IP-E project— CRISP Magazine # 1
With the design of Intelligent Play Environments, playful persuasion encourages social and physical play to promote well-being.
Playful persuasion Tilde Bekker
At first glance, the Intelligent Play Environment( I-PE) project may seem remarkably like that of G-Motiv; both projects use game elements as triggers for motivation in an effort to solve societal issues. There is, however, a clear difference. What I-PE seeks to do is to learn how to design play environments built around open-ended and decentralised intelligent game concepts. With these play environments, we want to playfully persuade people to change their behaviour.
Consider, for instance, the play of children. Play takes a large role in a child’ s development, as it helps them practice new( social) skills and explore imaginary worlds. In the past, children’ s play took place outdoors and was highly social and physical in nature. With the temptations of television and video games, children are not as physically active as they once were, which may lead to serious health risks. Another negative consequence is that, as a lot of their communication takes place in a virtual as opposed to the real world,
Dynamic behaviour & Emergent properties
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Context of play
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Crisp Magazine # 1
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Stages of play & Development of meaning
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Interaction opportunities
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User experience
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children’ s development of face-to-face social skills may also suffer. What if we could come up with a form of play that is an attractive alternative to computer games and television: a form of play that adds interactivity to the playground and enriches outdoor play in an appealing way? As we took on this challenge, we quickly learned that there is no straightforward approach to designing for play, because it can take so many forms. You need to think about what form of play the design should inspire: should it be physical or social, or a type of fantasy play, or a combination of these? Besides form, you also have to choose the type of experience: playful experiences can be triggered by a sense of curiosity, or of exploration; by a challenge, or competition or fellowship between players.
To further complicate things, play often develops over time, with several distinct phases. To ensure that people keep playing, the play environment needs to support players as they progress from invitation, to exploration, to immersion. A game may initially be inviting, but as time progresses, it may stop being interesting. On the other hand, if the initial learning curve from invitation to exploration is too steep, players may quickly give up. Because so much is still unknown at this stage, we follow a research-through-design approach. We give our students a basis of theoretical assumptions and a design brief. They use these assumptions to create prototypes in various iterations, and try to validate their design decisions by involving users in evaluating the outcomes. We subsequently analyse the results of their work to test our initial theoretical assumptions and, of course, correct where needed, resulting in general rules that we can use in subsequent student assign-
ments. A benefit of this approach is that, instead of having design-relevant knowledge only at the end of the four-year project, we quickly come to useful insights, not only for our own research but also for other organisations involved in the project. We’ ve learned, for instance, that open-ended play is ideally suited to elicit social interactions. What makes this approach more effective than, say, a functional approach, where you explicitly tell people how to behave, is that this type of play environment triggers people’ s intrinsic motivation. Because the game itself does not provide clearly defined rules, people will need to cooperatively negotiate what rules they want to incorporate in their playful activity.
We have bundled our initial insights of‘ things to consider during the design process’ in a theoretically supported framework. It helps in considering how the choices we make in our designs( micro level) are influenced by the considerations of higher level issues( macro), such as what experiences we are designing for. At the same time, practical concerns at the micro level might limit the ambitious goals at the macro level.
Tilde Bekker— 1964 m. m. bekker @ tue. nl
. Associate Professor at Eindhoven
University of Technology, User Centred Design, Design research on designing for children. Project leader CRISP project I-PE