Search engine technology for fun instead of productivity

Heck yes. Let’s make screwing around on the Internet more efficient.

Searching for Fun:

But this attitude [search for sake of productivity] ignores a growing portion of searches: those performed when people… want to discover something entertaining or amusing…

New research suggests that many people use search engines this way, and their behavior is fundamentally different from other searchers’ behavior.

To best serve those people, [Max Wilson] says, companies and researchers should look for more ways to provide welcome serendipity through search.

[David Elsweiler] says people seemed intent on producing a certain mood: They used such terms as “interesting,” “entertaining,” “distracting,” or “challenging” to describe what they sought. “These are very subjective descriptions, and search engines are not good at dealing with this kind of task,” he says.

Robert Stebbins, who researches the way people spend their free time, notes that historically, information scientists have neglected to design tools for people who search just for fun. Stebbins says people look for several sorts of things when searching the Web this way: sensory stimulation, interaction with others, and active entertainment…

Search engine research has traditionally focused elsewhere, says Daniel Tunkelang, an engineer at Google who is an expert on information retrieval. “It would be easy to dismiss [casual search behavior], except for the fact that people are doing it,” he says.

“To some extent, it’s up to systems to recognize and facilitate people who are putting themselves out there with different motivations, like to have fun,” [Wilson] says. “It may be feasible, as systems like Google do already with types of target content, to track ‘fun’ queries…”

Very First Imagination Playground Now Open

I linked to the project over a year ago: Unstructured Free Play Interfaces: David Rockwell’s Imagination Playground.

Imagination Playground may be “low tech”, but it’s well-designed, very playful technology all the same:

Imagination Playground is a breakthrough playspace concept conceived and designed by architect David Rockwell to encourage child-directed, unstructured free play. With a focus on loose parts, Imagination Playground offers a changing array of elements that allows children to constantly reconfigure their environment and to design their own course of play. Giant foam blocks, mats, wagons, fabric and crates overflow with creative potential for children to play, dream, build and explore endless possibilities.

The Imagination Playground site now includes video of the concepts in action. The water features look especially fun.

There’s too many good nuggets to quote about Rockwell and the project. Go on, read:

• How to work better: Play!
• David Rockwell, Bloomberg Open Imagination Playground (photos)

Cities around the world are getting on board by purchasing Imagination Playground in a Box portable sets. Reportedly, Rockwell is assembling a book of interviews chronicling successful people’s early play experiences.

Technologies of the Imagination: Aliefs and Fantasy Play

Recently I came across two really fun projects:

• German designer brings Wipeout racing game to life, burns up cardboard tracks with an R/C car
• Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots goes motion-controlled for TI design challenge

In the first, a classic video game was transformed into the “real thing” by way of constructing an elaborate, room-size track for a radio controlled car equipped with a video camera. The car is driven from an arcade racing cabinet with its video appearing in place of the cabinet’s original video game. Plans exist to enhance the experience further with force feedback and on-track power-ups.

In the second project, the classic Rock ‘em Sock ‘em Robots toy has been enhanced with a sophisticated system that allows players to box with their own fists and see the toy robots play out the fight.

The minute I saw these I immediately wanted to play with them. I shared the first with a friend and we both totally geeked out over it. Later I was struck with a question — why exactly was I so excited by these? The new and improved versions still provided the same essential experience that the originals did. The added technology apparently added or revealed something, but what? Perhaps it makes the experience more real? But what significance is there in making an instrument of pretend “more real”? What does that mean?

Philosophers and psychologists have an interesting notion that I think gets at an answer to my question: the alief. An alief is “an automatic or habitual belief-like attitude, particularly one that is in tension with a person’s explicit beliefs.” When a person is freaked out to stand on a perfectly sturdy glass walkway that reveals a great height below — that’s the manifestation of an alief. That person believes the walkway is safe but still carries another more primitive belief connected to the perception of the situation.

For humans, the unreal has very nearly the same effect on us as the real. This is the essence of aliefs. Imagination, fantasy, story, and illusion — they enter our consciousness and excite our nervous system in very similar ways to reality itself. This is the power of novels, movies, theater, magic, and toys. They tickle something real within us though we know full well these things aren’t real — this is the duality and tension of experiencing our beliefs and our aliefs.

And so this brings me to answering my earlier question. I think my enthusiasm for the two projects I cited at the beginning of this post is that they each have found ways to narrow the gap between the unreal and the real. Paradoxically, in playing with these technologies, they allow me to enter more deeply into a fantasy by causing me to experience a reality more viscerally.

Perhaps this partly explains the drive to create ever more sophisticated toys, ever more realistic special effects on stage and in theaters — it’s an effort to resolve the divergence of reality and imagination.

FOOTNOTE: The title of this post and some of its content were inspired in part by the article The Pleasures of Imagination.

FLASHBACK UPDATE (August 24, 2010): I just remembered that in Pacman vs. the Real World I discussed another fun project that similarly blurred the distinction between reality and fantasy. I was really geeked out about it too.

Playing with Blocks Gets All New-fangled and Technological

When thinking about toys it’s hard to get any more basic than playing with blocks. I’m noticing a theme developing in new takes on this classic — combining the tactile & tangible play of blocks with display technologies and inter-block communication.

For example:

• Puzzlemation - A Dynamic Tiled Display
  A maker’s implementation of a low-fidelity display that can change shape, grow in size, and present animations. Its name hints at its use in puzzles. The individual tiles (blocks) are unaware of one another.


• Great LED interactive Puzzle (GLiP)
  A student project that expands on the Puzzlemation concept by incorporating communication and positional awareness among the blocks.


• Siftables
  David Merrill’s thesis project for MIT’s Media Lab now being commercialized as a play technology. Siftables use a hi-fidelity display and include quite a bit of local processing power and inter-block communication ability. Siftables are the most advanced of the three examples and move beyond mere puzzles into a self-contained, programmable, play platform (that’s a lot of “p”s).

[I had opportunity to meet David Merrill before he completed his PhD. He told me there was at one point an effort to find business and productivity (i.e. serious) applications for his technology though most of the demonstrations I saw were games. It appears the technology landed squarely in the play space. Which I love.]

One observation I have on all these concepts is that they tend to be quite 2D in nature. The individual blocks are all primarily meant to lay flat and relate to one another horizontally. This drives a natural question for me: what would 3D versions of these block concepts look like having volume and shape and the ability to stack & build?

You might make the leap to thinking about adding motion to a 3-dimensional concept of high-tech blocks and arrive at something robotic. I don’t want to go there. Motion violates something essential to the nature of playing with blocks. I’m giving this concept more thought as it’s intriguing and leads to philosophical questions about the nature of blocks and spatial play and what smart blocks could be…

Say Cheese: 15 Fascinating Facts About Smiling

I recently received email from a self-described “frequent reader” (hot diggety I have a frequent reader!). Ken is with nursingschools.net; he pointed me to a new post on their blog ”Say Cheese: 15 Fascinating Facts About Smiling.” It’s a quick but quite interesting read with copious linkage.