Category Archives: civic_engagement

Community PlanIt in Boston Public Schools

How do you convince people to take time out of their busy schedules, leave their home around dinner time, perhaps get a babysitter, all in order to participate in a slow-moving conversation about something very abstract? It’s not easy. While … Continue reading

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Experience is Trying

In thinking about the game design work we are doing, I have previously made the distinction between participation and engagement.  Loosely, I have defined engagement as sustained attention to a driver of participation.  And I have made the argument that … Continue reading

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Six Principles of Designing for Engagement

p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 4pt; text-align: justify; font-size: 10pt; font-family: “Times New Roman”; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Designing for local engagement within the context of net locality is a multi-faceted process.  Building systems of interaction that … Continue reading

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Community PlanIt

While it has been announced in a number of forums, I have not yet written about the Engagement Game Lab on this blog.  In August 2010, the Engagement Game Lab was born as a virtual research organization at Emerson College. … Continue reading

Posted in cities, civic_engagement, Community_Informatics, mobility, net-locality, placeofmedia | 1 Comment

Participatory Chinatown Launches

Participatory Chinatown launched on May 3 in Boston’s Chinatown.  It’s a 3-D interactive game designed to augment the traditional community meeting.  Instead of the traditional model of people responding to a powerpoint presentation about the neighborhood, participants in this meeting … Continue reading

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Augmented Deliberation

The central premise of the Participatory Chinatown project is the staging of what we call “augmented deliberation.”  We introduce augmented deliberation as a possible design solution that addresses uniquely difficult contexts where deliberation is complicated by one or many external … Continue reading

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3-D Worlds for Land Use Planning

Holly St. Clair writes about the Participatory Chinatown project in an article for the American Planning Association newsletter.  In explaining what PC will do for the planning process, she says: The emphasis is not just on the computer simulation, but … Continue reading

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Immersive Planning

Methods of engaging communities in urban planning decisions have remained relatively stagnant. Groups of people are assembled into community centers, school cafeterias, and libraries and are asked to provide input on the professional discourse of architects and planners. They are … Continue reading

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Creating Empathy Through Role Play

We’ve made some good progress on the Participatory Chinatown (PC) project.   Building off of the first iteration of Hub2, PC will continue with the focus on creating platforms for “augmented deliberation,” but it will do so by more thoroughly exploring … Continue reading

Posted in boston, cities, civic_engagement, games, hub2, mediated urbanism, net-locality | 1 Comment

Relationship model of e-government

I’ve been thinking about how we might begin to think about relationship model versus transaction model when it comes to digitally augmented government.  In most configuations of e-government there is a choice between open dialog and collective decision making.  This … Continue reading

Posted in augmented_place, citygovernment, civic_engagement, hub2, placeofmedia | 2 Comments