Tales of the Park was what the philosopher Iain Bogost calls a ‘serious game’ designed to help people explore some of the privacy and security issues raised by Internet of Things (Iot) technologies.
Produced in collaboration with Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in East London, it consisted of 15 IoT ‘creatures’ placed throughout the public places in the Park. Each creature contained a Low-Energy Bluetooth Beacon: a simple IoT device which can be used to broadcast web links to people’s smartphones. We used these devices to give each of the creatures a ‘personality’ by linking them to a chatbot: a simple program, similar to that used in an Amazon Echo, which allows people to interact with computers using everyday language. When people went near to the creatures, if they were signed up for Google’s ‘Physical Web’ platform, they would be sent a link through which they could ‘talk’ with the creature.
The creatures were each loaded with information about the place they ‘lived’. For example, Rosi the Bee (the creatures were all named and painted by children living near the Park) was placed at the bottom of the ArcelorMittal Orbit, and knew all sorts of facts about it, like how tall it is, who designed it, where it was made, and so on. However, the creatures wouldn’t just tell you what they knew: they wanted to exchange information with you so they learned more. If you gave them a memory or a fact about the place the creature lived, they would then tell you something they knew about it, or something someone else had told them.
The creatures were very up-front about what they were doing: people were told that the creatures were learning things from them, and that anything they told them would be shared with someone else. In this way, storytelling and secret-sharing were used as a way to help people to understand how networked devices can work in ways that you might not expect.
Research Associate; research design, website design, UX and code.
CC BY-NC 4.0 Duncan Hay, 2024.