Mårtensson, Fredrika
- Department of People and Society, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences
Abstract
While digital play installations for outdoor use are becoming more common, little work has been done on how such technology shapes play in nature-rich environments. We performed a study of children's self-directed play with access to nature as well as digital installations. Our findings show that play with nature materials and digital installations emerged in different ways. Most notably, imaginative play was observed emerging in close interaction with nature, while the digital installations mostly inspired rule-based play. Furthermore, engagement with digital installations typically involved an active exploration phase which was not observed with nature materials. Nature materials instead engaged the children's senses more immediately, and often offered opportunities for collection and consumption, paving way for fluent play activities roaming large areas. We argue that these differences motivate rethinking the design of digital installations for play in nature and suggest guidelines to this purpose.
Keywords
digital outdoor play; open-ended play; restoration; children's play; nature; nature-rich settings; landscape architecture; nature play
Published in
Title: Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery
Conference
2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 26 April to 1 May, 2025, Yokohama, Japan
SLU Authors
UKÄ Subject classification
Human Computer Interaction
Publication identifier
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713303
- eISBN: 979-8-4007-1394-1
Permanent link to this page (URI)
https://res.slu.se/id/publ/143083