This project will focus on the design and development of the mobile app and interactive game ROAM*. ROAM is the concept for an interactive urban exploration and mapping game that helps players get lost and leads them through an aesthetic engagement and exploration of their environment. I have already developed the concept and theory behind the game, I now will focus on developing and designing elements of the app’s components and user experience.

This semester, I will focus on researching and creating all of the support materials for ROAM including game level design, user interface, user experience, wireframes, as well as marketing material and a website.I will have a comprehensive overview of the design and development process – this includes the requisite vocabulary and knowledge to discuss and direct a developer. I will also create the design support materials and building blocks that a developer will then use to code the software. The first phase of the project focuses on research and macro-scale planning of the structure, while the second phase will involve design of the User Interface (UI) and support materials such as marketing and website. I will research game level design, mobile app software such as HTML5, CSS3+, PhoneGap, Omnigrafe and balsamiq, information architecture, and interaction design. I have already started to educate myself about the different technologies and processes involved in mobile app development and will proceed to design the individual components in preparation

*ROAM is a proposal for an interactive urban exploration and mapping game for smart phones that helps players get lost. Players use the mobile app to get lost in the city and then document their journey as a form of narrative mapping using photo, video, audio and written capture. The project is a creative tool that uses disorientation as a part of the artistic process prompting aesthetic engagement with the architectural landscape and challenges ideas of spatial cognition and orientation. ROAM subverts our reliance upon and relationship to precision navigation technologies and how they shape our experience of our world and our selves. The mobile app is a creative tool that helps players get lost as a prompt for an artistic interaction with the environment. This work focuses on possibilities for experimental cartography and spatial exchange that depicts space as a way of knowing and embodying the city though pedagogical notions of play.