In reading John Dewey’s Democracy and Education, I have found some support for the idea that what I am calling engagement is intimately tied to experience.  Dewey says experience includes an active and passive element.

On the active hand, experience is trying – a meaning which is made explicit in the connected term experiment. On the passive, it is undergoing.  When we experience something, we act upon it, we do something with it; then we suffer or undergo the consequences.  We do something to the thing and then it does something to us in return…mere activity does not constitute experience (139).

This distinction between activity and experience is similar to the distinction between participation and engagement.  Experience requires the person experiencing to be able to reflect upon the connection between the activity and the the results.

It is not experience when a child merely sticks his fingers into a flame; it is experience when the movement is connected with the pain which he undergoes in consequence (140).

Dewey is saying that experience is connected to meaning, and short of that it is not experience.  This is precisely the same problem in the civic media space.  Getting people to do something is too often seen as good enough.  When in fact, the goal needs to be forging connections between doing stuff and the consequences of doing stuff.  An app that gets people to click on a link is not in itself constructive of learning.  Learning happens when the user is given the opportunity to reflect upon that clicking.

Ultimately, Dewey argues that an educational system focused on mere activity is one that simply reinforces its existing biases and is incapable of true democracy.  He argues that learning is experiencing.  The same is true in the civic space: technologies should be built around experience, not activity.  This is the best way to engage the public.

All the game content will be available in three languages – English, Spanish and Haitian Creole – and we’re hoping that the dynamics of the system will foster some dialogue between linguistic groups.  But this is still a big question mark.

There is a live action debriefing meeting scheduled for October 4th.  At this time, players and non-players alike will be invited to discuss the results of the Community PlanIt process.  We will look at how everyone spent their tokens and we will open up a community wide discussion about next steps.  This is a big experiment.  I fully expect that the dialogue will be civil, but as schools are an emotional topic for nearly every stakeholder, we are quite interested in seeing how the game system can accomodate emotional discord.

Designing for local engagement within the context of net locality is a multi-faceted process.  Building systems of interaction that are capable of sustaining a user’s attention both to other users and the locality of use, requires the consideration of a wide array of features and modes of participation.  The following six design considerations provide a framework for transforming participation and maximizing engagement.

1) What’s the Reason for Engagement? Too often, community-oriented tools are built with the assumption that simply because they exist people will use them.  In fact, there is nothing inherently usable about a tool – a hammer is good at pressing nails into a hard surface, but not ideal for opening cans.  Good tools are built to address recognizable problems.  The nail is a recognizable problem; the can is a problem forced to fit the availability of a tool. In the case of a community, bad roads and rising crime are recognizable problems; lack of local bloggers is a problem oriented around a tool.  A good tool should reorient its user to the nature of a problem, but it should not create it.

It is one thing for a problem to exist, it is quite another for a group of people to be able to articulate the existence of that problem.  It is therefore imperative that along with the introduction of a tool, there is a clear articulation of the problem to which that tool will be applied and a general consensus on the importance of that problem.

2) Who’s Listening? A community’s engagement with solving a problem is dependent upon who is paying attention to the community’s efforts.  When designing for engagement, it is important to consider not only the internal machinations of community building, but the external considerations that ultimately play a greater role in defining the identity and task of the community. A group of people in a neighborhood can talk all they want about their opposition to a new zoning ordinance, but it is in the externalization of that conversation through a blog, public forum, or some other means, that defines the identity and the goals of the community. 

It is important to make explicit the internal and external features of a community’s participation.  A sense of community stems from personal connections and identification with shared problems; but the sustainability of that identification is dependent upon their being an audience.  Designing engagement, therefore, is partly a matter of designing the context whereby a community can find and approach an audience.

3) People Comprise Locations; Locations Don’t Comprise People. In designing for geographical locations, designers tend to approach the problem as a geographical one.  What are the concerns in New York, Paris, or Boise?  While this is a good place to begin, the location often supersedes the people that comprise the location.  There are people in New York, Paris and Boise that, in addition to the geographic specificity of those places, define the locality’s meaning.  The challenge for designing engagement is articulating the connection between a geographic space and the people that participate in its definition. How can a user of a local social software platform, for instance, feel as though their participation matters in the larger context of defining a place? Digital tools are quite good at aggregating user data into something that can reflect the general make-up of a located community.  But engagement requires that in addition to making a user aware of aggregated data, they are perpetually aware of the individual actions that comprise aggregation.  In some respects, this is standard protocol for social software – user data makes the network more usable, but mutual sharing between identifiable individuals makes the network meaningful.

4) Design for the Community you want, not the community you know.  When employing ICTs in any local design problem, there is a component of aspirational thinking.  There is a sense, that goes along with digital technology, that the solutions generated through the intervention will be bigger, better and more sustainable.  This assumption is rife with ideological implications that new technology is associated with progress and even progressivism. These can indeed be dangerous assumptions.  But, the reaction to the possibilities of these assumptions can be equally as dangerous.  To not employ new technologies for fear of bending to these ideological assumptions is equally detrimental.  Simply put, the tool should fit the problem.   And new technologies are both potentially efficient means of doing so and productive means of understanding the scope of the problem. For example, a hammer provides the solution to pressing nails into a hard service; an electric hammer provides the means of doing so on a much larger scale.  The electric hammer transforms the problem without necessarily erasing the original context of the problem.

As such, when designing for engagement, it is important to understand how the tool transforms the reach of engagement.  Digital networks can reach large amounts of people in a distributed fashion.  In some cases, the quality of engagement is contingent on reducing the numbers of those engaged.  In other cases, the quality of engagement is premised on expansion.  Participating in a neighborhood meeting can be more meaningful if those participating feel as though their neighborhood is adequately represented.   Designers of engagement need to consider how scale will factor into user perceptions of their participation.  If the scale is too large, they might not feel connected to others involved in the process; if the scale is too small, they might feel that their participation is not meaningful enough for those listening.  Quantity is not in itself a positive attribute of a process; it is a variable that should be considered in design.

5) Face-to-face Matters.  It is a general misconception that when using ICTs for community engagement, there is no need for face-to-face connections.  In fact, there is considerable evidence that online networks are bolstered by offline networks, and vice versa [2,3].  Intermittent physical presence can have a noticeable affect on giving a community of users a sense of each other and the directionality of online communication.  It can provide a useful visualization of an online network and a human face to many-to-many correspondence.  This can work in two ways: as an introductory framework for online communication; or as an anticipatory framework for online communication.  If people meet face-to-face before they engage online, they can better understand to whom they are communicating; if people know they are going to meet face-to-face after they communicate online, it can serve as motivation for productive and meaningful exchanges.

As a design consideration for local engagement, face-to-face meetings can be quite effective for motivating sustained attention to an online community.  These face-to-face encounters can be used as periodic reminders of the physical context of online communication or can occur only once.  In any case, good design should not just arrange for these meetings to happen, but give the design of these meetings equal and complimentary consideration. 

6) Design for Distraction. Engagement does not imply undivided attention.  When people are engaged in a community process, they are doing multiple other things simultaneously.  They have families, social lives, jobs, and other interests.  To engage them is not to have them sacrifice their commitment to any or all of these things.  It is to have them direct a limited amount of their attention to a particular matter. Designing for engagement is designing for distraction.  Engagement implies sustained attention, but it does not imply absolute attention.  Attention is spread out across time, not just across space.  The ideal user is a multi-tasker, switching from one thing to another with ease. In this regard, civic engagement implies the ability to take from multiple contexts and apply towards a specific matter when nudged by a well-designed system to do so.  With the civil uprisings in the Middle East dominating the media discourse about technologies and local engagement, it is easy to assume that successful media engagement must lead to social revolution.  In fact, in a much more prosaic fashion, civic engagement simply means being aware of civic processes and their corresponding communities and contributing some level of care to decisions made about them.

This is very useful.  But it is not damning.  If digital networks are spaces of social architecture, we cannot assume that all networks inevitably lead to the same results.  We would never treat physical architecture this way.  We would never conclude that buildings lead to less social interaction.  We might say that mini-malls result in certain social behavior, or skyscrapers, but never buildings in general.  Accordingly, we need to address the design of digital networks in any assessment of how the digital affects local community.  And, we should continue to look at experimental practices that extend the possibilities of local, networked life.  Foursquare does not equal location-based social networking.  It certainly has brought these services into the public awareness, but it in no way should frame the debate about them.

In a design-based approach to communities and technologies, the evaluation of networked spaces is always connected to the intricacies of that space’s design.  How can location-based social networks make people aware of local geography, local resources, and communities?  What design elements lead to feelings of co-presence and an increase in social capital?  Let’s move beyond the debate about the efficacy of buildings and towards a conversation about the design of social architecture and the affordances of designed digital networks for local life.

Community PlanIt seeks to change neighborhood engagement by changing the way people pay attention to neighborhood issues.  The mobile game platform is designed to be played casually, to integrate into everyday life, to become a presence, without dominating interaction.  Too often we think of attention as all or nothing.  The strategy of designing a game around local engagement is precisely to combat these totalizing assumptions of attention so that engagement is achievable and enjoyable.

I am still considering how best to study the game as a matter of attention.  What does it mean rhetorically when you replace terms like civic engagement with civic attention?  Does that help us get away from the sometimes stifling paradigms of democratic process and into something that might actually be tweaked with good design?  I hope so.

Our current game that we are designing with support from the Technology for Engagement Initiative at the Knight Foundation is called Community PlanIt.

Community PlanIt is a LEG that uses web, mobile phone and tablet interfaces to engage communities in local urban planning issues.  We are building a game platform so that it can be used in any locality.  The foundation of the game is a mission system that gets players exploring their own neighborhoods in order to share the local knowledge they possess. They compete and collaborate with neighbors to create and gather data that will then factor into an official planning process.  The planning meeting itself will be augmented by the game.  Players/participants will demonstrate their understanding of the neighborhood and the issues by giving a virtual character a tour of the neighborhood.  They will have to see the neighborhood through someone else’s shoes before they are able to make their personal recommendations.  The platform we are designing will allow for the customization of characters and missions to make the game maximally appropriate for the local context.

Community PlanIt can be used for any community planning process centered on physical space.  For instance, planning a town square, creating a transportation plan, identifying healthy lifestyles, or mapping sub cultures.  We are building the platform in partnership with four communities so that we can anticipate possible uses and cover the widest array of necessary features.

We are planning a 9 month development cycle and hope to have a prototype available by April 2011.  

            When considering games in this light, the possibilities are endless.  They can provide a mechanism for teaching content, and they can provide a mechanism through which learners can reframe content by scrutinizing their underlying systems.  As such, there has been a surge of interest in designing games for civic learning.  Noteworthy is the suite of games called icivics, which incorporates games for teaching about all branches of the American government.  Justice Sandra Day OConner is a big supporter of this initiative. Players can be a senator, or a judge and solve problems inherent to those positions, while learning about the structure of government.  As Justice OConner said at the recent Games for Change conference in New York City, kids today dont know much about civics.  Employing a game, fun and engaging, is surely a useful way to make them know more. 

            But when we get into the realm of civics and games, there arises the inevitable question about the outcomes of learning.  What does learning about civics do and is there a correlation between learning, engagement and action?  This is nearly an impossible question to answer, as it would be foolhardy to assume that one act of gameplay can result in a distinct action.  However, it is worthwhile to interrogate how gameplay can be integrated into a social context and establish a framework for existing engagement.   Can a game reframe actual civic participation in such a way that the participation is better understood and/or more sustainable?  This is the question that is driving my work in what I call local engagement games games that 1) scaffold an existing form of engagement, 2) create an ethical context for engagement, and 3) open up cooperative spaces both in and out of the game.   Our recently completed Participatory Chinatown game was designed with this in mind.  It is designed for the specific context of an existing framework of participation the community meeting.  It is designed to augment the individuals conception of their neighborhood through roleplay.  And, it requires dialogue, conversation and collaboration within the game and invites the same on the website.  The goal is not to teach civics, but to scaffold an existing civic activity in such a manner that takes full advantages of the affordances of digital games and social media.

            Local Engagement Games are games whose primary objective is to make players attentive to their local environment and community.  They are geographically specific in orientation and their objectives move beyond participation to active and sustained attention to local matters.  While there is a lot of discussion about games and civic engagement, it is clear that to arrive at this goal we need to consider a game a situational component to existing forms of participation as opposed to thinking that a game (or any technology) can, in isolation, build platforms for civic engagement.  Being engaged in local life, whether its participating in a community meeting, or simply planting a flower in a sidewalk tree basin, requires first a sense of connection and ownership to a locality, and second, a framework for real-world action.  Just as violent video games will not compel me to act violently, civic games will not compel me to act civically.  Whether we want violence or local engagement, for a persuasive game to result in physical action, we need to build on top of the structures of social encounters that already exist.

Whatever the specific situation, each character is on one of three quests: to find a job, to find a place to live, or to find a place to socialize.  The players walk through the streets of Chinatown and are tasked with making the best decisions possible for their character.

After the players made decisions for their characters, the facilitator asked players to discuss how they felt about their experiences.  The room erupted in conversation as people spoke about their characters’ problems.   This conversation was then transformed by the faciliator to the specifics of the area being considered as part of the Chinatown Master Plan.  The second part of the game asks players to make decisions as themselves – no longer as their characters.  They are asked to prioritize their personal values for the neighborhood, choosing from labels such as ‘walkability,’ ‘identity,’ ‘affordability,’ ‘connections,’ etc.  From these priorities, people are informed with which of three planning scenarios their preferences most closely align – either residential, commercial, or mixed-use.  The values of the room are calculated and all the players enter into one of these scenarios where they can view what the area might look like and answer questions about their values.

All of the input provided during both parts of the game are saved and streamed to the website, where players can return to follow the status of their comments and continue the conversation.

The goal of Participatory Chinatown is to get people talking about their neighborhood in ways that involve a range of experiences.  Instead of coming to a meeting with a few pet peeves, playing the game gets people to think outside of their comfort zone and participate in a conversation that transforms the abstract concepts of urbanism into the everyday experiences of the characters in the game.

Perhaps most importantly, Participatory Chinatown extended not only the what of the conversation, but the who.  The mean age of participants was 30.  For a community meeting, let alone a community meeting about a master plan, that’s incredibly low.  By integrating a game into the planning process, Participatory Chinatown succeeded in bringing people into the process that are typically excluded.  In addition to the young participants, we also worked with 18 local youth to help design the game.  The youth helped make the characters by interviewing people in the neighborhood; they helped build the 3-D environments by photographing the neighborhood.  They were involved from the very beginning of the process.  And during the actual meetings, they functioned as “technology interpreters” and helped people play the game and operate the computers.

Participatory Chinatown changes the nature of the community meeting.  It makes democracy fun without being frivolous.   There is much more to do to realize the full potential of games for urban planning, but this is a good start.

Local civic engagement is an outcome of local attention.  When people engage in their neighborhoods they are paying attention to their neighborhoods amidst the myriad other things to which they could be paying attention.  They are stopping to engage in a local group, a process, or a meeting, and for that brief period of time, turning their focus towards their local geographic space.  So, the problem of waning civic engagement, so thoroughly documented by scholars such as Robert Putnam, is not merely a disenchantment with group processes, but can also be considered a problem of attention.  And, if we consider attention as something that is multiple, rather than binary, civic engagement (local attention), is not undivided.  In other words, we have the capacity to participate in local affairs through many avenues – joining a neighborhood listserv is one; attending a community meeting is another.  Civic multitasking is a viable form of participation and it in no way compromises the value of that participation.  It is similar to what N. Katherine Hayles describes as hyper attention – “Hyper attention is characterized by switching focus rapidly among different tasks, preferring multiple information streams, seeking a high level of stimulation, and having a low tolerance for boredom.”

Civic multitasking does not presume shallow focus, but instead assumes multiple foci, with each capable of depth.  And with most instances of hyper attention, deep and momentary focus bleeds over into other foci.  For instance, seeing a powerful film will influence the way you see other films, engage in fan communities, etc.  Just because focus is multiple, it does not mean that it is equally distributed.  So I’ve been thinking about this in relation to the participatory chinatown project.  We have built a game to engage residents of Boston’s Chinatown in that neighborhood’s master planning process. The game is intended to provide a deep and meaningful engagement in the neighborhood’s issues over the course of a two-hour meeting.  It is intended to, through the process of augmented deliberation, create a deep and lasting experience.  It is clear how the game can create a deep experience – it provides a scaffolding of interaction that quite literally captures the user’s attention and focuses participation onto the local context.  However, how it provides a lasting experience is less clear.

The game is intended as a reference point for civic multitasking.  It becomes a powerful reference within the multiplicity of a user’s attention.  Through the creation of a deep experience, it draws attention back to the locality, when attention might otherwise have gone elsewhere.  We have devised many, less time consuming mechanisms of paying attention to the game space after playing it, without playing it again.  Users can consult the website for continued updates on the process and on their own contributions to the game.  Paying attention to the game’s website, if only periodically and momentarily, is precisely the kind of civic engagement we are seeking.  The game provides an attentional reference point that can be continually called up within a psychological and social environment of multitasking.  In order for a game like this to be meaningful and effective, we have to adjust our terms of assessment.  The game will not result in a return to focused civic engagement; however, through the lens of civic multitasking, the game will hopefully provide that moment of deep attention that will ground the hyper attentional realities of civic life.  Our goal is to get people to pay attention to their local communities; but, likewise, our goal is to reorient expectations of attention and to discover and develop new platforms for civic multitasking.

Despite the immediate scale of its saturation, location-based tweeting is a big move in a digital culture still cozying up to location awareness.  The thing that is most compelling about Twitter’s new feature is its behind-the-scene-ness.  Location is not going to be a central feature of tweeting; it’s going to be just another piece of information captured along with digital activity.  By placing location in the background, it stands to more expeditiously bring location data into the center of the Internet.  When location data ceases to be something we protect as a representation of personal privacy, the Internet can rid itself of its aspatial qualities and better integrate itself into the everyday life of individuals and communities.

There are privacy concerns here and I have no doubt that the debates about this new feature will disproportionately focus on them.  But it is important that just as we consider protecting the limits of the person (in that we shield the individual from contextual intrusion), that we also consider the extensibility of the person (in that we understand the potential of integrating the person with their context).  Twitter might be the service that normalizes location awareness in our social media tools.  It also just might be the service that normalizes location awareness in our personal interactions with our surroundings.