Fun and Games Conference – Call for Papers - Program - Papers - Special Issue

Workshop: Design for social interaction through physical play

Organisers: Emilia Barakova , Tilde Bekker, Janienke Sturm

Affiliation: TU Eindhoven, Department of Industrial Design

P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven

The Netherlands

{m.m.bekker, j.sturm, e.barakova@tue.nl}

Date: Wednesday 22 October 2008

Location: TU Eindhoven, The Netherlands

Introduction

In a world where more and more people interact through media and sometimes less in a face-to-face manner, it is becoming more important to counter this trend and to design for social interaction. Another relevant trend is that people lead less active lifestyles. We can combine these issues and explore how to design technology that promotes more active and social interactions.

Physical play offers many opportunities to enhance and stimulate real social interaction (as opposed to virtual interaction through a computer). Playing a game is also a popular means to stimulate autistic children and elderly people to socialize and have fun. We believe in a combination of creating technological objects that promote social interaction and designing dedicated games and social scenarios that will increase the fun experience of using those embodied objects in social settings.

At the proposed workshop we would like to identify multidisciplinary approaches and address questions such as:

- What are the principles of designing for social and physical play?

- What is different about designing for and physical social play?

- What are inspiration sources when designing for social and physical play? E.g. theories about social interaction and sport psychology.

Important themes

- use of sensor and actuator networks

- designing dedicated games will stimulate social interaction through collaboration or competition.

- exertion interfaces

- Social aspects of physical play have for different user groups, such as children, elderly and people with disabilities.

- Intelligent play spaces solutions

- Tangible games for social and physical play

- Pervasive games,

- Human Robot Interaction.

Workshop goals

- to share information and experiences among researchers in the area of social interaction through physical play with regard to findings in related fields such as ubiquitous computing, CSCW, games theory, social and developmental psychology, behavioral sciences, social neurosciences, sports science, and education.

- to facilitate discussions aiming to the development of a theoretical framework able to explain and predict user’s interaction in various forms of interactive play and the development of a methodological framework able to support the investigation and evaluation of such interactions.

- to start the development of a set of guidelines for the design of social and physical games.

Workshop set-up

Participants of the workshop will be selected on the basis of position papers.