Using "tangibles" to promote novel forms of playful learning

Tangibles, in the form of physical artefacts that are electronically augmented and enhanced to trigger various digital events to happen, have the potential for providing innovative ways for children to play and learn, through novel forms of interacting and discovering. They offer, too, the scope for bringing playfulness back into learning. To this end, we designed an adventure game, where pairs of children have to discover as much as they can about a virtual imaginary creature called the Snark, through collaboratively interacting with a suite of tangibles. Underlying the design of the tangibles is a variety of transforms, which the children have to understand and reflect upon in order to make the Snark come alive and show itself in a variety of morphological and synaesthesic forms. The paper also reports on the findings of a study of the Snark game and discusses what it means to be engrossed in playful learning

Playlab: Telling Stories with Technology (workshop summary)

This one-day workshop explores how playful interaction can be used to develop technologies for public spaces and create temporal experiences

Entertaining situated messaging at home

Leisure and entertainment-based computing has been traditionally associated with interactive entertainment media and game playing, yet the forms of engagement offered by these technologies only support a small part of how we act when we are at leisure. In this paper, we move away from the paradigm of leisure technology as computer-based entertainment consumption, and towards a broader view of leisure computing. This perspective is more in line with our everyday experience of leisure as an embodied, everyday accomplishment in which people artfully employ the everyday resources in the world around them in carrying out their daily lives outside of work. We develop this extended notion of leisure using data from a field study of domestic communication focusing on asynchronous and situated messaging to explore some of these issues, and develop these findings towards design implications for leisure technologies. Central to our discussion on the normal, everyday and occasioned conduct of leisure lie the notions of playfulness and creativity, the interweaving of the worlds of work and leisure, and in the creation of embodied displays of affect, all of which may be seen manifested in the use of messaging artefacts. This view of technology in support of leisure-in-the-broad is strongly divergent from traditional entertainment computing models in its coupling of the mechanics of the organisation of everyday life to the ways that we make entertainment for ourselves. This recognition allows us to draw specific implications for domestic situated messaging technologies, but also more generally for technology design by tying activities that we tend to regard as purely functional to other multifaceted and leisure-related purposes

Single Value Devices

We live in a world of continuous information overflow, but the quality of information and communication is suffering. Single value devices contribute to the information and communication quality by fo- cussing on one explicit, relevant piece of information. The information is decoupled from a computer and represented in an object, integrates into daily life. However, most existing single value devices come from conceptual experiments or art and exist only as prototypes. In order to get to mature products and to design meaningful, effective and work- ing objects, an integral perspective on the design choices is necessary. Our contribution is a critical exploration of the design space of single value devices. In a survey we give an overview of existing examples. The characterizing design criteria for single value devices are elaborated in a taxonomy. Finally, we discuss several design choices that are specifically important for moving from prototypes to commercializable products

Designing multiplayer games to facilitate emergent social behaviours online

This paper discusses an exploratory case study of the design of games that facilitate spontaneous social interaction and group behaviours among distributed individuals, based largely on symbolic presence 'state' changes. We present the principles guiding the design of our game environment: presence as a symbolic phenomenon, the importance of good visualization and the potential for spontaneous self-organization among groups of people. Our game environment, comprising a family of multiplayer 'bumper-car' style games, is described, followed by a discussion of lessons learned from observing users of the environment. Finally, we reconsider and extend our design principles in light of our observations

Familiars: representing Facebook users’ social behaviour through a reflective playful experience

In this paper, we describe the design and development of a social game called Familiars. Inspired by the daemons in Pullman’s “Dark Material” trilogy, Familiars are animal companions that sit on your Facebook profile and change into different animal forms based on your social activity within the social network of Facebook. . Familiars takes advantage of the powerful capabilities of the developers platform of Facebook to build a multi-dimensional picture of a player’s state based on social activity, facial expression analysis on photographs and suggestions from friends. This rich information is then distilled and presented to the player in the form of animal that the familiar chooses to take. We show how the types of animals and personalities were associated in a cross-cultural user study, and present quantitative results from the social behaviours of the players within the game in addition to qualitative data gathered from questionnaire responses

Exploring Community Building with an Awareness Display

In this paper, we present a field trial of a pervasive system called Panorama that is aimed at supporting social awareness in work environments. Panorama is an intelligent situated display in the staff room of an academic department. It artistically represents non-critical user generated content such as images from holidays, conferences and other social gatherings, as well as textual messages on its display. It also captures images and videos from different public spaces of the department and streams them onto the Panorama screen, using appropriate abstraction techniques. We studied the use of Panorama for two weeks and observed how Panorama affected staff members’ social awareness and community building. We report that Panorama simulated curiosity and learning, initiated new interactions and provided a mechanism for cherishing old memories