ABSTRACT
Smart city technologies offer the potential to address issues of sustainability and efficiency in cities. Continuous monitoring, geotracking and ubiquitous computing act as tools for engaging citizens, influencing their behaviour and measuring their impact on the city. These technologies, however, are not neutral: if handled in a top-down way, they give rise to concerns about privacy, instrumentalism and technological lock-in. In this chapter, we illustrate an alternative, playful approach to urban sustainability, one that is based on playable cities and on different ludic strategies. To do so, we reflect on two playful artefacts created in the Mobility Urban Value (MUV) project that aim to make cities more sustainable. The first artefact is an app that helps citizens make sustainable mobility choices by transforming commuting into a ‘gameful’ experience and rewarding sustainable choices. The second is Asphyxia, a screenless device simulating the breathing movements of living lungs as a poetic way of communicating air quality that is non-solutionist, open to interpretation, aesthetically complex and playful. This chapter involves a reflective account of the ideation, design, implementation and deployment of these two designs; a short set of ‘designer interviews’ with their creators; and an artefact critique/semiotic analysis of the various digital and physical artefacts composing this project. Drawing on these perspectives, the chapter outlines an approach for urban sustainability on the basis of playfulness and ludicity.
