Search

The pace and magnitude of recent advancements in digital technologies have set the scene for a complete transformation of our citizenship experience. In the past, HCI research has been concerned with aligning technological progress with top-down organizational models of government institutions or exploring the needs of individual bottom-up community initiatives. However, this approach has proved too rigid for systemic issues and HCI researchers have started to meet these wicked problems halfway, rather than from two opposing sides. This involves putting emphasis on how citizens and organizations can incorporate existing technologies and involve dialogue and co-creation in their process. In this paper we highlight several directions of HCI research that follow the trail towards civic empowerment. Based on these, we identify a set of strategies that might help researchers contribute to a more inclusive orientation of civic tech.

Games are designed with different objectives in mind. Some primarily for entertainment, others also to educate, motivate or persuade its players. Games with the latter objective, that of persuasion, are designed not only to be entertaining, but also with the intent to shape how players think and feel about issues in reality. However, despite the growing interest in persuasive games, we still lack the design insights and strategies that support their production, particularly for those using immersive technologies. To address this gap, we organize a hands-on workshop and bring together academic and industry experts to explore persuasive game design. Through making we generate knowledge in the form of insights and examplar work, and subsequently formulate best-practises and design strategies for future design and research.

Persuasive games exist for a wide variety of objectives, from marketing, to healthcare and activism. Some of the more socially-aware ones cast players as members of disenfranchised minorities, such as migrants, prompting them to 'see what they see'. In parallel, a growing number of designers has recently started to leverage immersive technologies to enable the public to temporarily inhabit another person, to 'sense what they sense'. From these two converging perspectives, we hypothesize a still-uncharted space of opportunities at the crossroads of games, empathy, persuasion, and immersion. Following a Research through Design approach, we explored this space by designing A Breathtaking Journey, an embodied and multisensory mixed-reality game providing a first-person perspective of a refugee's journey. A qualitative study was conducted with a grounded theory/open coding methodology to tease out empathy-arousing characteristics, and to chart this novel game design space. As we elaborate on our analysis, we provide insights on empathic mixed-reality experiences, and conclude with offering three design opportunities: visceral engagement, reflective moments and affective appeals, to spur future research and design.

Game Jams - energized, fast-paced get-togethers of developers and artists to make digital games - have recently emerged as a way to generate and inspire novel game ideas and new ways of thinking. We intend to introduce the CHI community to this collaborative, fast-paced method of design by holding a game jam with an emphasis on developing novel user inputs as a way to explore HCI and to connect participants from diverse backgrounds. This game jam will introduce a successful model from a related field to the HCI agenda while developing collaborations between the two growing areas.