ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Avatopia: a cross-media community for societal action
Ylva Gisle´n Æ Jonas Lo¨wgren Æ 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. Gisle´n
J. Lo¨wgren (&)
Arts and Communication, Malmo¨ University,
205 06 Malmo¨, Sweden
e-mail: jonas.lowgren@k3.mah.se
U. Myrestam
Swedish Television, 350 33 Va¨xjo¨, 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 cafe´s 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 Va¨xjo¨. 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 Va¨xjo¨
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
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