Welcome to another episode of Democracy Innovators Podcast.
Our guest today is
Gianluca Sgueo. Thank you for
being here and for
your time. Thank you very much for
having me.
I can see from your experience
you have a lot of experience in
this field. I see
from your LinkedIn that you have
a description: digital transformation, democracy and global
affairs. But if I
go on your website,
I can see you really have
extensive experience and I honestly
don't know where to start.
So as a first question I would
like to ask you: when did you
first think that technology
could be a helpful tool
for democratic systems
and citizens?
Actually, I think I
have the kind of professional profile that
could be described as a hybrid
profile, which is not necessarily always
a good thing. Sometimes
you feel you
don't belong professionally to a specific field.
But I really think it's
my trademark - combining
different sectors. The sectors are technological
innovation, or if you prefer digital transition,
democratic participation,
and interest in representation as well,
all in a global sphere.
I'm telling you
this because my interest in technology,
academically speaking,
came later compared with my
interest in democracy. I am
a lawyer by education, so I
have a degree in law and one
in political sciences, or science of public
administration,
to be precise.
Then I enrolled in a PhD in
public and administrative law, and my PhD
thesis was about participatory mechanisms across
different legal systems: Italy,
a few European states, the European
Union,
and the United States. So I
compared how different systems
consult citizens
and engage them in policy-making.
My PhD was done between
2007
and 2010,
roughly.
So technologies were of course already there,
but if I go back and
read my thesis - actually my
thesis was published as a
book - my focus was not
on technology. Technology is there, there is
a little bit of it,
but the focus was about the globalization
of democracy. The title of the book
- it's an Italian book -
is
"Experiments with Global Democracy."
I was interested in that and
then little by little, after that period,
I realized that I
was exploring more and more the impact
of digital technology within
the mechanisms to
consult citizens. So the
balance between my interest
in democracy and my interest in technology
changed. I can say that
now I am still interested in
both, but I'm starting more from observing
the technology and how this technology is
changing the democratic sphere. So over
the years, technology has become more relevant
as an element of my analysis -
artificial intelligence, digital platforms,
and so on.
You mentioned participation, which is something that
is very interesting to me.
I think in our society
people do not really participate a lot.
I'm thinking about
gamification
as a way to help
citizens participate. I'm thinking about
gamification,
and I notice you've written a
book about this.
Correct. So yes,
I don't want to
make too many distinctions, but you know,
when you study democracy, when you
look at democracy, you at least learn
to distinguish between participatory democracy and
representative democracy. Both are
touched by the relevance of technology,
of course. But what I'm
interested in looking at is in particular
participatory democracy. I think both participatory
democracy and representative democracy - elections
in the latter case - are affected by
the same
critical elements. One
of these critical elements is the fact
that people are less engaged. People are
going to vote in lower numbers
compared with the past, and they
just aren't interested.
That applies also to how
we as citizens engage
in decision-making with administrations - what I would
call more exactly participatory democracy. This
is a very common problem. It's
something that has been acknowledged already
a few years ago. But the interesting
thing is that when digital
technology became widespread across Western
governments, there was a clear moment
in which many scholars and politicians and
practitioners
thought that this technological implementation
could be used to solve the problem
of participation. In other words, since we
now have digital tools to interact,
it will be much easier for me
to be interested
and for policymakers to listen
to what citizens have to say.
But that unfortunately did not happen. We
have plenty of very good examples -
in podcasts we hear about
a lot of very nice, what
would be called best practices. On the
other hand, I think that the problem
remains and it's even more striking.
This is because while it's true
that digital technology helps people in
principle to be in touch
without much effort, you mentioned
gamification - it's
something I've been studying for a while
and, as you said, something I've been
publishing about.
The idea is quite simple. I'll just
summarize it, and then of course if
you want to know more, we can
dig into it a little more. The idea
is that we can -
we can design - this is another word
that I really like, "design" - we can
design participatory
spaces with some game elements,
some elements that resemble a game, not
a pure game, something that resembles
a game.
Ideally - I want to
be precise - ideally this should help citizens to
be more motivated because we all like
to play. It's something that is part
of our learning experience. We as children
learn things by playing.
The use of games is something that we as
humans use for a long part of
our life in order to learn things.
There's a moment in
which we think that gaming is
trivial and is not for adults
any longer, but actually
there's a lot of game design
in many things that we do, like
in marketing strategies, for example. Now the
idea is that we could engage citizens
more by offering them gamified
environments. Now if you ask me, "Is
this working or not?"
my answer would be: it depends. It's
not the solution to the problem.
We have some very nice examples to
tell, but on the other hand we
have many examples that don't work.
So we have very good examples
of best practices. So what is
missing?
Is this related to
how institutions work? Why are
the solutions not implemented or tested
more widely?
That's an excellent question because it's actually
the picture of the problem. As you said,
we have many examples. When
I
published my book and also occasionally when
I write on the topic, it's
always nice to have a list of
examples - there are plenty of those
at all levels, from the very
local level to the national level, even
some supranational
examples that work very well.
In order to answer your question, I
need to make a step back to
how game design works, in order to
then give a possible explanation of
why gamification didn't work
so far in participatory experiments.
Game design basically replicates
elements of a game within participatory processes,
which means that you have basically three elements:
you have a set of rules, you have a
competition -
the competition
could be against other people
or could be against yourself,
it doesn't really matter - and third,
you have a reward. Again, don't
think necessarily about money or something tangible -
it can be anything like passing to another
level or being acknowledged
to have succeeded in something. So the
reward is, let's say, the conclusion
of your journey and maybe the
beginning of a new step.
Now all these elements, if well-combined,
well-designed within participatory processes, as
we said, could work very well.
What is the problem? It's another concept
that is very familiar to all those
who study gaming or
video gaming, and this is called the
"curve of engagement."
It really looks like a curve, and
I'd like you to think of
any game you might have played over
the last few years - could be anything
from something very simple on a
mobile phone, or maybe you're
into video gaming, or anything that is
related to console gaming,
or a board game.
You see that
we have this curve that goes up
because if the game is well-designed,
it looks interesting, it looks fascinating. We
want to spend more time with it.
The
complexity of the game is
well-balanced, so we see that
if we play, maybe we fail,
but we can improve, and so next
time we will defeat, for example, the
boss of the level, and we
scale up to the next level. So
it's
actually increasing. And then there
is a moment - sooner or later,
even with the best possible game - there
is a moment in which either you
feel that it's too complicated, or you
don't have time to play
that game in order to progress,
or instead you
become so good that it's a little boring.
So the curve starts to descend
and you are less engaged.
This is in pure gaming,
okay? But the same mechanism, as I
said, could be applied
to participatory processes.
So you have obviously a
set of rules, but you
can have incentives, and you have a
sort of competition between participants, and you
have a sort of reward.
That's the problem: it is not
meant to last for too long. You
have to reinvent the system in order
to re-engage the participants. You don't
have a single solution that will work
forever. There is no
video game - even Super Mario. Super
Mario - I think everybody has played Super Mario. After
more than thirty years, we still have
new versions of Super Mario, and the concept
is similar. I still enjoy going
back to Super Mario and playing it a
little bit, but
even Super Mario, the classic, has a curve.
After a while, it's too complex,
or it's too easy,
or I'm changing. So the same
applies to game design in participatory processes.
That explains why
we have a lot of single-shot
great examples. Some of them last
a little longer, but nothing that we
could say, "Okay, this is the benchmark -
this is how you design gaming into
democratic participation because it returns great
results." There's nothing like that. The
reason is that, as in any
other game, people - participants in this case -
need to be stimulated in different
ways.
I'm thinking about forms of
communication. Can we think about
the school system as a sort of
gamification? Because it
has a set of rules, it has
some sort of competition, and
also some kind of rewards. Also,
can we think about
gamification in terms of
collaboration instead of
competition?
I think - I will answer
your second remark first - I think
you can cooperate, you can collaborate in
order to achieve something, and that is
a sort of competition.
The concept of competition has to
be understood in a very broad way, so
it doesn't necessarily mean me against you
or me and you against X and
Z or something like that. It could
be something like that, but could also
be me and you - we have to
cooperate
in order to achieve a certain result.
I'm going to give
you an example. There is
a very nice experiment that was done
a few years ago by a municipality
in the United States. The idea of
the municipality was: we are expanding over
the years, and so
the social bonds have been weakening.
We want our local population -
we still have a small municipality
but growing in numbers - and
so we want to try to have
social bonds reestablished between different communities that
are living in the same area.
So they basically created this
virtual currency - it was called "Mason Money"
(I don't remember in which state of the
United States it was,
but the name of the city was Mason or Macon).
They basically created this virtual currency
and they distributed tasks
among citizens that would participate in this
sort of competition in order to find
the other half of the currency
and create a social bond.
So you see, in this case there
was a clear cooperation aim, but there
was a competition as well.
So absolutely, you can cooperate, and that
could also be a sort of competition
against yourself in order to achieve
another level. It also resembles education
or schooling systems in a way.
There are a lot of theories that
suggest having gamification used
as a learning system. Actually, many
of the platforms that provide
online learning are based on
gamification dynamics.
You can think about a very
famous platform - the
one that is meant to teach
languages -
or you can also go on very
big platforms like Coursera,
in which you basically access
learning in different subjects. All of them
are based on
very clear gamification dynamics, so you
have progress, you are awarded
points or stars or levels, whatever
it is, and you progress. You
achieve credits - it's a
very simple metric that can work very
well
in education.
Do you have any other examples
of
gamification to share?
Yeah, sure. There are many, many of
those. One very interesting example which
has a story behind it that's
worth knowing is the
story of "Evoke,"
which was created by the World Bank.
So we're talking about a very important
international institution. For those who don't
know, the World Bank
is an international institution that was created
after the Bretton Woods
agreements in order to - not
regulate global finance, but actually in order to loan money
to countries that would get this money
and in exchange would apply
democratic reforms. That is still the
role of the World Bank, and also
the International
Monetary Fund, which is the sister
organization
that was also created in the
same period.
If you go on
the website of the World Bank, it's
an incredible source of information. They have
very highly profiled professionals that are producing
very interesting datasets, for example, about
a lot of topics - really a lot
of topics. It's very broad,
and it's truly
an incredible source of information.
A few years ago -
and all this information is
actually available for free, it's
just there, you go online and you
can download the papers and
the reports - there are plenty of
those - the
World Bank did a sort
of internal investigation. The aim
was to
see what was the reaction by the
general public. So what would people
take from all this material?
The result - I don't remember the exact
numbers, but the result was striking -
just a very tiny percent of the
total amount of documents that were published
by the World Bank - when I say
tiny, I mean like one or
two percent, something like that - had been
downloaded at least once.
And part of these downloads was
done by people working at the World
Bank. So what was the result? We
have this incredible amount of information which
nobody
knows, nobody uses, and people,
in the best-case scenario, think
that we are technocrats that are
imposing draconian measures on national
economies. That was the
perception of people who knew
something - actually, who didn't know much about the
World Bank.
So the institution tried
to create something, an initiative that
could bring people into knowing
the institution, and they created this e-book called "Evoke."
It was a sort of
board game that was played globally,
and every week you would have
a mission. This mission
consisted of different tasks. The idea was:
the world is on the verge
of a global crisis, a very hard global
crisis, and
we have to intervene by doing something.
What should we do? Famine,
disruption of chains of production, this kind
of stuff. So people would
engage in different tasks on a weekly
basis. They would go through a process
that obviously was meant to teach people
what the World Bank does, because these
are typical tasks
that people at the World Bank
handle in their daily job.
The final task - the so-called
"education" - was to find an original idea
to be possibly implemented by the
World Bank, and the
best
idea would be called to Washington, D.C.,
where the World Bank headquarters is located,
and be awarded a cash
prize - I think in that case it was
a small amount.
Obviously, the World
Bank doesn't need
just people suggesting ideas - that
was part of the
game design, but it wasn't the main goal.
The main goal was to have as
many people as possible sharing information, learning
about the World Bank, sharing information with
other
participants, and increasing interest in the
institution. The results -
and this is something that I discuss in
a few publications in which I described
this example -
one possible question is: okay, so how
many people participated? Was it something
that attracted hundreds of thousands of
participants? No.
I think the total number of participants
was in the thousands
globally, so you realize it's quite
a tiny number. But the question that
I think is important to ask is
not just how many, but how engaged
these people were.
If you look at the pure volume,
again, you don't have
an incredible response by citizens. But
if you look at the interest of
these people, you might have a different
result. So you
could see that these people were actually
quite engaged in
the experiment, so it was in that
sense quite successful.
I was wondering why people act
a certain way. It's a
very hard question.
What do you mean exactly?
Can you help me understand better?
Yeah, I was thinking because
you said that actually the datasets
were downloaded by just a very small amount
of people.
And when there was the sort
of economic incentive,
then not so many people, but
still
a good amount of people
explored this kind of data.
So I think about the economic
incentive, but I'm also thinking about
why, without the economic incentive,
people
do not look for something that
actually could be very interesting. I
mean, maybe people read books about
topics and they could
obtain the same information, maybe in
a different way.
Absolutely.
I get your question, and
it brings us back to the
reason for gamification, which is one possible
solution,
and also brings us back to
your first question about
technology and what is
the reason why technology is now so
interesting to analyze for someone who
has an interest in democracy as a
possible solution,
but also as a crisis.
The principle is that
for many people,
participating
in democratic processes is not
perceived as a solution any longer.
So if you look at civic
engagement in all its forms - the
electoral participation,
engaging in
charity, for example, donating money
for a civic cause, or any other
activity that we would
consider part of democratic civic life -
if you look at what our parents
and grandparents - I'm talking about the
seventies, the sixties, and before -
were doing compared with what
people do now, you would probably agree
with saying that civic
capital has been shrinking over time, so that
people are spending less time in
civic activities. We said it before -
fewer people go to vote. If you look at,
for example - let's take a country
like Italy - it depends on the country,
of course, but in a country
like Italy,
in the seventies there
were millions of Italians who had
a
subscription to a political party, and
now political parties have very low numbers
of people. It's very tiny - it's
like seventy percent less than
twenty or thirty years ago.
So the principle is: it's not appealing
anymore, for a lot
of reasons related to the
crisis of democracy - the lack of social mobility,
the fact that we feel there are
fewer opportunities, and also the fact
that digital platforms have
captured
much of the attention of people. All these
reasons are contributing.
Now we go to game design. You mentioned the
financial incentive. Let me say that it's
not necessarily a financial incentive - that
is one possibility. It
can work very well, but it
can also be something completely unrelated
to giving you money. It could be having
your name mentioned in the first
place of a ranking. I'm going to give you an
example in a second - it's another
very interesting example.
But before that,
that's the potential of game design.
The potential is: what if I give
you a framework that will make the
experience more appealing? So it's not just
the fact that we will win, I don't know, ten euros,
but also the fact
that maybe we could spend one hour
together
thinking about how to solve a
problem, and maybe you have a resource,
I have a contact, and maybe we
can get closer to that result,
and we can do that in an
engaging way - maybe,
at least in the short term. Let's remember
the short-termism of these kinds
of
experiments, but maybe in the short term this
results in some interest.
In other words, people need to be stimulated
in order to find interesting a participatory
experiment. I'm not - this is not
original - I'm just quoting the very
basic
idea of behavioral sciences, all the
theory of nudging. You know, Richard
Thaler or Cass Sunstein - all
these theories are precisely that you can
create a framework in which you
push people, you give a sort of nudge
to people in order to find more interesting
an experience.
And if you allow me, I'm
going to mention another very interesting
case which did not include a
financial incentive. It was gamified
and resulted in a very
interesting outcome.
Now we are in Latin
America, more precisely in the capital city of
Peru - Lima - which was
at least one of the most polluted cities
in the world. One of the
reasons for this pollution
was the fact that the city is
very large and it has a number
of places where people just throw
their garbage, and these places are not controlled.
So as you can imagine, this
contributes to air pollution and environmental problems,
causing a lot of troubles. But
the municipality didn't have the resources
to make more controls, to hire people
that would control how
the garbage was
treated by the population.
So what the municipality decided to do was
to create this participatory experiment, and
they called it "Gallinazo Avisa,"
which means "the vultures are
checking." They trained -
I think it was ten vultures,
this animal that lives
in that area of the world -
in order to spot
this garbage. So they enjoy finding places where they
can find food, and they
put a GoPro camera on the bodies
of these vultures.
So when they fly, they actually
record the area, and then
what the municipality does is
take these videos and upload them on a
website and ask the citizens: "Can you
help us watch these videos? We don't
have the capacity, but if you can
help us - it's hours and hours
of footage - and you can spot
illegal sites within the city, you
can actually tell us and we will
at least try to intervene."
It was a huge success, and the reward was that
the names of those who had spent
hours watching these videos were mentioned
on the official website.
It was so successful that at a
certain point, there were citizens who were
taking videos with their mobile phones and
they were sending them to the municipality
to say, "This is also where you
should intervene."
Again,
an example - in this case, no money
even - but the fact that
watching very boring two or
three hours of footage of
an aerial vision of the city
resulted in something helpful for the municipality
that could intervene on
illegal sites.
I'm thinking about this crisis of
democracy and why people do not feel
that participating
is a solution.
I think about how information
is power in two different ways,
because on one hand, there are
social media, and as you
say, the attention of people is
captured by
social media. And at the same
time, also, information is power because
if there's something
wrong in my town, in the place
where I live, and I know that
I can send an email to
the mayor or someone in
the administration of the town,
I can
actually do something and change
the place where I live.
Before I thought about
why people are
not participating - because
they have more distractions, yes, as you
said, social media -
but it's not
related to time...
No, it probably is another problem.
The intangible assets that you need in order
to participate could make the difference between
types of participants. Let me explain myself.
Time is an intangible asset, so let's
say in your life there are
moments in which you feel you have
more time and moments
in which you feel your time is
limited.
Typically when you are younger and
you are in your school age,
you feel you have plenty of
time to dedicate yourself
to whatever you like. And then maybe
you grow up, have a family,
work, and so most of your
time is used in commitments,
and
the feeling of available time
is low.
But in order to participate, you need
some time, as you said. For
example, I need to
have the time to connect online
and listen to the meeting and maybe
make interventions, share what I want,
and then I have to follow
up. That can discriminate between certain
types of participants. That's why -
and
that's another reason why - in participatory
experiments online, we typically have certain categories
that are more represented than others.
These categories that are overrepresented are people aged over
fifty-five or even sixty-five,
for a clear reason: that is the
age of your life in which you
return to have more free time for
yourself.
It's also possible that you are more
civically engaged - you start feeling the need
to give a contribution or to
think about future generations. There are
many reasons, but one reason is also
that you have more time than you
used to have ten years before.
And also men compared with women,
because unfortunately in many social systems, it's
the woman who is taking care of
the family. So you can imagine,
if you're a mother, you have to
take care of the babies and
the family - you don't have
the time to do this.
Then there are other categories. So
the reason of time, I think, is
relevant. It is an explanation - not of
why people don't participate, or at least
it's a partial explanation of why people
don't participate - but more of the
fact that there are certain participants
that are overrepresented
and other participants that are
underrepresented. But in general, I think
that the lack of participation is explainable
by a missing link between what am
I achieving by participating
and what is the effort
that I need to take in order
to participate. It's never a pure
trade-off, right? It's never like "I pay
a ticket, then I watch a movie" -
it's not like that. But it's also
true that if I have a feeling
that even if I am contributing,
it's not really changing anything, I will
probably lose interest, and my interest
is also attracted by other stuff.
There's always a chance to do something
engaging by watching a movie or surfing
the web or playing a video
game or stuff like that.
So what do we have to
fix in order to
have better democracy? I
think about your book that in
Italian is "La Democrazia Similare,"
and in English, I don't know -
"Best Democracy Maybe"?
The subtitle is also important because
it says "the technologies that are changing power,"
so we return to
the original point.
Obviously, I don't have
the recipe for solving the problems of
democracy. I think it's part of the
debate - people, scholars, practitioners, politicians are
debating the crisis of democracy and the
many possible solutions.
A word that I'm really interested in -
it's not in the title, I mean it's
in the book, not in the title -
but the word that I'm really focused on
and that I think is key is the word
"design," which I mentioned at the beginning.
I think it's nice to mention:
how do we want to design our digital interactions?
This solution implies as a
precondition the fact that we accept that
most of the democratic
participation will be happening
on digital platforms, right?
And how do
we want to design these platforms?
I think there are a number of elements
that could help citizens to
engage a little more. One is the
topic we've been discussing for
most part of this interview: making the
participation more entertaining, so including elements that
can engage people. Obviously, game
design is the main
idea, but it's not the only one.
The other one is: how do we
narrate the
participatory process? I think that a
good storytelling of the participatory process is
very important.
I think even if I don't
believe it was a successful case, the
Conference on the Future of Europe -
I think that the storytelling behind it was quite
powerful. The idea was: "I'm giving you,
European citizen, the possibility to tell me,
you policymaker, what is the future of
Europe that you
want to imagine? What Europe would you like
to live in ten years from now?"
It was very well constructed, it was
powerful. It was designed before the pandemic, but it actually
came during the pandemic, so it was
a moment in which we were all
in a way questioning
these ideas of "okay, what's going to
happen next? How will the world
be changing after this?" So it
was a very nice storytelling.
And the third element, which is probably the most
important, is this:
the narration of democracy should retake on board
the concept of complexity.
I'm giving you a one-minute
explanation, which is something I've been researching
and writing about for quite a long
time now.
The design of commercial technology is
based on very simple elements: one is
simplicity, another one is the speed
of service, and the third one is
the
tailored nature of the services. So we
have very simple-to-use
digital devices, we have devices that are
trying to sell us
the idea of very fast service, and
that are also tailored to your needs.
Now, all these elements are what we
expect when we engage digitally with anything.
But in democratic participation, this
is not possible.
Decision-making takes time, it implies
a high level of conflict - at
least one part or one opinion - and
it is time-consuming, going back to
time. So a good way to have
people
at least aware and not disappointed by
what participatory processes online in digital formats
would imply is to bring back the
concept of complexity - not selling the
idea that by clicking (which was
very
popular when digitalization came into democracy) you
just click and you are
participating in democracy. Because that type of
narration created the disappointed citizens that we
are dealing with right now - people that
don't see any actual change when they
actually see
the results of participation.
I have a couple more questions if you have some more time.
Sure. So how do you imagine our social
or political system in twenty or
fifty years? I know it's very
difficult to reply, but do you
have any idea about some
possibilities?
Well, I'm very interested
and really fascinated by
futures studies. It's a very interesting
field of debate. At this very
moment, I'm reading a book on
the history of future thinking - so how
thinking about the future has changed over the
years.
It went through different
stages, and today we actually have
a science for that. We have foresight,
which is the scientific approach to
thinking strategically about the future - so quite
an interesting element.
So I believe that we will have
to face
a situation in which
we will probably have more time for
ourselves, and this more time will be
the result of the use of technology.
I know that what I just said
has a lot of exceptions and it's
probably very Western-focused. I know that
it's not a global way of
thinking, so I'm now looking more at
the situation with which I'm more familiar -
the Western world.
In the Western world, technology
will give us more time to do
things. Think about artificial intelligence and how
quickly you can
have certain results compared
with the past. What will
we make of this extra time? That is quite a
problem that we need to think about,
and I'm not just talking about the
labor-related aspects. I'm also thinking of
what do you do when you start
thinking of a society in which not
all of your time is spent
working in an office or
in a factory, which is the model
we've been part of over the last
fifty years.
So the last fifty years,
the broad idea is that once you
finish studying, you enter work,
and most of your life
will be spent - you do
a lot of stuff, but most of
the time you are at work. What
happens when you don't have that necessity
any longer?
That will have very interesting democratic
implications. It's not exactly a description
of the future world that I imagine,
but I think it's one crucial challenge
that we will have in the not-so-
far future.
The gain of time - a very bad use of
this gain of time is to be
more engaged in trivial uses
of our digital tools - scrolling and
watching ephemeral content.
That would be a very bad way
of using it.
A better way could be
re-engaging in social spaces,
and that's why I describe it
as a challenge.
I haven't asked anything about
you yet. I mean, just about your
professional
background. So I would like to
ask you if you want to share
something related to when you
were a child, where did you grow
up, what were your interests?
Sure, absolutely. I think I am
the typical
middle-class man. I was
born in a typical middle-class family,
and I am very aware of
not using the word "normal" because there is
a very interesting book about this - the
word "normal" has very different meanings
wherever you are, so it's very
misleading what is normal, what is normality.
In Italy, I was
born in 1976, so at the
end of the seventies. Let's say
I was a child in the eighties,
and it was in Rome,
the capital city. Both my
parents were working in
the private sector, and I have
a brother. So I would describe myself
as quite an ordinary middle-class family
living in a big city.
If I have to
remember some facts from my
childhood, I think books were an
important part of it, and I was -
this is something I'm doing with
my daughters now - I was
taught to like books. My house was full
of books, and I remember
there was a moment - summertime
when you have a lot of time
and you're bored because you didn't know
what to do - and I started to
enjoy taking a book and reading it.
That was an enjoyment
that I remember very well, and I
also remember that my mother -
both my parents, but my father was working
full-time, my mother was working part-time -
so my afternoons were with my mother
and my brother.
They were very strict
with the use of television. In
my generation, the distraction was TV -
we didn't have digital mobile phones,
of course, or stuff like that.
We would watch one hour - we could
choose one hour to watch TV
in the afternoon. There was a
very popular TV show
back then,
which was cartoons and a little entertainment,
and once that was finished, we had
to turn off the TV and do
something else. We were lucky because despite
living in a big city, we
were living in a building which had
some internal gardens, so when the
weather was nice, we
would go out and play with
other kids and sing songs,
or we would engage in reading
or drawing stuff. And again, this is something that I'm
also doing with my daughters right now -
they have a little time
they can use digital devices. I'm
not prohibiting them
from using digital tools - they are still
young -
but only for a
limited time. The rest of the time
they have to do something else.
That was a very important
part of my education. I am not
saying that I'm fully safe from
digital dependencies - in the sense that, like
many of us, I am attached to my
mobile phone and I sometimes feel
phantom vibration syndrome
when I
don't have reliable signal. I'm not saying
that this saved me from
being affected by digital tools, but it gave
me some elements to
train my brain, and I still like
to read books in paper format,
for example.
This is what I remember from my
childhood - it was a very
quiet childhood.
One last thing - it's something
I am passionate about:
I am very passionate about fantasy.
I still play
Dungeons & Dragons - it's
something that I really love. So
everything that's related with Lord
of the Rings, dragons,
fantasy - in movies,
in games, or in board games - it's
something that I still enjoy
doing. And that also came from
when I was thirteen.
So I was thinking about Dungeons &
Dragons in relation to gamification,
and maybe...
Exactly! That's true. I was
a dungeon master - I was
the one who was telling the story
to the others.
Do you have any books that
you were passionate about when you were a kid?
Yeah, okay. I have a couple of books that I
really remember.
One is a classic - I think when
I turned ten,
a friend of mine gave me
a present: The Hobbit from Tolkien.
I remember
I didn't read the book immediately. I
probably thought it was not interesting, so
I didn't read it right after that. Maybe
one or two years later,
I went back to
that book and it was mind-blowing.
It was precisely the type of
story that I like:
elves, dwarves,
the hobbit, the dragon - the
classic.
And then obviously The Lord of the
Rings came later.
So that's one - I would
say everything that Tolkien has produced, but
if I had to pick one book,
I would say The Hobbit.
The other one is The Lord
of the Flies, which is a
book which I read by chance. I
think maybe it was in the
house of my uncle where I would
spend the summertime,
and I
really enjoyed the
dark side of the book. For
those who - I hope you've read
it, it's another classic - you
see how human dynamics work,
and even with children, how the
power balances are established to the point
that things fall
out of control with these
young people. So that was
also something that I really remember.
I enjoyed it and
I thought it was a very nice reading.
I also love The Lord
of the Rings, but I
have to read The Lord
of the Flies.
I would do - let me
recommend it.
It's a very, very nice
book. It's a narration of
human society, basically. The story
looks like a children's story, but it's
not. It's really worth it. Actually,
there are some movie adaptations - they're quite old -
but I would suggest reading the book.
Thank you. And the last question:
for people that are working in the field
and are searching and experimenting
with new solutions in relation to participation...
What I would like to see more -
let's put it this way - I would
like to see more cross-pollination
of different disciplines.
To a certain extent, we have it, however I
still see there are
a little bit of silos
between people working in the field.
For
example, Europeanists are very engaged in participation -
it's really part of
people studying European landscapes - but
these people do not talk much with,
for example, European policymakers, or at least with people
interested in supranational governance.
On the same side, people looking at
global dynamics tend to ignore or consider
less relevant what is happening
in certain fields.
Lawyers, political scientists,
sociologists - they don't know
designers.
So it's now more frequent
to find this type of cross-pollination. I am,
for example, contributing to a
project in which we have
lawyers, political science scientists like
me, but also designers. So we
try to compare different perspectives,
and I think that it would be
nice to have more of that -
more, because sometimes you feel
you're not talking the same language, and
obviously you see the world from different
angles. But it's actually when you
find a common point, it's a very
strong one, because it means
it's been found from different perspectives,
and so it's more difficult to achieve,
but it's also more rewarding to achieve.
Thank you very much. It was very
nice to be part of
this podcast. I look forward to
your next episodes, and
now that I'm a subscriber to the podcast,
I'll be following the
new episodes every time you
publish them.
Really, really thank you.