The Research Origins of It’s All Connected

A bit about how it started: It’s All Connected V0.1

How do you measure public impact of interdisciplinary e-waste research spanning X years? A competitive-cooperative game for 4 players paired up across team roles of Citizens and Corporation. Relying on each other’s functions for their team’s win conditions centred around creating, maintaining and repairing devices, the original game-as-research-tool served as an abstraction of our current systems of supply and demand to measure. Here’s a 1 minute summary of the original mechanics:

Translating this reality into gameplay comes with one twist – a climate marker that both teams rely on for survival.

What research?

Originally a research game for all audiences backed by the Fixing the Future project, initial prototypes sought to gather information on the impact of ongoing e-waste and repair research by putting people in the shoes of key stakeholders within these systems to understand the context in which decisions around sustainability are made on all sides. The idea of ‘serious’, ‘non-fiction’ or ‘meaningful’ games is still a steadily burgeoning area of study even beyond the use of interactive media in teaching. Through feedback we received the experience has shown to prompt thoughts about preventing repair through maintenance as well as balancing want/need on the demand front while the interactive nature provided a balanced perspective of the typically more opaque corporate side.

Who funded this?

Fixing the Future: The Right-to-Repair and Equal IoT

They’re a 2-year, £1.25 million research project funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) investigating how the lack of repairability in the consumer Internet of Things (IoT) will adversely impact equity, inclusion, and sustainability in the digital economy.

But what now?

School use?

We are now looking to streamline and modularise the game’s mechanics to fit into lessons around sustainability, specifically touching upon product’s life cycles. To ensure we’re considering all perspectives, don’t hesitate to reach out to become a tester or share your view!