4iP Blog

Play and playfulness

This month, it’s been great to see a bit of play and playfulness enter our world courtesy of the 4iP delicious network.

Several of you brought our attention to Akoha described by ivoivo as “social gaming in the real world”. The project is currently in private beta but you can get an idea about how it might work at http://community.akoha.com/help/learn/.

At a more basic level, we love Playscapes, the blog about playground design, bookmarked by addictive_picasso. How’s this for a reason for being (or in 4iP-speak, ‘an itch being scratched’)?:

“Because it’s difficult to find non-commercial playground information. And I find that frustrating.Because a playground doesn’t have to cost a million bucks and come in a box. In fact, it’s better if it doesn’t.Because playgrounds are under-recognized as an artistic medium. Because everybody loves a playground.”

And it’s addicitive_picasso again who takes us from from small spaces to big spaces: after a trial run in Bogota, the Future City game is being supported by the British Council amongst others and is described as ‘an interactive game to develop citizenship and policy skills whilst also considering the future of our cities.’ So does this, perhaps, inspire you to add some more playful elements to your 4iP idea?

Thinking global

People, it seems, do search far and wide for inspiration - whether it’s looking at the way Australians keep tabs on their politicians, or how Americans help each other monitor their health service options or find open-all-hours shops and services.

One option for expanding your horizons and gaining an international perspective on your work is to plug into an existing community like the UNESCO-backed Design21 social design network. ‘Better design for the greater good,’ Dominic_Campbell calls it. Or if you work with schools, check out Rafi.ki, an online learning community using simple technology to build successful school partnerships, transforming pupils into global citizens.” ‘Bit of a corker this one’, notes Dominic.

Trendy Twitter

Ewan’s recent blog entry about Google flu is just one piece of evidence of a dramatic rise in online data analysis and visualisation tools for telling us more about ourselves – what we’re talking about, how we’re feeling, what we all might be thinking about doing next etc.

Monitoring Twitter, in particular, to spot social trends and commercial opportunities appears to be very much flavour of the month. monicatailor bookmarked Twist, a service for charting the occurrence of individual words used in Twitter (from which we learn that people use the word ‘ church’ twice as much on Sundays than any other day…). And monica also led us to Magpie an application for supposedly ‘converting your tweets into bling bling’...

At a more sophisticated level, it’s good to see Christian Nold’s biomapping work getting noticed by no less than four 4ip-ers inclusing podnosh and danbri. Christian specialises in mapping and visualising emotional responses to specific environments, buildings and pathways. His work has all kinds of consequences for the way we design public spaces, and also share our more personal responses to the world.

Complaining can be fun

What with flu viruses, bad weather and the credit crunch you probably don’t need to monitor feeds to realise how most people feel in the UK right now. The good news, though, is that if you’re feeling mouldy at the moment, there are now new ways of moaning about it all. The suitable named delicious user itsallgonewrong has bookmarked Kvetch: a community complaints service that lets you delight in other people’s sarky comments.

Sharing your rants is one thing. Putting them to music is quite another. But that is exactly what a Complaints Choir does – takes in letters of complaint, turns them into song and sings them loudly in public, preferably in front of the people or the organisation being complained about.

If there isn’t a choir near you, you can start your own. First choir to put any moans about 4iP into song wins… er… the admiration of their peers.