Designing for Adaptability:Open, Incomplete, Alive?!

Digital Media & Learning 2011

LCHC / UCSD

Dramatis Personae

• Jay Lemke, UCSD / University of

Michigan

• Rachel Cody-Pfister, LCHC / UCSD

• Robert Lecusay, LCHC / UCSD

• Ivan Rosero, LCHC / UCSD

Adaptability

• What/who adapts to what/whom?

• Affordances are relational, within a social

ecology

• Not just the game/tech, but a larger system

• Adaptability defined and designed only across

wider, less predictable settings, users

• Adapt or die!

Living Activity Systems

• Designing FOR

• Research IN

• Documentation OF

• Evaluation WITH

Why “Living”?

• People and things in changing

combinations

• Organized across multiple levels,

timescales

• Emergent, unpredictable behaviors

• Changing, developing, evolving, dying?

The Lab Alive

In the Fifth Dimension

• LCHC, UCSD, Mike Cole

• After-school and community centers

• Kids, undergraduates, researchers

• Playing and learning

Case 1: Extended Day Academy

• Urban charter school, extended day

program

• Computer lab, low-end tech

• Quest Atlantis (Sasha Barab, Indiana U)

• Kids younger than designer’s target age

• Designed for classrooms, adapting to

after-school setting

The Lab Mis-imagined

Quest Atlantis

Research Themes

• Affect and Play – playing together while

playing the game

• Recombinant Mixing – coupling what

normally doesn’t mix

• Crossing Timescales – interactions

between short-term and long-term

processes

Playing Together

Mixing together

Panel Issues• Designing FOR: diverse settings, linking offline

& online activities; emergence: the BuildWorld

• Research IN: noisy, chaotic setting; rapidly

changing moods and interests; evolving goals

• Documentation OF: fieldnotes, multi-

perspective videos, audio, chat, documents

• Evaluation WITH: changing goals, outcomes,

criteria; theirs and ours, yours?

Mixing Offline & Online

Supporting Creation