Public participation with the Bickers

Members of the public are set to embark on a three week, environmentally-flavoured, interactive game experiment organised by BT Innovate.

The experiment which kicks off on Monday 17th November will see the volunteer participants taking up residence with a fictitious family - the Bickers. During the game, the participants will engage in a number of playful challenges aimed at shedding some light on how they live their lives and the impact their actions have on the environment.

The game will be played on the web, on mobile phone and using BT Vision. It will see the Bicker family (Isambard, Eve and Michaela) posing questions to participants, giving them missions to complete and asking them to take photos and make videos about their habits.

The trial, named ‘Bicker Manor –Time to Pick Sides’ is at the heart of a major project being conducted by BT’s Broadband Applications Research Centre in BT Innovate known as ‘Participate’.

Also involved in the Participate project with BT are partners from the BBC, Microsoft Research, Sciencescope, Blast Theory and Nottingham and Bath Universities. The Participate project is geared towards exploring how mobile, online and broadcast channels can be combined to enable new forms of mass-participatory campaigns based on directed user generated content (UGC).

Leading the project from BT Innovate is principle researcher Amanda Gower. She explained:
“Within the project we’ve been researching how we can effectively encourage and direct participation that leads to the generation of exploitable UGC. But we also want to find out more about the effectiveness of different technologies and services such as the web, mobile devices and IPTV working together. This trial gives us a great opportunity to establish a framework for other parts of the Participate project as it progresses.”

http://www.bickermanor.com