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Conference paper2018

Playing Close to Home: Interaction and Emerging Play in Outdoor Play Installations

Back, Jon; Vidal, Laia Turmo; Waern, Annika; Paget, Susan; Pysander, Eva Lotta Salinas

Abstract

Outdoor play is becoming an increasingly marginalised activity in the urban landscape. Even in HCI, research on interactive solutions for outdoor play has largely been limited to special areas and in particular playgrounds. But children play everywhere, and especially play close to home is central in children's play activities. In this article we draw upon knowledge about designing for children's play in interaction design as well as in landscape architecture, to study how interactive play installations can be integrated in outdoor environments of a residential area. We present a field study in which digitally enhanced play installations were installed, in dialogue with the landscape, in between the buildings of a residential area. We focus on how emerging play activities made use of the installations as well as of the surrounding landscape in expected as well as unexpected ways. Based on the observations, we discuss how residential play is special, and how this affects how to design for it.

Keywords

Play; playgrounds; playing close to home; digitally enhanced playground; landscape; landscape architecture

SLU Authors

Global goals (SDG)

SDG11 Sustainable cities and communities

UKÄ Subject classification

Human Computer Interaction
Landscape Architecture

Publication identifier

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173730
  • eISBN: 978-1-4503-5620-6

Permanent link to this page (URI)

https://res.slu.se/id/publ/104631