In part two of our series on playful engagement, I chat again with Josh Silver from the DC office of planning and Dr. Benjamin Stokes Founder of the Playful City Lab at American University. We'll continue our talk about more playfulness in community engagement and get into some examples of their work in action.
Citizen engagement is top of mind for many local governments. And it should be. Local governments continue to grapple with communications strategies around COVID and the vaccine, are working with tightening budgets and are continuing to face pressure to innovate at the same pace as private sector companies. And building and maintaining trust with your community is key.
Interview with Joshua Silver, Lead Planner for Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships for the DC Office of Planning and Dr. Benjamin Stokes, Founder of the Playful City Lab at American University.
More info:
Featured government: Washington, D.C.
Episode guests:
Joshua Silver, Lead Planner for Strategic Initiatives and Partnerships, DC Office of Planning
Dr. Benjamin Stokes, Founder of the Playful City Lab at American University
Visit govlaunch.com for more stories and examples of local government innovation.
Lindsay: (00:08)
Welcome to the Govlaunch podcast. Govlaunch is the Wiki for local government innovation and on this podcast, we're sharing the stories of local government innovators and their efforts to build smarter governments. I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, co-founder of gov launch and your host. I'm here again with Josh Silver, from the DC office of planning and Dr. Benjamin Stokes from the playful city lab at American university. We'll continue our talk about more playfulness in community engagement and get into some examples of their work in action. First, we should put to work some strategies from last week, starting with an ice breaker. So Benjamin I'm dying to know as an expert in game theory, I guess what we'll call it. What is your favorite game?
Benjamin: (00:55)
Um, that, that's a great question. Uh, there, I think a lot of us have games from our childhood that we go back to, um, capture the flag for me is one that I have like a deep allegiance to, because it brought a group of people together every Thanksgiving, we had these epic beach capture the flag battles. Um, so, so that's, that's one. I have a lot of fun digitally playing, uh, league of legends, uh, at times. So, uh, this is in the, the e-sports space. Um, but actually I played soccer in college and so I love soccer and then I'm, uh, I'm obsessed with location-based games. I'm constantly trying them, although none of them can keep me for too long. So I, uh, as much as the good folks at Niantic with things like Pokemon go, uh, or the Harry Potter game, hope that they'll have people stick around.
Benjamin: (01:43)
I just love trying different ones that take us, um, moving through physical space. Um, so yeah, that's a, it's a great question. And I think that the fun thing is you don't have to be a game person to answer it. You'll get people who say, um, I am not a gamer and they'll say, well, I do love playing board games in my group meets every Thursday. Oh, how interesting, uh, tell us about that game. And then they'll, they'll have all sorts of things to say. So when you get past a little, a few of the cultural barriers, it's actually a great way to open up and connect with other people, including during the pandemic. It's been fun to see some of the games that have emerged.
Lindsay: (02:17)
Alright Josh, now you.
Josh: (02:20)
Oh, wow. Um, I guess, you know, we've been spending a lot of, we are, we have a really wonderful game shop in our neighborhood, um, and I've been spending a lot of time buying new games and then playing old games. I would say the thing that we've probably played the most is, is Scrabble. So, and that's been a game that I've played with my parents, um, for, for years. Growing up there, there are too many video games that I played to to name. But, uh, I would definitely say the sports video games were, were probably some of the more popular things that I play. Yeah.
Lindsay: (02:52)
I would say the adrenaline rush with Tetris, nothing can beat it. Good old fashioned Tetris.
Josh: (03:00)
Yeah. Yeah. That's a good one.
Lindsay: (03:02)
Getting back to some of the work you've collaborated on. Do you have a project or two, you feel really shows the power of playfulness?
Benjamin: (03:08)
Yeah, there's probably several we could talk about, um, Josh, do you have any, you wanna start us off with?
Josh: (03:16)
Yeah, sure. There are really two projects that we've collaborated on in the last couple of years. One of the projects that I would like to sort of highlight that I think would be beneficial for your audience, Lindsay, is that it really focused on public space activation on or better put based on what Dr. Stokes comment on earlier. Um, I never thought of it this way, but we really created this social space project. And in the district of Columbia, we have this amazing, but under utilized public asset and it's our alley system. And we have around 246 linear miles of alleys, uh, throughout the entire district of Columbiawhich are mostly public spaces.
Josh: (03:51)
And we don't really think about those public spaces. Um, and so the project was a partnership between my agency, the DC office of planning, a neighborhood community development organization, uh, the co-founders of an initiative called the Washington alley project, as well as the DC chapter of the American Institute of architects. And then, uh, Dr. Stokes in the American university gaming center. And the project, um, really served many purposes, but I'll speak to it in what, what, one of the primary things that provided the DC office of planning. And that is, it was a really an opportunity to engage the community as part of a neighborhood planning process. The project really involved testing some ideas for how people in the neighborhood might use their alley for things like informal gatherings, uh, for artwork, uh, for play in green space.
Josh: (04:39)
In this particular alley, where we did this testing, this prototyping, um, was in a very, very busy stretch of road, um, with a lot of congestion, a lot of traffic, and there were a lot of safer places for youth in particular to play. Um, and so some things that we learned from this partnership, and then I'll let Dr. Stokes explain a little bit more about kind of what his involvement was with it is that, you know, by using this alley incorporating playful components, um, people responded differently. People started saying, we never go down this alley. We wouldn't, why would we go down there? It's not safe, or there's no reason to use it. And we never thought about using this alley, or, Oh, wow. We have an alley behind our house. We should use that alley.
Josh: (05:15)
And people in residence in the community, as well as some of the partners that I listed repeatedly told us that they liked this form of community engagement much better than your traditional community meeting and forums that we talked about earlier in the podcast or, or things like a charrette. Residents really stated they liked seeing the ideas and discussions for community improvement happening in place rather than an, a meeting room. And finally, I will say that, you know, being in the alley really helped people imagine the possibilities for this space and or other parts of their neighborhood for events and play spaces, uh, for, um, biking and one of the people for the local community development, uh, groups that, you know, we need to hold an event about how to teach kids, how to bike, uh, in this alley.
Josh: (05:57)
There were other artists that came by and landscapes, landscapers came by and everyone started offering up ideas and kind of playing off the space. And there were just some really simple components that involve lighting, temporary lighting, chalk art, um, and interactive mural. Um, some signboards you explained the history and the significance of alleys and just kind of get people to interact and kind of play off one another and have these conversations. We just had a conversation last week with the project team about, um, how to do more of this as part of this neighborhood plan that we're developing with the community right now. So it was the playfulness piece. Um, it continues to have a ripple effect in all of our work. And this was just one example.
Benjamin: (06:36)
Maybe I'll, I'll jump in with just some of the role we, we did with bringing the digital into this. We were intrigued with how, um, people already have a data collection device in their hands. They have a, they have a phone and of course, city government has done surveys and work. We have apps for phones. Um, but an interesting thing about accessibility is that, uh, text messaging is actually much more democratically accessible than any app, especially apps that require data, because it turns out that while almost anybody has a phone that needs a job, cause somebody might call you, you need to respond or take care of your kids. It's a incredible priority for your, for low-income folks as well. The data plans are where actually we get huge drop-off. So we said, well, what if we take a really accessible technique technology like SMS and recognize that we can actually send pictures of alleys through SMS, and we can map a little DCS alley spaces. Um, partly because so many people don't pay attention to them. The act of taking a picture is an act of saying, well, I'm going to look with my eyes. I'm gonna look through the camera. I mean, this is nothing that's that hasn't been, uh, discovered, uh, through the act of things like community photography projects or community asset mapping. These are projects that already exist, but the digital feedback loop is interesting. And again, I said, games are partly about these feedback loops. So in our system, we handed out these postcards which said, show us your alley. And they were handed out at events. They were handed out edited and exhibition space where it was talking about the project and how we're rethinking alleys and some of the history of DC alleys and including some of the equity questions. There's some history around some of DC alleys that involve some really bad displacement in the early 1900s.
Benjamin: (08:15)
Um, and we're at right now. We're like, well, we don't want to have bad displacement now, can we think about a good, good approach, as opposed to just letting those with money and redevelop access to their, to their alleys. Having people take pictures of interesting alley spots, where there's the hidden murals, where there's a shortcut that becomes a beloved shortcut, um, was something that when you saw this postcard, you could scan the QR code. And what it would do is it would pre-fill a text message saying, here's my alley picture you would hit, hit, send, and then add the picture, hit, send again. What we built though, was a conversational system, so that what you got back is, Hey, we got your picture. Thanks. Can I ask you a question or two? And so rather than say, here are the five pieces of data we need before we can accept it, which, which is what we tend to do when we get to kind of our information and research modes.
Benjamin: (09:03)
Instead we, we let people, uh, tell us some things about what you liked about this picture. Um, tell us something that you want others to know, uh, tell us where it was located. And I want to also, uh, just emphasize that some of what this leads to is fuzzy data, um, fuzzy data on one hand is something that we're getting better and better at with machine learning and AI of making sense of. At the same time, a lot of our elementary approaches to data collection say, no, we should ask the exact longitude and latitude. We need an address. We will not validate your entry unless you give us the right kind of data. And this is actually totally against how engagement works. So importantly, this is an engagement process with the alleys that included data collection, which means the data collection has to feel like engagement.
Benjamin: (09:50)
We can't switch modes and say, welcome, come in, come in, come in now, stop. And you must only give me this certain kind of data. So the idea of embracing fuzziness in our, in our data design is something that we don't teach in our engineering schools, but game designers, they know all about this, about when do we want to embrace the kind of fuzziness we want the feel of agency to feel of, of engagement of kind of leaning forward in our chairs of staying in the alley of meeting people in the alley and the picture taking and the data collection, the data reporting all happened while you were walking around. Um, so it, wasn't something that's like, take 10 pictures and then go to the, go home to your Excel sheet and type things in because nobody wants to do that.
Benjamin: (10:28)
The tool we were using for this is a new game engine that we've actually launched as an open source project here at American university. Uh, it's called Hive Mechanic. Um, and the, the idea is it's, it's free and open source. You do have to have somebody who can figure out how to install it on the server. So we were still have some, some barriers to making it something that anybody can easily install. But once you have it installed in a server, you can run a bunch of different little projects like this. And so we used it to, to prototype this without writing code. That's kind of the fun, cool thing is we, our system says, if we get a picture, then reply with this text message.
Benjamin: (11:02)
You can write, write that in. If we get back this keyword, send them this, here's the next thing in the sequence. Um, so it feels like writing, uh, like a script more than, um, writing code. In fact, again, there's no code in, in how we write this. Um, and that was a really fun project. An interesting twist in terms of the feedback loop, one extra thing in terms of physical and digital, every time somebody sent you in a picture, it was instantly printed out in the exhibition, uh, through a variety of reasons. We did it actually in one of the staff's offices. Every so often, uh, the staffer would be like, Oh, my printer, this pro it's a little small footprint photo printer would just like spit out a photo, um, with almost no explanation and ends it. It's like a moment of surprise. This is again, that that attitude of playfulness has serendipity has unpredictableness as part of what you're seeking. Uh, so rather than give the full information on the person, it's just the picture. And they would take these pictures over to a wall in the exhibition space and start putting them up. And it was just kind of a collage that started, that started forming. I would argue that currently in a lot of cities, we don't do this full feedback loop back to the physical. We start with like a physical event, come to our meeting, come to our display space. We meet you at the farmer's market, then it's, then it goes to the online. But once it goes to the online, it's like, it's done where it's like, it's all in online spaces, but communities don't live in online spaces exclusively.
Benjamin: (12:23)
They live partly in online spaces and partly in the physical, and we want to close that loop. And so it was a really fun thing to see that wall evolving. One of the reasons to do this is that that's actually super motivating for people when they go and they say, Oh, there's pictures coming in. They can see the kind of data that's being collected that was actually driving people to participate as well. Um, people aren't just participating because it's playful in the alley, they're participating because they can see if they contribute, their efforts will lead to something. Games have choices that feel meaningful, not just that we give people again, points and badges. And this is an example of how the choice you can see it's meaningful because your photo might end up in the exhibition as well. Um, so that's one example of a playful system we built as part of this mapping, uh, DC’s huge alley system.
Lindsay: (13:08)
That's great. And you mentioned earlier the open source, um, tool that you all have built that would be available to others, obviously. Um, where would local governments who are curious, uh, access these types of resources being put out by the AU game center?
Benjamin: (13:24)
Yeah, well, hive mechanic is the, is the only offering tool that we've put out. Um, I would say we're in kind of the alpha phase of testing and trying to get funding to launch it as a larger product, but, but it's out there, anyone that has someone with enough technology skill to install, it can, and then once it's installed, anyone can make activities with it. Um, it is, uh, something that you will do a web search for hive mechanic or go to our website. I'm happy to include that for the podcast notes, um, as well. Uh, one little note in terms of infrastructure, because our cities, we think often in terms of city infrastructure, in terms of like pipes and electricity and so on, uh, the infrastructure that this system uses, uh, it relies on a program called Twilio. And for those in government that haven't heard of this before, uh, it's a little bit like the telephony side of Amazon web services so the cloud is where we store lots of things.
Benjamin: (14:15)
This is the cloud version of your tele center. Um, and so, uh, you can pay them money and they will be able to take five text messages coming in or 5,000 coming in. And we don't have to actually like go and install any phone lines or deal with all of that. So it's like a infinitely scalable, well, relatively infinitely scalable system, um, for handling things like text message interactions with the public. One of the things that I've been pushing is that play should use our existing infrastructures and, and those infrastructures are partly the physical streets. So it's play in physical streets, but it's also the infrastructure in the digital spaces where people are already moving and the systems they're using. So I would argue that for local government a kind of telephony system is, is as much part of our infrastructure as is something, uh, like alleyways.
Benjamin: (15:02)
Um, people use text messaging all the time, and we want to think about how we're supporting that or engaging with that. Uh, how can we circulate people, not, not just through the alley, but also circulate them through text messaging, have media spill over from one space to the other, just the picture of the alley show up in their social feeds. Uh, do their friends come to the alley and physical presence after they've seen the thing online. So connecting back and forth between the two of those, I think as a notion of kind of hybrid infrastructure, um, that I think is a better way of designing engagement, we, we designed engagement when it's, it's we think of engagement that is both digital and physical, uh, hybrid infrastructure leads to that kind of approach.
Lindsay: (15:40)
Well, in this series, you've shared a lot of really interesting advice. Um, but what is some final advice you want to share with local governments trying to engage more playfully with their community?
Benjamin: (15:53)
Um, I think that part of it is, uh, take the idea of play seriously in, in the way that we would narrative as I, as I mentioned earlier. And that doesn't mean you have to go back and get another graduate degree in game design, as much as we would love that at AU, we'd love to see more people, more city agencies enrolling their, uh, their employees in night classes at game game centers and game programs. I think that that is part of it, but there actually are a number of books coming out, uh, not just mine, but other people are writing about this as well. Um, that describe, you know, what are the elements of, of games? How do they work? Um, and if, if you're going to design a public engagement activity, just spend a paragraph talking about a couple of the game design elements as well. What's the verb that people are going to repeatedly do? Is there any hiding, is there any seeking to take one of those examples from a game we all know, hide and seek? Um, is there something, um, like sharing, that you want people to repeatedly do, and then what's the feedback loop as people do, some of that, they get feedback about how to do it better the next time. Um, cause in games we always get better at something. And so maybe that's kind of a provocation that I'd like people to keep thinking about is we tend to think that technology and public engagement is, should just be easy. And I think on one hand, it is because we want a really low barrier. We want everyone to come in, but a key lesson of games is that games are interesting and fun, partly because they have that challenge.
Benjamin: (17:19)
And so I want us to keep thinking actually about how we can make civic engagement a little bit harder. That's my provocation is that we don't want to actually make it hard, but haven't been meaningfully interesting and engaging. And that challenge is sometimes social where you're talking to somebody. Well, what do you think the budget should be? That's actually a hard conversation. I'm going to convince somebody to come to my side. That's an interesting, and kind of meaningful level of difficulty. It's not just that I did the easiest simplest action. So I think that that's something that I'd want folks to keep thinking about. Um, where is their interesting challenge in, in the kind of public engagement they're doing? Um, because that's a key part of, of game design and borrowing from it. It's not just the, the incentives it's the feedback loops that keep us, keep us there, keep us working at things, uh, while we're at play.
Lindsay: (18:07)
And Josh as a public servant in planning, you knew the challenges local governments face when engaging the community, which is going to be present regardless of government size. What advice would you share, particularly with small to medium sized local governments looking to join this playful cities movement?
Josh: (18:23)
Oh, that's a great question. Well, I mean the first thing, my first sort of piece of advice is the easiest one and that is to buy Dr. Stokes book locally played real world games for stronger places in communities. It's a great book, it's got great information, great case studies, and it served as inspiration for me in terms of how we've been thinking about it and in our work. Um, thank you, Josh. That's great. Um, I would also say, um, think small and scale up, um, what I've realized in the application of using, um, a playful approach to, um, our community engagement efforts is the simplest and smallest and least expensive game for which we've tried here can have a very similar effect on community engagement is something bigger and much more expensive. So making something that is not grandiose, but something that is small portable that you can take around in different places is really important. I would also add that in many cases it comes as no surprise where the local governments are stretched in, in terms of time and resources, especially now, you don't need a lot of time or money to make, um, you places and processes more playful and have impact. In addition to that, I would say seek the creativity of your colleagues. We held a two day work session that was dedicated internal to our agency with a small group that was really dedicated to brainstorming potential ideas for integrating play into a city-wide community engagement process. We then pitched each other on our ideas and then we developed a decision making system until now I didn't even think about it. We were gaming and we didn't even know it when we did that, um, making decisions.
Josh: (19:52)
And then within, just over a week or two, we were out in the community using a game that was designed in-house to engage community perceptions, um, around, um, what I referred to earlier, which was the city's comprehensive or long range planning process. I'll end with saying something. I talked a lot about creative placemaking during the podcast and it's become a big part of my work and our agency's work, um, and, and other agencies within the DC government, but, um, work with local artists to develop games or playful processes. They really have a way of thinking outside the box, which is what you talked about earlier, Lindsay. Building trust, and just thinking creatively and differently in, in sort of just making people make decisions, but decisions that aren't in a way about saying, you know, give me the red dot or the green dot and stick it on the board.
Josh: (20:38)
We've got to move past that in many, in many cases. And I think this is what we've demonstrated through our, um, you know, early entry into gaming and play is that, um, it has, it has many benefits that we hope to continue to develop and collaborate and partner with Dr. Stoves and American university.
Benjamin: (20:55)
Can I make one other prediction, which is, I'm going to predict that more government agencies are going to hire a game designer in the future? Um, that, that I'm not, I'm not sure when we'll start actually allowing them to have that title, but the idea that that a planning office should have somebody whose expertise is in playful engagement, uh, and, and the structures of game design. I, I think that game designers do think a little bit differently about problems that combined systems and data and play, and that is actually a core competency of what cities should be doing. Uh, and I think that hiring game designers is actually, I, I know New York city has done that. Um, Mexico city has done that. Um, San Jose has brought them in an interesting ways. It's, it's not yet been recognized as a hiring strategy of what, like the, the head of a planning agency should do. Um, but I think it's a provocative move. And it's a signal of the, of the kind of thinking influence that I think is only going to grow for, for game design.
Lindsay: (21:55)
Well, Josh, we appreciate you coming on and talk about your innovative work in DC to inspire other local governments to creatively and more playfully engage in the ways you have. And thank you, Benjamin for sharing your expertise in this area. For those of you interested in reading more about what Benjamin shared today, you can check out the Govlaunch story for a quick link to his book. To you both keep up the inspiring work in DC and at American University. And we look forward to seeing what you all come up with next.
Josh: (22:24)
Well, thanks for having me today. Um, Lindsay, it was really a lot of fun, um, being on here and talking about all the work that we're doing in DC and thanks again for the invitation today.
Benjamin: (22:36)
And thank you also Lindsay, but I love the podcast, but also just these conversations, uh, getting the chance to step back and reflect a little on practice. Cities are such fascinating innovation centers and microcosms of, of what's going on in the world, but also new innovations are coming out of them. And I can't wait to see what's going to be popping up with play in, in all the cities in your network.
Lindsay: (23:09)
I'm Lindsay Pica-Alfano, and this podcast was produced by Govlaunch the Wiki for local government innovation. You can subscribe to hear more stories like this, wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a local government innovator, we hope you'll help us on our mission to build the largest free resource for local governments globally. You can join to search and contribute to the wiki at govlaunch.com. Thanks for tuning in. We hope to see you next time on the Govlaunch podcast.