Designing Humor for Playable Cities

Smartness, made possible by intelligent sensors and actuators, is invading our home, office and public environments. This smartness monitors, anticipates and supports our activities, increasing efficiency of our activities. Smartness is usually associated with efficiency, but it also allows environments, virtual humans and social robots to display emotions, empathy and provide environments to introduce and support humorous events. We review examples of playful and humorous street furniture in ‘playable’ cities and projects that allow residents and visitors to interact with objects and environments in playful and humorous ways. We add observations on humor theory, in particular observations that deal with physical, visual and multimodal humor. Our emphasis is on introducing incongruities and on exploring different forms of incongruities in order to introduce humorous situations. Inventories of incongruities are explored. These inventories have been obtained from observing humor in everyday situations, in comedies, in movies, and in TV commercials. Shortcomings of these inventories from the point of view of multimodal and interaction humor are discussed and some preliminary views on additional approaches are provided.