Service Design as Entertainment

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. *^^*