1,721,070 research outputs found
Game Design Beyond the Game Industry
Full text linkOnce considered a niche, almost a subculture, video game design has evolved into a fully realized sector and field of innovation within the Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs). This Open Debate section of diid. disegno industriale industrial design explores what happens when game design is hybridized with other domains of design and creative practice, both in terms of practical integration and conceptual transformation. As we introduce this volume and the contributions in it, we outline a general panorama spanning four ana- lytic dimensions that recur in the field: theoretical concepts (theories and frameworks that reframe what design is and what it can do), approaches (developmental and participatory processes and models used to guide design work), tools (the technical systems and platforms adopted from game development), and methods (techniques and design heuristics drawn from game practice)
Serious Urban Games: From Play in the City to Play for the City
No full textThe academic study of playful activities has rapidly gained relevance over the past ten years and given birth to an interdisciplinary field known as Game Studies. In that context, a small but promising research area deals with interactions between game design, urban planning and socially relevant issues such as urban rehabilitation, innovation, integration, inclusion and civic engagement. We believe that digital and non-digital ludic practices in urban spaces offer countless untapped potentialities for the promotion of active, responsible forms of citizenship, awareness- raising on key sociocultural and political issues and the promotion of more participative urban design and development processes.
To map a possible direction for future research, we will discuss some features of ludic activities designed to motivate players to interact with their surrounding urban space and fellow citizens in positive ways. We will describe two ludic genres: Serious Games and Urban Games, the overlapping of which defines an emergent Serious Urban Games sub- genre. As a first step towards a more extensive analysis, we shall then detail two key tendencies in Serious Urban Game Design using some examples to argue for the relevance and usefulness of designing, organising and studying playful activities in metropolitan areas
In and out domains. Playful principles to in-form urban solutions
Full text linkThe implementation of games in architecture and urban planning has a long history since the 1960s and is still a preferential tool to foster public participation and address contemporary spatial – and social - conflicts within the urban fabric. Moreover, in the last decade, we have seen the rise of urban play as a tool for community building, and city-making and Western society is actively focusing on play/playfulness – together with ludic dynamics and mechanics - as an applied methodology to deal with complex challenges, and deeper comprehend emergent situations.
In this paper, we aim to initiate a dialogue between game scholars and architects through the use of the PLEX/CIVIC framework. Like many creative professions, we believe that architectural practice may benefit significantly from having more design methodologies at hand, thus improving lateral thinking. We aim at providing new conceptual and operative tools to discuss and reflect on how games facilitate long-term planning processes and help to solve migration issues, allowing citizens themselves to take their responsibility and contribute to durable solutions
The HydroNet ASV, a Small-Sized Autonomous Catamaran for Real-Time Monitoring of Water Quality: From Design to Missions at Sea
No full textIn this paper, we describe the design, the development, and the sea trials of a novel small-sized autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) designed for monitoring the coastal water quality. The vehicle is characterized by the capability of measuring hydrocarbon and heavy metal concentrations directly onboard by means of custom-made miniaturized sensors. This capability, novel for an ASV, is combined with a winch-based sampling system specifically designed for small-sized vehicles. The sampling system can collect water samples up to 50 m in depth and measure the physical/water quality parameters of the water column. With these two features, the HydroNet ASV provides an autonomous, practical, real-time monitoring system, conceived to complement the current water monitoring practices in which samples are collected by a dedicated boat and analyzed in specialized laboratories at a later stage. The design process had the aim of realizing a vehicle capable of hosting the sampling system and the custom-made sensors that represent a unique payload in the world of small-sized ASVs. A twofold objective was pursued: realizing an ASV suited for monitoring missions in realistic scenarios (e.g., attention was paid to avoid water sample contamination), at the same time limiting the size for the ease of transportability and deployment. Severe constraints rose from these considerations and were addressed during the realization of the robot such as reduced length/weight (that limit the available space for the sensor payload) and low draft and protected propellers to allow the ASV to navigate in shallow waters with likely floating obstacles such as plastic bags. We report the design process aiming at a tradeoff between ease of transportability (small vehicle), available payload, and navigation performance in terms of achievable speed, endurance, and resistance to environmental disturbances (favored by larger ASV dimensions). We present sea trials of the realized vehicle validating the design choices. In particular, a long-range mission is discussed in which the robot executed a monitoring survey covering autonomously 12.5 km in front of Livorno, Italy, coast
Neural Network Learning the Inverse Kinetics of an Octopus Inspired Manipulator in Three-Dimensional Space
No full textMission Planning and Decision Support for Underwater Glider Networks: a Sampling on-Demand Approach
Full text linkThis paper describes an optimal sampling approach to support glider fleet operators and marine scientists during the complex task of planning the missions of fleets of underwater gliders. Optimal sampling, which has gained considerable attention in the last decade, consists in planning the paths of gliders to minimize a specific criterion pertinent to the phenomenon under investigation. Different criteria (e.g., A, G, or E optimality), used in geosciences to obtain an optimum design, lead to different sampling strategies. In particular, the A criterion produces paths for the gliders that minimize the overall level of uncertainty over the area of interest. However, there are commonly operative situations in which the marine scientists may prefer not to minimize the overall uncertainty of a certain area, but instead they may be interested in achieving an acceptable uncertainty sufficient for the scientific or operational needs of the mission. We propose and discuss here an approach named sampling on-demand that explicitly addresses this need. In our approach the user provides an objective map, setting both the amount and the geographic distribution of the uncertainty to be achieved after assimilating the information gathered by the fleet. A novel optimality criterion, called A η , is proposed and the resulting minimization problem is solved by using a Simulated Annealing based optimizer that takes into account the constraints imposed by the glider navigation features, the desired geometry of the paths and the problems of reachability caused by ocean currents. This planning strategy has been implemented in a Matlab toolbox called SoDDS (Sampling on-Demand and Decision Support). The tool is able to automatically download the ocean fields data from MyOcean repository and also provides graphical user interfaces to ease the input process of mission parameters and targets. The results obtained by running SoDDS on three different scenarios are provided and show that SoDDS, which is currently used at NATO STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE), can represent a step forward towards a systematic mission planning of glider fleets, dramatically reducing the efforts of glider operators
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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