Beating the City: Three Inspirational Design Patterns to Promote Social Play Through Aligning Rhythms

This paper offers three inspirational design patterns for sparking social play between unacquainted people in public and semi-public spaces. The intention is to support developers in appreciating and articulating possible approaches in creating physical or digital artefacts as interventions that encourage unacquainted people to play together in urban areas. As part of a broader selection of design examples with such social effects, we present three inspirational design patterns related to the notion of rhythm: “Sharing Vibrations”, “Actions That Need Another”, and “Crosswire Outputs”. Although the creators of our accompanying design examples did not explicitly propose them neither as games, nor urban interventions, we believe that they have strongly playable qualities that can help inspire opportunities to increase playability in unexpected moments in city places.