Mixed-initiative and Board game design at CHI 2017

At the 35th Annual CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing System, better known as CHI, there were several initiatives related to design practice that the IDG was involved in. For starters, the Mixed-Initiative Creative Interfaces workshop took place on Saturday, May 7, where the interactions between a human designer and a proactive computational designer were explored in many different applications. The workshop included three panels as well as time for groupwork and discussion. The workshop was organized by the Digital Creativity Labs at the Universities of York, Goldsmiths, and Falmouth in collaboration with the Expressive Intelligence Studio at UC Santa Cruz, the Institute of Digital Games at the University of Malta, and the Playable Innovative Technologies Lab at Northeastern University. You can check out more information at the workshop's website and this post will also be updated with a link to the proceedings as soon as they're available.

Moreover, on Wednesday at the main CHI Conference Catherine Emma Jones presented a joint publication with Antonios Liapis, Ioanna Lykourentzou and Daniele Guido. The publication is titled "Board Game Prototyping to Co-Design a Better Location-Based Digital Game"; as its name suggests, the paper covered a method for prototyping a location based app via a boardgame. The cheap and effective way of testing a simplified version of the eventual digital application allowed designers to engage with the end-users, as well as iterate based on their feedback and re-test. In total, three board game play trials were conducted with improvements on the game's rules and layout based on the users' feedback. A short video explains the process and findings, while the full paper can be found here. The location-based app that is being developped as a result of this board game prototyping process will be used for the CrossCult project for the purposes of reflection on the topic of migration during users' walks through the cities of Luxembourg and Valletta.