ORIGINAL ARTICLE Avatopia: a cross-media community for societal action Ylva Gislen �� �� Jonas Lowgren �� �� Ulf Myrestam Received: 23 December 2005 / Accepted: 31 July 2006 / Published online: 23 February 2007 �� Springer-Verlag London Limited 2007 Abstract A cross-media platform was designed for a community of young teenagers oriented towards societal change. The platform involved an interactive web-forum featuring creative and communicative collaborative tools in a 3D avatar environment, and a weekly show in national public-service television. Informal assessment of the work indicated that (1) an integrated spiral of production and consumption across the two media channels involved is a viable design concept to support community building, (2) off-the-shelf avatar technology and consumer-grade Inter- net connectivity can form a feasible infrastructure for collaborative storytelling tools, and (3) a participatory de- sign process wherein participants transition into the role of mentors and norm carriers upon deployment can be a feasible way to support subcultural community building towards ������difficult������ topics, even though it entails consid- erable resource demands. All of these findings are poten- tially transferable to other design domains and audiences. Keywords Cross-media Community Sociability Public service Participatory design Avatar world 1 Introduction Designing new media products always takes place in the context of existing media products, channels and uses against the backdrop of the existing mediascape, as it were. Technological trends in the directions of interactivity, mobility and sociability coexist with established production and consumption practices including mass media such as television as well as personal media such as phones. Any effective design strategy for such a complex situation must find ways of balancing the familiar and the innovative, the old and the new���as Ehn [1] puts it in a memorable phrase, to address the dialectics between tradition and transcedence. The Avatopia project illustrates one such attempt to balance the old and the new in the mediascape, and spe- cifically by creating a cross-media product intertwining the qualities of public-service broadcast television with those of an interactive web forum. The project aimed at providing a platform for young teenagers committed to creating change in society. As such, it was an experiment in sociability of interactive television, not limited to sharing electronic program guides and snippets of broadcasted ������content������ but rather placing broadcast TV in a larger context of interac- tivity and inter-activity for societal purposes. The project was based on a participatory design process and ran all the way to full-scale deployment of web forum and national TV programming. However, the development of the Avatopia community was prematurely discontinued when the national TV broadcaster suffered an unexpected budget cut. Hence, we have no formal evaluation data and the following pages concentrate on presenting a chrono- logical overview of the project, outlining tentative con- clusions, and identifying promising directions for future work in related areas. 2 Project setting Among young teenagers in Sweden (age 13���17 or so), there is a small but significant fraction committed to Y. Gislen �� J. Lowgren �� (&) Arts and Communication, Malmo �� University, 205 06 Malmo, �� Sweden e-mail: jonas.lowgren@k3.mah.se U. Myrestam Swedish Television, 350 33 Vaxjo, �� �� Sweden 123 Pers Ubiquit Comput (2008) 12:289���297 DOI 10.1007/s00779-007-0152-5

changing society in the large and in the small. Typical examples of topics catalyzing their energy include envi- ronmental concerns, racial segregation, social injustice, globalization and consumerism, co-determination and societal influence of young citizens, and of course gender equality. You may find them in issue-driven organizations such as Amnesty, Greenpeace and Animal Liberation, or as student representatives in co-determination groups at school, or marching in the streets during trade organization summits, or hanging out in cafes �� and other meeting places together with their friends in urban settings, that is. The ones truly committed to change, who have the misfortune of growing up in villages or in the countryside, generally find the selection of stimulating social and physical envi- ronments to be lacking. What is common across the country is the subcultural perception of being denied the access to media and other channels of public influence that the heartfelt issues deserve. Swedish Television is the national public service TV network in Sweden, offering two analogue and five digital channels to virtually every household in the country, all (largely) advertisement-free and funded by the state and by viewer fees. It is a cultural institution in many ways, with extremely strong figures for reach and credibility among Swedish mass media and an equally strong image of grown-up and authoritarian television. Consequently, it struggles with low ratings among teenagers as well as with the respectable tasks of identifying its roles and the public service mission in the rapidly changing landscape of increasing TV competition and the new media. The two preceding paragraphs may appear to have nothing in common, but circumstances happened to be fortunate in the year 2001: The intention emerged to ex- plore the intersection between (some) young teenagers��� will to change society and Swedish Television���s need to experiment with new cross-media formats and new inter- pretations of the concept of public service. A collaborative project was formed between Swedish Television, Malmo �� University, Animationens Hus, the Interactive Institute, and a couple of more peripheral actors to work towards the vision of designing, deploying and assessing a cross-media platform for a small but highly motivated group of young teenagers throughout Sweden committed to creating change in society. 3 The Avatopia project The vision of the project was formulated in the initial phase based on the knowledge interests of the participants, on Swedish Television���s knowledge of its audience, and on preparatory studies of sociological theory and initial fieldwork with young teenagers across Southern Sweden [2]. It essentially posed the idea of a cross-media platform providing the social substrate for planning societal action and influencing the public opinion on key issues. This was to be realized in the form of an interactive web forum in conjunction with a daily or weekly TV show, where broadcasted material was produced inside the interactive forum by community members in collaboration with TV staff. The idea was for the two channels to form a positive spiral of participation: The comparatively small web forum produces material which is broadcast to a comparatively large TV audience, where some people are excited enough by what they see to join the community by committing to action in the interactive forum. In order for this spiral to work, we assumed that the interactive forum had to use audiovisual representations of a nature that were suitable for TV broadcasting. Moreover, we thought of the Avat- opia community as a small and highly involved group, comprising some 2,500 members of which only a hundred or a few hundred were online in the web forum at any given time. The unique access to a highly regarded national broadcast channel would ensure appropriate potential for influencing public opinion. 3.1 Concept development With this overall vision in mind, we set out to create a participatory design process involving 20���30 young teen- agers with the dual tasks of (1) contributing to the design of various aspects of the cross-media platform, and (2) adopting the roles of mentors and norm-carriers in the community once it was opened to the public. The group of teenagers was recruited in December 2001 and January 2002 by means of a rather unusual Christmas gift followed by an initial workshop at Swedish Televi- sion���s premises in Vaxjo. �� �� The gift was a loaf of bread stuffed with some creative exercises and a cassette tape with instructions and mood music, along with an invitation to bring the completed exercises and come to the Vaxjo���� workshop. The exercises were largely inspired by the RCA work on cultural probes [3] and involved a disposable camera for a photo diary, a set of pre-addressed postcards with questions pertaining to values and views on change in society, a small object to be used in creating a personal avatar, and a cassette tape containing spoken instructions for the exercises, mixed together with some mood music composed for this purpose (refer to Fig. 1). Some forty Christmas gifts were sent to young teenagers whom we had reason to believe would be interested in the goals and development of Avatopia. The list of recipients was compiled based on contacts from our initial fieldwork and on other contacts to individuals and organizations where we expected to find project members with the right profile. Twenty-seven signed up for the initial workshop, a 290 Pers Ubiquit Comput (2008) 12:289���297 123