Saving Face: Playful Design for Social Engagement, in Public Smart City Spaces
Abstract
Can social engagement and reflection be designed through social touch in today’s smart city’s public spaces? This paper explores ludic, playful design for shared engagement and reflection in public spaces through social touch. In two Artistic Social Labs (ASL), internationally presented in public spaces, a radically unfamiliar sensory synthesis is acquired, for which perception of ‘who sees and who is being seen, who touches and who is being touched’ is disrupted. Participants playfully ‘touch themselves and feel being touched, to connect with others on a screen’. On the basis of the findings in the ASLs, guidelines are proposed for orchestrating social engagement and reflection, through social touch as play.
Keywords
Social engagement Digital art in city spaces Playful social touchNotes
Acknowledgements
Saving Face (2012) was developed by artists-scientists duo Lancel/Maat (Karen Lancel, Hermen Maat) as an art work, artistic research and case study (http://www.lancel.nl/work/saving-face/). It was generously supported by Media Fund, Mondriaan Fonds, Festival aan de Werf Utrecht, MediaFonds@Sandberg, Cultural Consulate Beijing, BCAF Beijing, Beam Systems Amsterdam, Dutch Embassy Berlin, SICA NLTR 400 and technically developed in collaboration with Sylvain Vriens, Tim Olden, Matthijs ten Berge, Mart van Bree, Beamsystems, using Jason Saragih’s open source Facetracker library.
References
- 1.Blast Theory: Can You See Me Now? (2007). https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/can-you-see-me-now/. Accessed 12 July 2018
- 2.Benford, S., Giannachi, G.: Interaction as Performance. Interactions 19(3), 38–43 (2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 3.Butler, J.: Gender Trouble, Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, London (1990)Google Scholar
- 4.Castells, M.: Informationalism and the Network Society. In: Himanen, P. (ed.) The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age, pp. 155–178. Random House, NY (2001)Google Scholar
- 5.Ga, Z.: People’s Portrait (2004). http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/peoples-portrait/images/3. Accessed 3 Sept 2018
- 6.Gill, S.: Tacit engagement, beyond Interaction. Springer International Publishing, New York (2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 7.Gould, C., Sermon P.: Occupy the screen: a case study of open artworks for urban screens. In: Armstrong, K. (ed.) The 21st International Symposium of Electronic Art Proceedings of ISEA 2015, New Forms Art Press, artists and writers, Vancouver (2015)Google Scholar
- 8.Gsöllpointner, K., Schnell, R., Schuler, K.S.: Digital synesthesia, a model for the aesthetics of digital art. De Gruyter, series: Edition Angewandte, Berlin/Boston (2016)Google Scholar
- 9.Huizinga, J.: Homo Ludens. H. D. Tjeenk Willink & Zn, Haarlem (1940)Google Scholar
- 10.Kwastek, K.: Aesthetics of Interaction in Digital Art. MIT press, Cambridge (2013)Google Scholar
- 11.Lancel, K., Maat, H., Brazier, F.M.: Kissing data, distributed haptic connections through social touch. In: Acoustic Space volume No 17. Riga’s Center for New Media Culture RIXC/Art Research Laboratory of Liepaja University (2018)Google Scholar
- 12.Lancel/Maat: Saving Face (2012). http://lancelmaat.nl/work/saving-face/. Accessed 31 Aug 2018
- 13.Lozano-Hemmer, R.: Body Movies, Relational Architecture 6 (2001). http://www.lozano-hemmer.com/body_movies.php. Accessed 12 July 2018
- 14.Nijholt, A.: Playable Cities: The City as a Digital Playground. Springer, Singapore (2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- 15.Reeves, S., Benford, S., O’Malley, C., Fraser, M.: Designing the Spectator Experience In: CHI 2005 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 741–750. ACM, New York (2005)Google Scholar
- 16.Sermon, P.: Occupy the screen (2014). http://www.paulsermon.org/occupy/. Accessed 3 Sept 2018
- 17.Zimmerman, J., Forlizzi, J.: Research through Design in HCI. In: Olson, J.S., Kellog, W.A. (eds.) Ways of Knowing in HCI, pp. 167–189. Springer, New York (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-0378-8_8CrossRefGoogle Scholar