Panelists will discuss their work in designing and studying living spaces for astronauts and we’ll connect this to the stressors affecting our current living situation. Astronauts also face the challenge of living and working in extreme environments. Surrounded by danger, extreme heat or cold, poisonous gases, or a lack of oxygen, they live in small living quarters, closed off from the outside world and with only tenuous connections back to their loved ones at home. But throughout all of this, not only do they find opportunities to play, they make it an important factor in their lives.

We’ll see how to use playfulness in a team. How can you empower them using playful levers? Together, we’ll practice by taking examples and try to use the playful design methodology to do this. We’ll choose together practical use cases you can encounter in your daily routines at work and try to make a change in order to make them more playful!

When you’re designing something, it’s important to take the user experience into account. What I’m offering you in this class is to come with a project you have in mind (a technology, a product, a service) and to empower the experience with the playful methodology. You will see how you can use the playful value proposition, and if you don’t have an idea in mind, I have several interesting ones for you.

Serious games are games that have another purpose than just pure entertainment. In this class, we will test a serious game about Blockchain, and try to assess it and find guidelines for when you’re developing that kind of game. After that, I will share tips with you to design your serious game! Don’t hesitate to come with a topic in mind.

Come test our games! The MIT-Shenkar Summer Game Development Workshop has four games in early development this summer that are in need of your feedback! We invite everyone – young, old, MIT community, game playing, game developing, or even never touched a video game before in your life – to come, play our games, and give us the feedback we need to complete our games by the end of July.

Miguel Sicart will look at the culture, aesthetics, and technological implications of play in the age of computers. He will propose a theory of play that includes the materiality of computation in its definition of the activity, and will suggest that our forms of playing with machines are both forms of surrendering to the pleasures of computation, and forms of creative resistance to the reduction of our worlds to computable events.