Linda de Valk

Leaving room for improvisation: towards a design approach for open-ended play

Open-ended play with interactive objects provides children with the freedom to construct their own rules, goals and meaning. Instead of games with strict rules, open-ended play designs offer interaction opportunities as a trigger for creating personalized games. The process of developing these designs differs from designs with predefined use. This paper presents the further development of a design approach on how to design for open-ended play. We give an overview of related work and analyze eight existing open-ended play designs. Next, interviews with design students are discussed that illustrate the process of developing open-ended play designs. As a conclusion, we describe our design approach for open-ended play, including an improved definition of open-ended play, an overview of which design parameters have to be considered and advice for tailoring a design process to consider these parameters.

GlowSteps A Decentralized Interactive Play Environment for Open-Ended Play

In this paper we present the interactive play environment GlowSteps. GlowSteps consists of ten flexible tiles that respond with light feedback on players actions. The play environment is developed to support both social and physical play and is designed with the intention to encourage children to create their own play and games. The tiles can be programmed with different interaction behaviors leading to a variety of play experiences. This showcase illustrates our design approach for such interactive play environments, combining the fields of decentralized systems and open-ended play.

A toolkit for designing playful interactions: The four lenses of play

The development of ambient play environments provides an opportunity to develop tangible play solutions to stimulate social and physical play by embedding responsiveness tailored and adjusted to player behaviour in the environment. This paper gives an overview of different perspectives on play and translates this theoretical knowledge from different disciplines to design relevant knowledge. The design relevant knowledge is presented in the form of a design toolkit, called the lenses of play, including the perspectives of forms of play, open-ended play, stages of play and playful experiences. Application of the design toolkit is illustrated in relation to two interactive play design cases to emphasize the design relevance of the knowledge in the design process. Furthermore, it shows how the lenses can inform different types of design decisions, such as early scoping of the design space by focusing on a form of play and making more detailed design decisions later when considering different stages of play.

i-PE: A Decentralized Approach for Designing Adaptive and Persuasive Intelligent Play Environments

This paper presents the approach of the intelligent Play Environments (i-PE) project. The aim of this project is to develop design guidelines for designing interactive environments that stimulate social and physical play. We want to create an environment that supports this play behavior and emphasizes on the flow of play by offering freedom in interaction. In this position paper, we describe our approach for designing such a play environment. We will introduce two focus areas for our research: playful persuasion and adaptation.

About Experience and Emergence - A Framework for Decentralized Interactive Play Environments

Play is an unpredictable and fascinating activity. Its qualities can serve as an inspiration for design. In designing for play, we focus on play environments with players and multiple interactive objects. The current understanding of how to design these objects and interaction opportunities to create meaningful interactions and engaging user experiences is limited. In this paper we introduce a framework focusing on the development of decentralized interactive play environments for emergent play. This framework combines knowledge from different fields including play, user experience, emergent behavior and interactions. Two case studies demonstrate its use as a tool for analysis.

Shake up the schoolyard: iterative design research for public playful installations

Three different design research topics are presented in this article: how to design social and active play for teenagers, how to design for openended and emergent play, and how to evaluate interactive playful installations in situ. The Wiggle the Eye installation, five interactive wiggle benches and a central lamp, was iteratively developed and evaluated with more than 1000 users, at two high schools, one university and a design festival. The installation succeeded in inviting teenagers to play in a social way, yet the interaction design proved challenging: uncoordinated mass usage and a variety of external factors influenced the exploration and discovery process for the users. The presented insights serve as advice for everyone designing for teenagers, public spaces or playful interactions.

Toinggg: How Changes in Children's Activity Level Influence Creativity in Open-Ended Play

This paper describes an explorative study with an open-ended play environment called Toinggg that consists of three interactive trampolines and was developed for children aged 6-8 years old. Toinggg was used to evaluate the change of childrens activity level on creativity in open-ended play. With this exploration, we aim to gain a better understanding of the balance between physical activity and creativity in play. In a user evaluation twenty-one children played in groups of three with Toinggg. Results show an increase in development of new game play and creativity after a moment of rest concerning the activity level of the interaction behavior.

Tangible Play Objects: Influence of Different Combinations of Feedback Modalities

This paper presents a study on childrens play with tangible, interactive objects called MagicBuns. The aim of this study was to examine the support of different combinations of tangible feedback on different play behaviors and forms of play related to the different development stages of children. Furthermore, a comparison of the play behavior was made between children within the age category four till six and children in the age category ten till twelve years old. Creating guidelines for designing play objects which can grow along with the children. For this study MagicBuns were developed, that through rolling or shaking vibrate, create sounds or change color. Eighty children played in small groups in three different play sessions with these objects. These sessions showed that younger children engage more in parallel play, making use of one feedback modality and simple interaction rules, while older children prefer more complexity. They integrate multiple interaction rules and feedback modalities in their games.

Investigating Perspectives on Play: The Lenses of Play Tool

This paper presents a new design tool for developing interactive playful environments. This design tool consists of a number of cards, which explain five perspectives or lenses on play. We describe three user evaluations that were carried out with the design tool and discuss how participants used the tool in their design activities and what they considered to be the value of the tool. The evaluations where mainly focused on two lenses: open-ended play and emergence. The tool provides inspiration for students, and other design researchers and practitioners working in the field of interactivity and play.

Designing for emergent play

This paper describes the PhD research on designing for open-ended play environments for children aged 6-8 years old. I discuss my research topic in more detail, as well as the developed design prototype and a first explorative study with this prototype. The focus of this study was on supporting playful experiences in different stages of play. Results show that playful experiences are supported by (different) design elements throughout the three stages of play. For the doctoral consortium, I also propose my research agenda for future work as point of discussion.