Service Design as Entertainment

Why Pooptopia? A view into my design process.

Problem:
The sidewalks of via Watt are littered with dog poo. The neighborhood is what I have termed a "Pooptopia." Heaven if you like dog poo, but hell if you don't. This is a problem for me because my wife fears walking down the street to my school. This is also a problem for other people as well. Some of the poo has been flattened and smeared by unwary walkers. I happened to observe one unlucky lady wearing lovely boots as she stepped in poo across the street. We live in Milan and there are lots of fashionable people wearing nice, expensive shoes. I'm sure the poor girl was horrified to be scraping the bottom of her boots in the dirt and bushes.

Observation:
Around the big park near my apartment the sidewalks are clean. The park is huge by local standards and it has a sizable dog run, a fenced-in area for dogs to run free. This is a "Puptopia." Heaven for dogs, dog owners, and people just out for a walk. Me and a friend interviewed several dog owners enjoying the park with their dogs. They felt it was their responsibility to pick up after their dog. They all carried plastic baggies with them, made sure their dog only went in the grass or in the dog run.

This was also clearly a community. We were among friends and neighbors. They knew each other's dogs by name. Most of them take their dogs out 5 times a day, so they probably saw each other quite regularly. The dog owners had a lot of time to chat among themselves while their puppies played in the dog run. We observed something very special. As we were talking with two ladies, a third woman on a bicycle with dog on a leash and little girl riding in a child seat behind her, paused briefly to hand over the dog's leash to one of the ladies we had been talking to and then cycling away. Some time later she returned on her bicycle, alone. She must have dropped her daughter off at school. I realized that this was a daily ritual for both her and her friends. No words needed to be exchanged, everything was already understood between them. They had a strong community here and I think the park had a big role in this. It reminded me of the talk Enzio Manzini's gave to our class last year about the Commons, areas shared by the community. Poop-free sidewalks are just one beneficial side-effect of the Commons. I know you, you know me. I clean up after my dog, you clean up after yours. I look after your best interests, you look after mine. It's so simple.

Hypothesis:
Via Watt is a mixed commercial-residential area. No grand parks or grassy sidewalks. Just auto-shops, furniture makers, and hardware stores along with a couple pizzerias and kebab joints to feed to local labor force. Domus Academy and Interaction-Ivrea just moved into the neighborhood which signals that perhaps neighborhood is verging towards industrial-chic but it's not quite there yet. It also means the neighborhood has a strong flux of transient visitors, busy during weekday working hours, empty on weekends and evenings. Via Watt does have some residents, and obviously a number of them have dogs judging from the evidence. But I would guess there is no sense of community. Dog owners do not congregate in the street. They pass each other on the sidewalk, walking in opposite directions, meeting rarely. No one is looking out for anyone else, and if you're not going to pick up you're dog's shit, why should I?

And that, my friends, is why the people of Watt and Watt-like neighborhoods across the globe need M.P.A.A.S., the Mobile Poo Awareness & Avoidance System brought to you by turd-herders of Pooptopia LBS (Location-based service). Part of Service Design As Entertainment.

View the Flickr set for this project.

This post is dedicated to Neil Churcher for always asking WHY and was motivated by reading this post by Julian Bleecker. Pooptopia owes a large intellectual debt to Enzio Manzini and Jane Jacob's wonderful book "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."

What's your favorite color? This weekend I am working on some fun designs for Pooptopia, uploaded and geotagged my poologging from earlier this week as well as pix from a survey of dog owners. Check out the Flickr set. More juicy bits on their way!

A new home for my thesis: Service Design as Entertainment [SD:E], Entertainment as Service Design [E:SD]. Previously hosted at http://people.interaction-ivrea.it/a.amstrong/thesis/

To recap, SD:E asks what can service design learn from entertainment? By way of adopting entertainment-like qualities such as storyline, production value, and narrative, I believe the daily interactions with have with services can not only serve our needs but also enrich our lives in both playful and poetic ways. My goal is to design a service which is so fun, so enjoyable to use that people will be drawn to using it in the same way people seek out cultural experiences. In this regard, I am developing Pooptopia LBS (don't laugh, poo is serious business in Milan), a location-based service in development with Victor Szilagyi. E-mail me if you want to be notified when we reach an alpha build of the service.

E:SD asks: How can service design save entertainment? This is a very broad and questionable question so I will be more specific. I am focued on the field of gaming because A) it's my second love (she is my first) and B) we're at a very critical stage in the development of a new medium with all the hype surrounding next-gen consoles, pervasive and casual gaming. Beyond the hype, I think there is also hope for experimental and independant game developers, but in my opinion, the financial viability of projects is the biggest issue (this is something Greg Costikyan is tackling head on in the PC market). Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) are a great illustration of a new game genre struggling to be self-sustainable. 4orty2wo Entertainment has done such amazing work under the guise of engagement advertising or buzz creation. One could even say "The Beast", ILOVESBEES, and Last Call Poker were superior cultural offerings than the products they were marketing: the A.I. movie, Halo, and Gun... clearly with Gun, less so with Halo, but regardless of whether you prefer X to Z, it is a whole lot easier to sell tickets to a movie than to an ARG.

Which leads us to E:SD, how can service design save the entertainers? I am looking at games built with new economic models in mind, designing games as services rather than boxes of software (see Lost Garden), and forging partnerships with commercial stakeholders instead of traditional in-game advertising.

E:SD is comprised of four projects which illustrate my approach with four different commercial partners. It the beginning there was Piedimonsterz helping McDonald's tighten and tone their image.

This summer Art Center Nabi heard my proposal for Rumble of the Future, a locative media interactive narrative embeded in the commecial fabric of the Myungdong area of Seoul, played out through a series of semacode-trigged MMSs.

In our recent Applied Dream's workshop, Chia-Ying Lee and I proposed Urban Brand Warfare, a game for shopper when they're not shopping, to France Telecom. Urban Brand Warfare is a city-scale turf war fought by consumers representing the brands they represent played on the infrastucture of the mobile phone cell network. Tribalism and graffiti were major influences. Urban Brand Warfare is under NDA until May 2006.

Finally, the project currently under development which I hope to be demoing at the IDII 2006 End of Year Show, Gladiator Daycare: Adventures in RFID Retail. Taking lessons from Paco Underhill's Call of the Mall, it's game for mall-rats, bored hubbies and tag-along kids which takes RFID tags in the retail environment and uses them as in-game tokens.

Alejandro and I are hoping to show an exhibition-quality Piedimonsterz installation at the Salone this year. We just need sturdier insole-inputs. I will be working with a yet-to-be-confirmed programmer on prototyping Gladiator Daycare on a PDA with an RFID reader using flash to simulate a Gameboy DS-like experience. 'Rumble' is on the back burner with a few ideas for a Milano/Duomo/Stranieri story on simmer.

In other collaborations, David A. Mellis and I have been bouncing around ideas for a Teaching Turing make-over called Free Turing (a.k.a. Alan, a Rat, a Cat, and a Dog), which takes the 'teaching turing machines through a series of puzzle-challenges' concept one step further by setting it in the context of Alan Turing's later life when he was forced into an insane asylum by his own government for "treatment" for homosexuality and which ultimately lead to his tragic demise. We don't know yet if it will tie into Dave's thesis, Understanding Code, yet but it _is_ somewhat related. Anyways, we love the project and think a lot of other people will too (not just closet cryptographers!).

And now, I've *really* got to read the Diamond Age. *^^*