Valentina Nisi

The Geography of Pokémon GO: Beneficial and Problematic Effects on Places and Movement

The widespread popularity of Pokémon GO presents the first opportunity to observe the geographic effects of location-based gaming at scale. This paper reports the results of a mixed methods study of the geography of Pokémon GO that includes a five-country field survey of 375 Pokémon GO players and a large scale geostatistical analysis of game elements. Focusing on the key geographic themes of places and movement, we find that the design of Pokémon GO reinforces existing geographically-linked biases (e.g. the game advantages urban areas and neighborhoods with smaller minority populations), that Pokémon GO may have instigated a relatively rare large-scale shift in global human mobility patterns, and that Pokémon GO has geographically-linked safety risks, but not those typically emphasized by the media. Our results point to geographic design implications for future systems in this space such as a means through which the geographic biases present in Pokémon GO may be counteracted.

Uses & gratifications of a facebook media sharing group

This paper explores uses and gratifications of a content community on a social network service - a music video sharing group on Facebook. In a two-stage study, 20 users first generated words or phrases to describe how they used the group, and what they enjoyed about their use. These phrases were coded into 34 questionnaire items that were then completed by 57 new participants. Factor analysis on this data revealed four gratifications: contribution; discovery; social interaction and entertainment. These factors are interpreted and discussed, leading to design implications and guidelines aimed at informing the design of future online services that combine media sharing with social interaction to create online systems based on a rich and meaningful object-centered sociality.

From gamification to pervasive game in mapping urban accessibility

In this paper we present the design and implementation of two different game applications, designed and developed in order to extend and motivate the community of mPASS, an urban accessibility mapping system. On the one hand, mPASS relays to collect a sufficiently dense, detailed and trustworthy amount of data. On the other hand, its niche goal somehow limits its natural audience, which is not enough to reach the critical mass of information needed by the system in order to provide effective accessibility maps for its users. To overcome this problem, we resorted to the use of a gamification strategy to develop both a traditional prizing add-on and a novel mobile game targeting young and adults players, aiming to include them into the data contributors community. Design process and development description of both games are presented, highlighting the design iterations of the concepts, motivated by contribution gathered from feedback sessions, focus group and experience prototyping.

Crowdsourcing Urban Accessibility:: Some Preliminary Experiences with Results

This short paper presents some preliminary results (both quantitative and qualitative) gathered from field trials with three different mobile apps that allow walkers to map urban accessibility barriers/facilities, while wandering around. The three apps were designed based on different gamification mechanisms, respectively exploiting: i) intrinsic (i.e., altruistic) motivations, ii) extrinsic motivations expressed in terms of a concrete reward, and iii) extrinsic motivations expressed in terms of fun/entertainment. These preliminary results reveal that the apps designed on the basis of extrinsic motivations are able to drive users to provide a larger amount of contributions. Interesting differences between concrete rewards and fun used as effective means to motivate contributors are discussed.

Hopstory: An Interactive, Location-Based Narrative Distributed in Space and Time

As computing and communications technologies evolve, there is the potential for new forms of digitally orchestrated interactive narratives to emerge. In this process, balanced attention has to be paid to audience experience, creative constraints, and presence and role of the enabling technology. This paper describes the implementation of HopStory, an interactive, location-based narrative distributed in space and time, which was designed with this balance in mind. In HopStory, cinematic media is housed within wireless sculptures distributed throughout a building. The audience, through physical contact with a sculpture, collects scenes for later viewing. Inspired by the history of the installation space the narrative relates a day in the life of four characters. By binding the story to local time and space and inviting the audience to wander, we amplify the meaning and impact of the HopStory content and introduce an innovative approach to a day-in-the-life story structure.

Beyond Eco-feedback: using art and emotional attachment to express energy consumption

This paper describes several art based eco-feedback concepts conceived around the potential of emotional attachment between people and the natural environment. Starting from a sensor-infrastructure that looks at how families consume electricity in their homes, we investigate several artistic visualizations of the Madeiran local landscapes exploring the connection between families and elements of the endemic laurel forest. The approach described here leverages digital art as a means to go beyond traditional eco-feedback technology. By coupling people and the forest landscapes we intend to narrow the physical, temporal and psychological gaps between our everyday actions and nature. We explore how people can build a direct emotional connection between their daily energy consumption and the impact on the natural environment (such as climate change and related forest fires, mudslides, desertification and erosion).

The iLand of Madeira location aware multimedia stories

This paper describes the initial stages for the iLand project, a Location Aware Multimedia Story project that captures and exposes the rich oral culture and traditions at the Island of Madeira, using the Madeira main city, Funchal, as a setting to bring a new level of engagement of the audience with the city and its traditional stories. We developed high quality content to be used in an already existing platform to deliver location aware stories. With the story experience carefully designed, an evaluation was carried out in order to expose the opportunities where such systems can be improved. Finally we discuss the results from the evaluation and explain how we will address them in the design of our new system.

Fighting exclusion: a multimedia mobile app with zombies and maps as a medium for civic engagement and design

This paper presents a study on urban data crowdsourcing driven by Geo-Zombie, a multimedia mobile application we designed and developed to engage pedestrians in taking note of urban architectural impediments and facilities by documenting them through pictures and multimedia data. Geo-Zombie aims at transforming the civic activity of contributing into a virtual gamified experience where players attempt to escape from horrific situations in which zombies are ready to cannibalize unsuspecting walkers. In some sense, walkers that kill zombies deeply reconnect with the concept of imminent danger which can be fought resorting to appropriate civic actions. To challenge our initial hypotheses we conducted a design process, starting with a concept generation where three different concepts were discussed which gave rise to five different multimedia mobile apps including the one with zombies. Then, focus group, experience prototyping, application design and implementation, and finally field trials were exploited to refine the design and to select the best apps out of the five that better responded to the need of involving common people in collecting urban accessibility data. It is worth noting that the experiences of use with 50 avid walkers have demonstrated that a multimedia mobile app with maps and zombies can be a concrete step towards a social inclusion strategy while inviting new reflections and discussions on the issue of urban data crowdsourcing.

WATTSBurning: Design and Evaluation of an Innovative Eco-Feedback System

This paper reports a 15 weeks study of artistic eco-feedback deployed in six houses with an innovative sensing infrastructure and visualization strategy. The paper builds on previous work that showed a significant decrease in user awareness after a short period with a relapse in consumption. In this study we aimed to investigate if new forms of feedback could overcome this issue, maintaining the users awareness for longer periods of time. The study presented here aims at understanding if people are more aware of their energy consumption after the installation of a new, art inspired eco-feedback. The research question was then: does artistic eco-feedback provide an increased awareness over normal informative feedback? And does that awareness last longer? To answer this questions participants were interviewed and their consumption patterns analyzed. The main contribution of the paper is to advance our knowledge about the effectiveness of eco-feedback and provide guidelines for implementation of novel eco-feedback visualizations that overcome the relapse behavior pattern.

Engaging children in longitudinal behavioral studies through playful technologies

Measuring childrens behaviors and experiences has been one of the core interests of the field of Child-Computer Interaction. However, maintaining childrens engagement in the evaluation process is one of the challenges that researchers need to meet. In this paper we introduce Playful Booth, a system that aimed at engaging children in playful photo taking practices with the goal of capturing their social interactions over prolonged periods of time. We then present a 4-week-long deployment of Playful Booth with a total of seventy children that aimed at addressing three research questions. First, does playful booth create initial engagement on children and does it sustain this engagement over prolonged periods of time? Second, can the deployment be sustained for prolonged periods of time with minimal resources? Last, do behavioral data as captured from playful booth reflect childrens actual social participation in the school community?