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