Prototyping in PLACE

Abstract

The rising popularity of location-based applications and games (LBAGs) that break spatial, temporal, and social boundaries creates new challenges for designers. This paper introduces PLACE, an iterative, mixed-fidelity approach to Prototyping Location, Activities, Collective experience, and Experience over time in LBAGs. PLACE consists of 6 design principles: start small and scale up the fidelity, treat participants as co-designers, test in a representative space, focus on activities more than interfaces, respect authentic social experience, and represent time authentically. The effectiveness of PLACE was evaluated by prototyping Floracaching, a geocaching game for citizen science. This revealed the types of insights that PLACE provides, best practices for implementing PLACE, and how PLACE com-pares to other prototyping methods.