Co-gnito: a Participatory Physicalization Game for Urban Mental Mapping

DOI

This study introduces Co-gnito, a participatory physicalization game that supports collaborative urban mental mapping through storytelling. Through Co-gnito we investigate gaming as a means to elicit subjective spatial experiences and to steer the synchronous construction of a physicalization that aligns and represents them. Evaluating Co-gnito with 28 players, we found that storytelling as a gaming mechanic, motivated the gradual addition of personal contributions towards a collective outcome, but that the reward system did not nudge the mapping direction as expected. We also demonstrate how the shared construction process of a physicalization was influenced by the negotiation of the data encoding scheme, the token physical affordances, and the game mechanics. We therefore believe that our core contributions, comprising of: a working research prototype; an augmentation of the physicalization pipeline towards collaborative settings; and a set of reflective considerations, provide actionable knowledge on how to design participatory physicalizations in the future.