Technology for Situated and Emergent Play: A Bridging Concept and Design Agenda

Abstract

Despite the capacity of play to spontaneously emerge in our daily life, the scope of application of play design in HCI is generally narrower, specifically targeting areas of pure leisure, or wholly utilitarian and productive play. Here we focus on the value of play design to respond to and support our natural gravitation towards emergent play that helps to meet our social and emotional needs. We present a bridging concept: Technology for Situated and Emergent Play, i.e. technology design that supports playful engagement that emerges interwoven with our everyday activities outside leisure, and that enriches these activities with socioemotional value. Our intermediate-level contribution has value as a synthesis piece: it weaves together theories of play and play design and bridges them with concrete design examples. As a bridging concept, it contributes: i) theoretical grounding; ii) inspiring design exemplars that illustrate the theory and foreground its value; and iii) design articulations in the form of valuable experiential qualities and design features. Our work can help to focus design agendas for playful technology and inspire future designs in this space.

Project IRL: Playful Co-Located Interactions with Mobile Augmented Reality

“…In recent years, researchers have drawn attention to the value of playful interactions [4,66]. Therefore, we decided to design applications to enable these types of experiences among people who are together in the same space.…”

A Catalog of Speculative Playful Urban Technology Ideas

“…Finally, we see playful urban designs that are not games per se but technology-mediated invitations to engage in free-form urban play. [3] characterizes them as Technology for Situated & Emergent Play, i.e., "technology design that supports playful engagement that emerges interwoven with our everyday activities outside leisure, and that enriches these activities with socio-emotional value. " For example, SelfieCafe fosters social interaction between community members by allowing them to take a selfie and share it on a large display [52]; spread.gun allows people to sabotage advertisement screens and "reclaim" them with custom messages [25]; or Urbanimals [39] and Hello Lamp Post [49] allow people to interact with urban infrastructure playfully, let it be physically or verbally, in ways that do not necessarily bring about any productive gain.…”

“…We aimed to generate early ideas of technology-mediated urban experiences that embraced at least one play potential. We produced 25 ideas, which we collected on a slideshow 3 and expanded at a subsequent brainstorming session.…”

Mesmer

“…For this reason, play has become a key topic in HCI, and researchers investigate how to use its potential to enrich situations that have traditionally been considered non-playful (e.g. [1] [11] [13] [17]). Works in this space often face a common challenge: how can we design for play that enriches non-play activity without disrupting it completely?…”

“…Works in this space often face a common challenge: how can we design for play that enriches non-play activity without disrupting it completely? The Situated Play Design (SPD) [1] approach addresses this challenge by focusing on chasing play potentials-i.e. "existing manifestations of contextual play-to inspire play design.…”