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Abstract

Crowdsourced data collection is a scalable approach to collecting mobile broadband performance data across space. However, existing platforms for crowdsourced mobile broadband measurements are not designed to engage workers over time or space, which can lead to spatial misrepresentation and stale data. With the insight that games and play offer naturally engaging frameworks for users, we held five iterative, participatory design sessions with 11 participants to co-design a catalog of 11 game concepts that could be used to create more spatially representative mobile broadband data sets. Importantly, we found that while games varied substantially with respect to theme, all used a few common game mechanics to incorporate mobile broadband data collection into play. This indicates that a designed prototype might focus on offering a customizable gaming structure that would allow communities and individuals to create thematic content that could overlay onto a set of common mechanics that could support more representative geospatial data collection.


Citation

Jared Duval, Shelby Hagemann, Tochukwu Arinze Ikwunne, Dayra Quinonez, and Morgan Vigil-Hayes. 2024. Co-Designing Location-based Games for Broadband Data Collection. In Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ‘24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2057–2072. https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661502

@inproceedings{10.1145/3643834.3661502,
author = {Duval, Jared and Hagemann, Shelby and Ikwunne, Tochukwu Arinze and Quinonez, Dayra and Vigil-Hayes, Morgan},
title = {Co-Designing Location-based Games for Broadband Data Collection},
year = {2024},
isbn = {9798400705830},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661502},
doi = {10.1145/3643834.3661502},
abstract = {Crowdsourced data collection is a scalable approach to collecting mobile broadband performance data across space. However, existing platforms for crowdsourced mobile broadband measurements are not designed to engage workers over time or space, which can lead to spatial misrepresentation and stale data. With the insight that games and play offer naturally engaging frameworks for users, we held five iterative, participatory design sessions with 11 participants to co-design a catalog of 11 game concepts that could be used to create more spatially representative mobile broadband data sets. Importantly, we found that while games varied substantially with respect to theme, all used a few common game mechanics to incorporate mobile broadband data collection into play. This indicates that a designed prototype might focus on offering a customizable gaming structure that would allow communities and individuals to create thematic content that could overlay onto a set of common mechanics that could support more representative geospatial data collection.},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference},
pages = {2057–2072},
numpages = {16},
keywords = {body storming, broadband measurement, location-based games, mobile broadband, participatory design, research through design, serious games},
location = {Copenhagen, Denmark},
series = {DIS '24}
}