You make the rules!
Pepijn Rijbout
As an open-ended play environment, the design should not explicitly provide games or narratives.
As children play, the rules of their games are often not predetermined but defined and changed in the moment. The Intelligent Play Environments project( I-PE) investigates how we can create play environments that support such open-ended play. Instead of designing one central play element, we chose to create environments that consist of multiple interactive objects: each object has a computing device, can communicate with the other objects, can sense touch and the presence of a player, and in turn emit either light or sound which allows players to interact with the environment. As objects in these environments can communicate with each other, they can begin to show complex behaviour. This requires that the interaction design looks beyond the interaction with individual objects to explore how players can use multiple objects to define their play. If for instance, an object can pass‘ its’ light to other objects, the player’ s interaction focus moves from the interaction with objects to those changing lights.
In this project, I am investigating how the object’ s interaction rules can be designed so that play is supported. Designing interactive objects for play involves designing local interaction rules [ MICRO ] as well as rules, for the complex behaviour of multiple objects [ MACRO ]. I explore the relations between these aspects by actually designing, building and programming environments. A first iteration led to the development of Flow- Steps: programmable mats that can detect a user standing on them and can emit light. As a test, we built ten FlowSteps and let ten children between the ages of 6 and 8 play with them. We noticed that, although a moving light can lead to competitive play, the scarcity of a colour can lead to cooperative play, as children start to discuss how to‘ catch’ the light when it appears. In developing the Flow- Steps, we also experienced what taking on such a design challenge requires. One thing we’ ve learned, for instance, is how closely related technical development and play