June 13 (Tuesday)

June 14 (Wednesday)

June 15 (Thu)

Opening Keynote: Ben Schouten

Title: Play and Civic Interaction Design

In this lecture we will address a changing perspective on design, one in which users are defined as social and economical actors who co-create products and services. We will see that the role of play in its contemporary and digital form for instance through games, apps, interactive toys is essential in this process. With civic interaction design, we mean the design of products and services that enable citizens to improve the quality of both their individual and communal lives, and that equip them with agency to act as citizens.

This lecture consists of two parts. The first part focuses on our research in play and civic interaction design. We will define play in its digital form and its intrinsic qualities, such as fun, experience, creation, collaboration, and competition. Next, we will show that through these qualities a new digital culture has emerged in which, instead of a top-down, one-to- many vertical cascade, we find bottom-up, many-to-many, horizontal, peer-to-peer communications. The main focus in this lecture is on the challenge of how to design for these collective opportunities, e.g. in health care, education and city planning.

Short Bio:

Ben Schouten holds degrees in arts and mathematics. In 1996 Ben Schouten founded Desk.nl, providing innovative internet related solutions. Together with the Dutch Design Institute (Vormgevings Instituut), Desk was internationally acknowledged with a webby award in gaming. In 2001 he received his PhD for his thesis on content based image retrieval and interfaces that allow browsing & searching for images in an intuitive way, according to human perception.

Ben Schouten founded a research group in Biometrics and Human Behavior Analysis at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI, Amsterdam) and taught at the Utrecht School of Art & Technology (HKU) in Interaction Design and Gaming. In 2010 he was appointed Full Professor Playful Interactions in Smart Environments at Eindhoven University of Technology and in 2013 Lector of Play & Civic Media Research at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. His group focuses on play for social innovations, citizen empowerment and culture. He is an advisor for the European Commission on the ‘Internet of Things’ and has written 100-plus publications at the intersection of play, games, participatory design and citizen empowerment.

Closing Keynote: Steven Dow

Title: Collective Innovation

Society’s most daunting problems call for new strategies that engage many diverse stakeholders into the design process in order to solve bigger and messier problems. While the Internet makes it easy to find and coordinate people, we need to advance fundamental knowledge and technologies for "collective innovation", where groups collectively explore and refine solutions for big problem spaces. To explore this, my research group contributes novel interactive systems to better understand 1) how to synthesize large collections of prior research and examples in order to frame appropriate research questions, 2) how to productively select and build on the most promising and creative ideas, and 3) how to effectively engage in large-scale participatory design by gathering feedback from communities of stakeholders and through crowdsourcing and social media. To guide and motivate the design of these systems, this research builds on (and draws explicit links between) theories of design thinking and collective intelligence.

Short Bio

Steven Dow is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego where he researches human-computer interaction, social computing, and creativity. Steven received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2015 for research on "advancing collective innovation." He was co-PI on three other National Science Foundation grants, a Google Faculty Grant, Stanford's Postdoctoral Research Award, and the Hasso Plattner Design Thinking Research Grant. Before UCSD, Steven was an Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University and a postdoctoral scholar in Computer Science at Stanford University. He received an MS and PhD in Human-Centered Computing from the Georgia Institute of Technology, and a BS in Industrial Engineering from University of Iowa.