Co-designing playful interactions for public health in green spaces

Public green spaces such as parks are key contributors to peoples’ health and wellbeing. Users often underutilise these green spaces in terms of undertaking casual physical activities and are recognised as having the most to gain from participating in their use and development. The Active Parks project aimed to co-design a concept for a playful and interactive ‘health trail’ in a green space to explore the effects of playful interactive experiences on the casual physical activity of park users. In a series of co-design workshops with local residents, the Lancaster City Council and NHS Lancashire Public Health, a numbers of ideas and concepts were developed, which informed the design proposition of the health trail offering new ways of motivating and taking physical activity specific to local people in their park. Three versions of a proof-of-concept digital prototype - large-scale musical instrument - were developed to explore how it could be used and implemented in the park. Pilot testing showed that the prototypes encouraged positive experiences of intergenerational casual physical activity among young children and teenagers, their parents and grandparents. Users described the experience as ‘fun’, ‘magical’ and ‘brilliant’ and were positive in their feedback about the prospect of the idea becoming a reality in their park. Reflecting on the co-design process the paper recognises the successes of the project while questioning a lack of opportunity for participants to engage in the rich knowledge generation experience of prototyping in the evaluative design phase as a barrier to further innovation

Enter the Circle: Blending Spherical Displays and Playful Embedded Interaction in Public Spaces

Public displays are used a variety of contexts, from utility driven information displays to playful entertainment displays. Spherical displays offer new opportunities for interaction in public spaces, allowing users to face each other during interaction and explore content from a variety of angles and perspectives. This paper presents a playful installation that places a spherical display at the centre of a playful environment embedded with interactive elements. The installation, called Enter the Circle, involves eight chair-sized boxes filled with interactive lights that can be controlled by touching the spherical display. The boxes are placed in a ring around the display, and passers-by must “enter the circle” to explore and play with the installation. We evaluated this installation in a pedestrianized walkway for three hours over an evening, collecting on-screen logs and video data. This paper presents a novel evaluation of a spherical display in a public space, discusses an experimental design concept that blends displays with embedded interaction, and analyses real world interaction with the installation

Organizational Probes:Exploring Playful Interactions in Work Environment

Playfulness, with non-intrusive elements, can be considered a useful resource for enhancing social awareness and community building within work organizations. Taking inspirations from the cultural probes approach, we developed organizational probes as a set of investigation tools that could provide useful information about employees’ everyday playful experiences within their work organizations. In an academic work environment, we applied our organizational probes over a period of three weeks. Based on the collected data we developed two design concepts for playful technologies in work environments

LEDs Urban Carpet, una instalación interactiva para sociabilizar en el espacio público

The purpose of this paper is to explore the type of social interactions that can be generated when a technological platform is introduced in a public environment. Here we present an interactive urban installation, which use a body-input as a form of a non-traditional user interface. Its aim is to enhance novel experiences that can enrich interactions between people nearby, sharing the same space and the same playful atmosphere. The prototype incorporates a grid of lights that dynamically generates patterns according to pedestrian?s position over the carpet. The installation was tested in various locations around the city of Bath, UK

An Investigation into Playful Interactive Experiences within Public Space

This investigation aimed to produce methods of regeneration for underutilised public areas, encouraging social and spatial interactions through play permission. Approached from an interdisciplinary perspective, design and artistic installation merge with social science. Central skills of communication develop at a young age where play is a major contributor, but in a globalised world interactions are increasingly ‘virtual’ rather than physical. Research hypothesis suggests playful designs as catalysts for change will alter spatial usage and user perceptions, thus creating exciting places for public life. Ideally a ‘playful interactive experience’ is seemingly humorous participatory design unexpectedly intervening with public space, allowing participation with an ephemeral experience. Investigation contributions are frameworks for the creation and evaluation of playful interactive experiences, to be utilised at academic or professional levels, aiming for: playful environment creation, and analysis of user interactions. Design for research methodology tested framework parameters through the utilisation of design artefacts. Multiple methods were employed to triangulate results: onsite questionnaires, focus groups, and professional interviews provided the study with public and professional opinions. Secondly, observational behavioural mapping displays visual and statistical outcomes for data comparison. Modified user perception, increased usage and positive social engagements reveal that: play permission implemented correctly is a successful method for place creation. Conclusions indicate that humorous outcomes can be enjoyed by all as economic, fun and non traditional solutions to ‘placemaking.’ Findings allowed for framework development in their concluding form. Future recommendations suggest a handbook detailing the playful interactive experience. New questions prompt discussions into: impacts on anti-social behaviour, continued employment over greater time periods and additional spatial settings. This research was carried out by De Montfort University, aided by Frederick University and Urban Gorillas, NGO. It was an investigation into playful interactive experiences with intentions of improving sociability and perceptions, promoting creativity and usage within underutilised public spaces

Space time pixels

This paper reports the design of a networked system, the aim of which is to provide an intermediate virtual space that will establish a connection and support interaction between multiple participants in two distant physical spaces. The intention of the project is to explore the potential of the digital space to generate original social relationships between people that their current (spatial or social) position can difficultly allow the establishment of innovative connections. Furthermore, to explore if digital space can sustain, in time, low-level connections like these, by balancing between the two contradicting needs of communication and anonymity. The generated intermediate digital space is a dynamic reactive environment where time and space information of two physical places is superimposed to create a complex common ground where interaction can take place. It is a system that provides awareness of activity in a distant space through an abstract mutable virtual environment, which can be perceived in several different ways – varying from a simple dynamic background image to a common public space in the junction of two private spaces or to a fully opened window to the other space – according to the participants will. The thesis is that the creation of an intermediary environment that operates as an activity abstraction filter between several users, and selectively communicates information, could give significance to the ambient data that people unconsciously transmit to others when co-existing. It can therefore generate a new layer of connections and original interactivity patterns; in contrary to a straight-forward direct real video and sound system, that although it is functionally more feasible, it preserves the existing social constraints that limit interaction into predefined patterns

Emergence and playfulness in social games

Social Games, built and played on social networks such as Facebook, have rapidly become a major force in the world of game development, and the top social games today claim more players than any other online game on any format. As social games begin to mature from their roots as simple playful social toys and into the products of big business, the patterns and mechanics used in the design have begun to be formalised. In this paper, it is argued that experimentation and playfulness is still a very important part of the play experience and a valuable source of fun. As game designs explore the space opened by the new genre of social games, it is vital for designers to leave “gaps” in the design to allow for playful and serendipitous experiences to emerge from the activities of the players. To support this argument, Caillois’ classification of play is used as a lens through which social games can be examined. Examples of paidic, playful and emergent play are presented from popular social and offline games, and a detailed case study of paidic play in a new social game is presented from the designer’s perspective. Interviews from participants to an open trial are discussed, and their experiences in creating their own playful experiences and goals within the formal structure of the social game design are explored

Understanding Public Evaluation: Quantifying Experimenter Intervention

Public evaluations are popular because some research questions can only be answered by turning “to the wild.” Different approaches place experimenters in different roles during deployment, which has implications for the kinds of data that can be collected and the potential bias introduced by the experimenter. This paper expands our understanding of how experimenter roles impact public evaluations and provides an empirical basis to consider different evaluation approaches. We completed an evaluation of a playful gesture-controlled display – not to understand interaction at the display but to compare different evaluation approaches. The conditions placed the experimenter in three roles, steward observer, overt observer, and covert observer, to measure the effect of experimenter presence and analyse the strengths and weaknesses of each approach

The urban screen as a socialising platform: exploring the role of place within the urban space

In this paper we explore shared encounters mediated by technologies in the urban space. We investigate aspects that influence the interactions between people and people and people and their surroundings when technology is introduced in the urban space. We highlight the importance of space and the role of place in providing temporal and spatial mechanisms facilitating different types of social interactions and shared encounters. An emperical experiment was condeucted with a prototype that was implemented in the form of a digital screen, embeded in the physical surrounding in selected locations with low, medium and high pedestrian flows in the heritage City of Bath, UK. The aim is to create a novel urban experience that triggers shared encounters among friends, observers or strangers. Using the body as an interaface, the screen acted as a non-traditional interface and a facilitator between people and people and people and their surrounding environment. Here we outline early findings from deploying the digital screen as a socialiasing platform in a city context. We describe the user experience and demonstrate how people move, congregate and socialize around the digital surface. We illustrate the impact of the spatial and syntactical properties on the type of shared interactions in and highlight related issues. The initial findings indicated that introducing a digital platform as a public interactive installation in the urban space may provide a stage for emergent social interactions among various people and motivate users to actively and collaboratively play with the media. However, situating the digital platform in various locations, and depending on the context, might generate diverse and unpredicted social behaviours designers might be unaware of. In this respect we believe that the final experience is shaped by interconnection of structural, social, cultural, temporal and perhaps personal elements. We conclude by mentioning briefly our on going work