This book explores how smart cities enable new and playful ways for citizens to experience, inhabit and socialise within urban environments. It examines how the functionality of digital technologies within municipal settings can extend beyond environmental pragmatism and socio-economic concerns, to include playful approaches to urban spaces that co-constitute and reinvigorate the experience of place through location-based applications and games. Chapters highlight the varied ways the city, as both a conceptual and lived space, is changing because of this confluence of technologies. The book also considers the extent to which these transformations form an armature upon which more playful approaches to the urban domain are emerging, while exploring what effect these ludic formations might have on related understandings of sociability. Smart Cities at Play: Technology and Emerging Forms of Playfulness will be a key resource for scholars and researchers of information technology, urban planning and design, games and interactive media, human-centred and user-centred design, human centred interaction, digital geography and sociology. This book was originally published as a special issue of Behaviour & Information Technology.

Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm that promises to transform several domains: creative work, business work, cultural cooperation, etc. Crowdsourcing reflects the close-knit interplay between the latest computer technologies, the rapidly changing work model of the 21st century, and the very nature of people. The interplay makes for an exciting but at the same time challenging new field to investigate under the lens of a diverse set of disciplines, ranging from the technical to the social and from the theoretical to the applied. Early research has focused on an aspect of crowdsourcing known as micro-tasking. Micro-tasks are simple tasks (like image annotations) that anyone could perform. An emerging area is how to utilize crowdsourcing to solve problems that go beyond simple tasks towards more complex ones, that require collaboration and creativity. In juxtaposition to micro-task crowdsourcing, this book investigates macro-task crowdsourcing and its potential.

Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm that promises to transform several domains: creative work, business work, cultural cooperation, etc. Crowdsourcing reflects the close-knit interplay between the latest computer technologies, the rapidly changing work model of the 21st century, and the very nature of people. The interplay makes for an exciting but at the same time challenging new field to investigate under the lens of a diverse set of disciplines, ranging from the technical to the social and from the theoretical to the applied. Early research has focused on an aspect of crowdsourcing known as micro-tasking. Micro-tasks are simple tasks (like image annotations) that anyone could perform. An emerging area is how to utilize crowdsourcing to solve problems that go beyond simple tasks towards more complex ones, that require collaboration and creativity. In juxtaposition to micro-task crowdsourcing, this book investigates macro-task crowdsourcing and its potential.