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The wide diffusion of the "Entrapped Suitors" story-type has often been observed: examples are found in a remarkable number of literatures, ranging from English, French and Greek in the West, to Persian, Arabic and Kashmiri in the East. However, a text of this type that is often overlooked is the Middle Dutch play Een Speel Van Drie Minners ("A Play of Three Suitors"). This is despite the fact that it represents a highly idiosyncratic variation on the story, as it replaces the central moral with something more scabrous. We offer here a comprehensive discussion of this singular text and its narrative form, with an English verse-translation appended.
Deciding what kind of smart cities do we, as a society, want is not only a political question but also a matter of envisioning possible futures. The speculative narratives that designers produce to support their imagination are called "Design Fictions." We share SUBMERGED, a cross-platform project that combines game design, interactive narrative, and urban exploration with the objective of empowering citizens to produce their design fictions. Following a "Research through Design" practice, we describe our process for creating SUBMERGED, we synthesize some critical insights from our experience, and we urgently call for a dialogue between semioticians and design researchers on these topics.
