1,751 research outputs found

    Exploring Cognitive Playfulness Through Zero Interactions

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    Many emerging technologies, products and services today try to use diverse methods of interaction to provide playful experiences. Increasingly more interactive features and techniques are being introduced to afford users new experiences and enrich our living environment. While many of these playful experiences can be achieved through various types of physical, sensory and social interactions, this paper attempts to focus on how 'no-interaction' can achieve playfulness in relation to our cognitive experience. If there is a way to give someone a playful experience without any physical, sensory and social interactions, where and how can we apply this approach or phenomenon? Here we share a provocation that tries to demonstrate a tangible means whereby such an idea could be used to explore potential user experiences within HCI

    In and out domains. Playful principles to in-form urban solutions

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    The implementation of games in architecture and urban planning has a long history since the 1960s and is still a preferential tool to foster public participation and address contemporary spatial – and social - conflicts within the urban fabric. Moreover, in the last decade, we have seen the rise of urban play as a tool for community building, and city-making and Western society is actively focusing on play/playfulness – together with ludic dynamics and mechanics - as an applied methodology to deal with complex challenges, and deeper comprehend emergent situations. In this paper, we aim to initiate a dialogue between game scholars and architects through the use of the PLEX/CIVIC framework. Like many creative professions, we believe that architectural practice may benefit significantly from having more design methodologies at hand, thus improving lateral thinking. We aim at providing new conceptual and operative tools to discuss and reflect on how games facilitate long-term planning processes and help to solve migration issues, allowing citizens themselves to take their responsibility and contribute to durable solutions

    CENTRIC 2018 : The Eleventh International Conference on Advances in Human-oriented and Personalized Mechanisms, Technologies, and Services

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    Over the next years smart Internet-connected toys are expected to grow significantly in numbers. Our study explores smart toys’ potential to deliver experiences related to playful learning. One key aspect of toys, such as the CogniToys Dino, Fisher-Price’s Smart Toy Bear and Wonder Workshop’s Dash Robot are their game-based and toy-based features and functions, which are suggested to have educational outcomes when used in play. Through a comparative investigation of toy marketers’, preschool teachers’ and the parents’ of preschoolaged children’s perspectives of smart toys potential—and a comparison to the actual play experiences of preschoolers discovered in earlier stages of research, we demonstrate how the educational potential of contemporary smart toys may be categorized into game-based and toy-based affordances that may be employed for specific educational goals in playful learning. Keywords - game-based learning; Internet of Toys (IoToys); play; preschoolers; smart toys.</p

    How to Gamify? A Method For Designing Gamification

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    During recent years, gamification has become a popular method of enriching information technologies. Popular business analysts have made promising predictions about penetration of gamification, however, it has also been estimated that most gamification efforts will fail due to poor understanding of how gamification should be designed and implemented. Therefore, in this paper we seek to advance the understanding of best practices related to the gamification design process. We approach this research problem via a design science research approach; firstly, by synthesizing the current body of literature on gamification design methods and interviewing 25 gamification experts. Secondly, we develop a method for gamification design, based on the gathered knowledge. Finally, we conduct an evaluation of the method via interviews of 10 gamification experts. The results indicate that the developed method is comprehensive, complete and provides practical utility. We deliver a comprehensive overview of gamification guidelines and shed novel insights into the overall nature of the gamification development and design discourse

    All Work and No Play? Facilitating Serious Games and Gamified Applications in Participatory Urban Planning and Governance

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    As games and gamified applications gain prominence in the academic debate on participatory practices, it is worth examining whether the application of such tools in the daily planning practice could be beneficial. This study identifies a research–practice gap in the current state of participatory urban planning practices in three European cities. Planners and policymakers acknowledge the benefits of employing such tools to illustrate complex urban issues, evoke social learning, and make participation more accessible. However, a series of impediments relating to planners’ inexperience with participatory methods, resource constraints, and sceptical adult audiences, limits the broader application of games and gamified applications within participatory urban planning practices. Games and gamified applications could become more widely employed within participatory planning processes when process facilitators become better educated and better able to judge the situations in which such tools could be implemented as part of the planning process, and if such applications are simple and useful, and if their development process is based on co-creation with the participating publics

    Using games as learning tools for design research planning

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    Designers are required to understand human behavior and people’s needs in order to design solutions. According to Muratovsky (2015), society today demands designers to not only design products and communications, but also a system for living. The definition of design is changing from a craft-oriented profession where the emphasis is on individual creativity and commerce, to a discipline that is robust and committed to conceptualization, configuration, and the implementation of new ideas (Muratovsky, 2015). Therefore, the current demands become the reason cross-disciplinary studies is a required skill for designers (Muratovsky, 2015). In order to broaden their knowledge, designers need to become strategic planners and thinkers who can work across disciplines. In order to meet the current demands for designers to become strategic planners, the designer needs to find a way of improving the design research planning process. Based on the author’s experience and observations, novice designers or design students found difficulties when they plan to design research in professional and academic contexts on their teams. It seems that they often forget the various methods, theories, or tools about design methods that should be used for the research. To solve these issues, games could convey a solution that helps designers to understand the whole process of design research. Games can be used for designers as an activity to learn the planning design research experimenting method by knowing what is a better plan in a particular case. Design games enable design actions to be studied in a manipulable and well-bounded environment that creates situations similar to real-life situations (Habraken & Gross, as cited in Vaajakallio, 2012). Games can be used as a tool or medium in a cross-disciplinary team for having engaging discussion and collaboration process. This thesis explores how to create games that help the designer to plan research in order to guide designers to understand better the design research context. This knowledge can help designers to expand their emphasis based on individual creativity towards conceptualization, configuration, and implementation of new ideas. The outcome of this thesis is games that help designers to plan design research

    Hybrid Social Play Final Report

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    Operationalizing Culture With Design Cards in Cross-Cultural Design: Translating Critical Knowledge Into Provocative Insights

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    Operationalizing culture is “one of the most fundamental issues cross-cultural researchers face” (Matsumoto & Jones, 2009, p. 324), as stated in The Handbook of Social Research Ethics. Inconsiderate research design could “ignore the large degree of individual differences that exist in human behavior” (p. 325) and eventually “vindicate” cultural stereotypes the researchers mean to avoid. In the field of cross-cultural design, a big challenge is how to inform and guide the design process with a sophisticated understanding of culture. This design challenge is a contextualized problem of operationalizing culture in practice. Insensitive design recommendations could end up strengthening the cultural essentialism designers want to leave behind in this increasingly globalized world. For example, designers should be more careful when recommending an online event scheduling system for American users that includes more granular and precise time units (e.g., options at 15 minute precision level) than what is recommended for Mexican users. The recommendation makes sense as American culture is considered monochronic, which prefers punctuality for meetings, while Mexican culture is not. However, what if some individual Mexican users might want to take more proactive actions to counteract their polychromic cultural influence for intercultural collaboration

    Urban Play and the Playable City:A Critical Perspective

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