From now on, fun will be mandatory at the Mobile Life Centre!
This January we’re starting a new project, all about playfulness – and the little quirks that make our lives better. Beyond our intense exploratory research (aka playing Wii Band Hero), we (=me, Helena Mentis, Ylva Fernaeus) have also produced a Very Serious Position paper outlining some challenges when trying to design for playfulness and fun in the workplace. People do appear to have the strange tendency not to enjoy enforced fun and not even to enjoy the same things, so what is ‘designing’ for playful experiences really about?
The paper has resulted in a nice trip to Savannah, GA for CSCW 2010 where we’ll participate in the ‘Fun, seriously?’ workshop. All workshop papers can be found here. Do check out the paper of Marleigh Norton and Philip Tan of the MIT GAMBIT Game Lab in Singapore on their work as game developers and on how Bill & Ted’s excellent adventures can guide your professional life. It’s both awesome and excellent really – and they’re bravely trashing the conference paper formatting guidelines too, chapeau!
Philip, mad Googler that he is, found your blog post mentioning our paper. Glad you liked it, and thanks for the shout out!
Looking forward to a most triumphant time with you in Savannah,
Marleigh