Designing for Adaptability Open Incomplete Alive Digital Media
Designing for Adaptability: Open, Incomplete, Alive? ! Digital Media & Learning 2011 LCHC / UCSD
Dramatis Personae • Jay Lemke, UCSD / University of Michigan • Rachel Cody-Pfister, LCHC / UCSD • Robert Lecusay, LCHC / UCSD • Ivan Rosero, LCHC / UCSD
Adaptability • What/who adapts to what/whom? • Affordances are relational, within a social ecology • Not just the game/tech, but a larger system • Adaptability defined and designed only across wider, less predictable settings, users • Adapt or die!
Living Activity Systems • Designing FOR • Research IN • Documentation OF • Evaluation WITH
Why “Living”? • People and things in changing combinations • Organized across multiple levels, timescales • Emergent, unpredictable behaviors • Changing, developing, evolving, dying?
The Lab Alive
In the Fifth Dimension • LCHC, UCSD, Mike Cole • After-school and community centers • Kids, undergraduates, researchers • Playing and learning
Case 1: Extended Day Academy • Urban charter school, extended day program • Computer lab, low-end tech • Quest Atlantis (Sasha Barab, Indiana U) • Kids younger than designer’s target age • Designed for classrooms, adapting to afterschool setting
The Lab Mis-imagined
Quest Atlantis
Research Themes • Affect and Play – playing together while playing the game • Recombinant Mixing – coupling what normally doesn’t mix • Crossing Timescales – interactions between short-term and long-term processes
Playing Together
Mixing together
Panel Issues • Designing FOR: diverse settings, linking offline & online activities; emergence: the Build. World • Research IN: noisy, chaotic setting; rapidly changing moods and interests; evolving goals • Documentation OF: fieldnotes, multi-perspective videos, audio, chat, documents • Evaluation WITH: changing goals, outcomes, criteria; theirs and ours, yours?
Mixing Offline & Online
Supporting Creation
- Slides: 16