled, embodied knowledge of knitting practice into the language of sound, our study explores how audio augmentation of routinized motion patterns affects an individuals awareness of her bodily movements and alters conventional practice. Four different instruments (The Knittstruments: The ThereKnitt, The KnittHat, The Knittomic, and The KraftWork) were designed and tested in four different locations. This research entails cycles of data collection and analysis based on the action and grounded theory methods of noting, coding and memoing. Analysis of the data collected suggests substantial alterations in the knitters performance due to audio feedback at both an individual and group level and improvisation in the process of making. We argue that the usage of Knittstruments can have relevant consequences in the fields of interface design, wearable computing or artistic and musical creation in general and hope to provide a new inspiring venue for designers, artists and knitters to explore.