A growing number of urban practitioners and scholars are interested in using digital storytelling to strengthen neighborhood connections to shared culture and build a coherent sense of place. This article contributes to this discussion by investigating how 'urban furniture' can sustain social capacity for digital placemaking. While traditional 'urban furniture' in public space is purely physical, digital-physical hybrids are emerging, from benches that tell stories to bus stops that play videos. This extended case follows the travels of an Afrofuturist piece of urban furniture: a community-hacked payphone called Sankofa Red. Our analysis triangulates findings across three installations to show how placemaking can be sustained as a social process: as part of a successful makeover of a community plaza, featured in a neighborhood history game, and in an art exhibition on race and ethnicity. We identify promising practices to adapt urban furniture and retain design collectives beyond a single placemaking installation. As a way for cities to build capacity, we propose that rotating one kind urban furniture (e.g., payphones) across neighborhoods can build the social capacity for placemaking around a shared technical foundation, while still prioritizing local needs and culture.

Strong places aren't accidents; they can (and often need) to be organized. In this chapter, I show how games can tap into the science of making communities stronger. Yet the ability to make a positive impact—and avoid displacing local culture—depends on whether the game aligns with the community that already exists. I call this the game's local fit, and in this chapter, I provide a simple way to measure it. Fit is a prerequisite for respecting the past, but it is also pragmatic in the present—i ncluding for recruiting, for increasing impact on network goals, and for spreading games horizontally across cities.

How games can make a real-world difference in communities when city leaders tap into the power of play for local impact. In 2016, city officials were surprised when Pokémon GO brought millions of players out into the public space, blending digital participation with the physical. Yet for local control and empowerment, a new framework is needed to guide the power of mixed reality and pervasive play. In Locally Played, Benjamin Stokes describes the rise of games that can connect strangers across zip codes, support the “buy local” economy, and build cohesion in the fight for equity. With a mix of high- and low-tech games, Stokes shows, cities can tap into the power of play for the good of the group, including healthier neighborhoods and stronger communities. Stokes shows how impact is greatest when games “fit” to the local community—not just in terms of culture, but at the level of group identity and network structure. By pairing design principles with a range of empirical methods, Stokes investigates the impact of several games, including Macon Money, where an alternative currency encouraged people to cross lines of socioeconomic segregation in Macon, Georgia; Reality Ends Here, where teams in Los Angeles competed to tell multimedia stories around local mythology; and Pokémon GO, appropriated by several cities to serve local needs through local libraries and open street festivals. Locally Played provides game designers with a model to strengthen existing networks tied to place and gives city leaders tools to look past technology trends in order to make a difference in the real world.

To democratize the power of games for smart cities, we are refining Hive Mechanic, an open-source game engine for embedding play with text messages, city data streams, and the Internet of Things (IoT). City-specific games have the potential to affect social issues, including to address regional economics and health disparities that vary by zip code. However, collaboration in design is notoriously difficult - and programming skills are often lacking in urban planners, artists, and ordinary residents. Rather than propose a consumer app for mobile phones, this project investigates the potential of coordinating play from a neighborhood server. More importantly, the authoring tool seeks to democratize design by aligning the use of print and digital "cards" in the design process to express feedback loops and interactive sequences without requiring any traditional software coding experience. We argue that for game design in particular, paper prototyping is especially important -- and that authoring tools can expand participation by embracing a "card metaphor" to extend the power of paper prototyping into online authoring tools. This work in progress is a nine-month case study of using Hive Mechanic, including for public art, crowd-sourced mapping, and a transmedia scavenger hunt.

The story of Macon Money grows more fascinating when we look under the hood. The raw numbers from chapter 2 are still valid, yet as I will show, a much deeper view of the impact appears using the questions of local fit. Not only do we discover new ways to optimize the game, we begin to understand it as an unusually targeted form of socioeconomic policy.

Commercial games are rarely studied for their links to civic behavior. Yet small-group games online can affect the social networks that spill into civic life (and vice versa). This study examined players of the world's most popular personal computer game, League of Legends. Such games are theorized as mirrors that reflect civic tendencies and help some players to retain social resources. Using models of civic voluntarism, the attitudes and behaviors of more than 9,000 gamers were investigated. Gamers were shown to have relatively typical civic lives, except for unusually high rates of peaceful protest. Which gamers protest? As predicted, models for protest improved when considering how players approach their gaming (including recruiting and collaboration preferences). Dispelling some civic fears, there was no evidence that video games distracted from civic life when played in moderation. The findings support an emerging notion of protest as a playful and expressive civic mode.

This video was produced as part of the participatory speculative design project "Sankofa City." The project engages community residents to design emerging technologies (e.g. augmented reality, ubicomp, and self-driving cars) tied to their cultural practices. This collaboration is based in the African-American neighborhood of Leimert Park, in South Los Angeles. With increasing urban development in the area, residents are concerned about cultural displacement. In this twelve-week workshop series, local residents worked with university students (Figure 1) to design and plan their neighborhood's future. Groups began by brainstorming high-level concepts through "what if" hypothetical questions. Then they created prototypes and scenarios based on their user personas, which were inspired by local residents. Lastly, they created seven collages (Figure 2) and a design fiction video to share at a local stakeholders' meeting, in order to gather larger community feedback. The video portrays an ARenabled self-driving shuttle that dynamically displays local history. The video was particularly effective for gaining community buy-in and has since been shown at a number of local events and festivals. By grounding speculative designs in a community context, students and residents imagined novel technologies that support Leimert Park's local economy and project their cultural heritage into the unknown future.

Urban placemaking can deepen the sense of place, including with novel technologies. Placemaking seeks to revitalize public spaces, attract investment, and rally stakeholders. How can play help to position residents as storytellers and circulators of key images tied to local history? This study shows how play can leverage smart city technologies, including urban furniture and rebuilt payphones. Game mechanics were selected to gather crowds at local monuments, generate pictures of the group tied to local mythology, and automatically circulate images online. In contrast to “app” based approaches, the design facilitated cross-platform “spread” for local storytelling. The study shows how placemaking can benefit from physical objects and hybrid interfaces to facilitate the circulation of local placemaking narratives.

Despite the growing significance of mobile devices, especially among marginalized communities, there are few explorations of how participatory design (PD) can be applied to mobile communication technologies. This case study of Mobile Voices (VozMob) explores a community-based approach to PD and its potential to promote the participation of groups typically marginalized from the design process, and to empower users. VozMob is a mobile platform that was codesigned with and for immigrant workers and organizers to facilitate the online publishing of multimedia stories about their lives and their social justice efforts. Through collective visualization methods, observation, and interviews, this study investigates the factors that enabled or hindered meaningful user participation in the VozMob design process. Significant differences emerged between participants' experiences of the design process, which allow for the exploration of themes related to technology appropriation, design ownership, and power sharing in collaborative processes. Our findings reveal that a community-based approach to PD can shed light on the degree to which-and how-collaborative design and equitable participation is possible through mobile media.

Recent speculative and critical design practices may critique the dominant socio-cultural assumptions of technologies, but often lack diversity and participatory input outside the privileged realm of academic and professional designers. This paper investigates the process and potential of designing speculative futures with local communities, in order to collectively imagine technology that serves a common good and reinforces local identity. This study reflects on the "Sankofa City" project, a three-month community-university collaboration based in a historically black neighborhood in South Los Angeles. The project utilized design fiction scenario videos and collages to present provocative design concepts to local stakeholder meetings and the general public. This paper analyzes the methodology and outcomes of co-designing emerging technologies (such as augmented reality and self-driving cars) in order to establish "infrastructures of the imagination" for long-term strategies and alternative cultural models of innovation.

Given the emphasis in Participatory Design (PD) on the democratization of technology design and empowerment of users, PD has potential to contribute to the development of communication systems for social justice. Despite the growing significance of mobile technologies, especially within marginalized communities, there are few explorations of the application of PD to mobile communication technologies. This case study analyzes efforts at participatory design in creating the Mobile Voices (VozMob) mobile platform, which was designed with and for immigrant workers and organizers. Through the VozMob platform, participants use basic mobile phones to publish online multimedia stories about their lives and their social justice efforts. Through collective visualization methods, observation, and interviews, this study investigates user participation in the design of VozMob and the factors that enabled or hindered meaningful participatory design. Significant differences emerged between participants’ experiences of the design process, including: whether they experienced the development of the platform as technology ‘appropriation’or technology ‘design’; and differences in the types and degrees of power-sharing in collaborative processes. These findings have particular import for future efforts to develop communication technology projects that seek to advance social justice through participatory design, particularly for projects that incorporate emerging mobile technologies.

Sustaining participation in design is difficult, especially in neighborhoods that seek change consistent with their cultural values. Participatory Design offers several approaches (e.g. infrastructuring) that help to balance the sensibilities of urban planning with the immediacies of design. This paper investigates the distinctive value of a "constellation" of participatory activities that sustained engagement throughout the design of an urban plaza, combining physical and digital flows. Based on a three-year collaboration in a historically black South LA neighborhood, this study analyzes the reinvention of urban furniture -- payphones, bus benches, newspaper boxes, planters, and public displays -- into community interactions. After reviewing the concrete vision of this constellation, the City of Los Angeles decided to fund the implementation of a pedestrian plaza. This paper articulates our methods of infrastructuring, providing techniques that sustain participation over time around physical urban objects that become touch points for fluid groups of designers. More than any one design, the constellation approach provides a platform for horizontal iteration, maintaining focus and participation in imagining a neighborhood's socio-technical future.

This learning workshop will prototype and advance theory around the participatory design of hybrid games. In contrast to screen-centered games, our platform makes it easier to repurpose ordinary urban objects -- from aging payphones to experimental bus stop displays. The resulting games are hybrids, where the action is alternately woven across the digital and physical. Successful hybrid games offer choices to players that are immediate, from introducing neighbors (building the social fabric), to photographing street art (documenting local culture), buying from a local business (shifting the economy), and revealing local history. Based on three years of experience in South Los Angeles, our methods for Participatory Design (PD) combine low and high-tech to leverage local culture. The resulting games emphasize social mixing -- including with local businesses -- and are amplified online with flows of pictures, audio and text. For workshop participants, no technology skills are needed --since the platform seeks to maximize participation in the design process. Participants' own knowledge of cities and important cultural neighborhoods will be used to create 2-3 semifunctional games. Hidden in each design is a set of technologies that join communication networks, including cell phone SMS and Raspberry Pi computers hidden inside payphones. The most important result of this workshop may be in identifying PD theory that could help the field of game design, and vice-versa, as the two fields increasingly consider street-based media and how to constitute publics around city streets.

A delicate touch is required to empower neighborhoods using civic media. Funding is persistently scarce. Especially in marginalized neighborhoods, blunt designs can be counterproductive and even entrench complex problems. New metaphors may be needed to guide design and empower local neighborhoods. Urban acupuncture is used as the basis for this study, emphasizing a light-touch strategy that has shown success in Brazil with urban transit, and more recently in Europe with urban design. We specifically propose neighborhood acupuncture to address the local level, tapping the sociology of place-based communication. To investigate the implications for systematic design, a case study is probed in South Los Angeles using mobile media for community mapping. Using qualitative methods, three tactics were investigated for the potential to poke the network into action, including one to bridge diverse storytelling networks. Each tactic ultimately seeks to build the capacity for collective action around neighborhood issues. Acupuncture is broadly argued to sustain two design shifts: first to help approach neighborhoods as ecosystems, and second, to design for circulation rather than any single technology platform.

What does it mean to “plan” a technology? Designs with a footprint in public space are important hybrids, including wired bus stops and rebuilt payphones. Our goal is to shift from designing technology for a neighborhood by planning technology as part of the neighborhood. Aging phone booths were purchased in LA’s historic Leimert Park. For six months, residents joined with technologists to tackle a planning issue (gentrification). We developed a method of “deep engagement” to sustain grassroots planning in socio-technical systems, especially around the digital divide. The method resists “solving” the payphone problem, and instead theorizes engagement as four social scaffolds to bring technology literacy into the planning process.

The Leimert Phone Company is a design collaborative that seeks to reimagine the phonebooth. We are repurposing old payphones for civic engagement and storytelling on local streets. The project was born in Leimert Park, a neighborhood in South Los Angeles famous for its African American culture. Across the country, public phonebooths are dying. Is this a hidden opportunity to reclaim physical space and shift the narrative of the neighborhood? We go beyond booths as wifi hotspots. This project reveals an ambitious strategy for a “payphone redesign,” mixing installation art with mobile technology and activism. Members of the Leimert Phone Company include a diverse mix of artists and technologists from Leimert (anchored by KAOS Network) and the nearby University of Southern California (USC).