Designing IoT Resources to Support Outdoor Play for Children

Abstract

We describe a Research-through-Design (RtD) project that explores the Internet of Things (IoT) as a resource for children's free-play outdoors. Based on initial insights from a design ethnography, we developed four RtD prototypes for social play in different scenarios of use outdoors, including congregating on a street or in a park to play physical games with IoT. We observed these prototypes in use by children in their free play in two community settings, and report on the qualitative analysis of our fieldwork. Findings highlight material qualities that encouraged social and physical play under certain conditions, suggesting social affordances that are central to the success of IoT designs for free-play outdoors. We provide directions for future research that addresses the challenges we faced when deploying IoT with children, contributing new considerations for interaction design with children in outdoor settings and free play contexts.

Lanterns

“…Several studies in HCI and related Interaction Design for Children (IDC) literature have explored the design of digitally augmented artefacts for open-ended play [15,[23][24][25]29,48,50,58]. There is commonly a focus on digitally enhancing outdoor play and therefore augmenting existing kinds of play resources that are commonly used outdoors [23,39,44,50].…”

“…Even when novel open-ended designs are introduced into free play, the tendency is to observe and principally consider rule-based play in subsequent evaluations [15,36]. Research investigating open-ended designs in free play outdoors looks principally at older children, aged seven and up [2,4,15,[23][24][25]36,39,44,48,50,51,58], where we may expect to see children playing games, discussing and negotiating relatively complex rules [37], as a component of their play with open-ended designs. By exception, Pathway [41] was designed for children aged 3-5 years, and the authors report increased physical activity through running, skipping, and jumping on the prototype.…”

“…Through reporting on the findings from our observational fieldwork, we extend existing work at the intersection of play and Interaction Design for children (e.g. [2][3][4]15,58]) by contributing three new Sensitising Concepts [5,7,54,59] for the design of interactive tangibles to support preschool children's outdoor play: Choosing the way; Improvising in movement; Anticipating a response. By introducing these sensitising concepts, we aim to guide future design work in this space, whilst acknowledging the importance of free play being child-led and open to interpretation.…”

“…Whilst interactive screen entertainment continues to captivate children and draw them into virtual environments, there are increasing opportunities for encouraging children outside by designing compelling interactions with tangible computing devices [2][3][4]15,24,25,36]. A rich design space is opening up for interactive technologies that pique children's interests in outdoor play settings, and thus can have proven social and physical benefits for children [6,22].…”

“…A rich design space is opening up for interactive technologies that pique children's interests in outdoor play settings, and thus can have proven social and physical benefits for children [6,22]. Extant Human Computer Interaction (HCI) research has highlighted the opportunities presented by digital, networked technology to support outdoor play for children [4,15,24,44], but as yet little is known about designing interactions specifically for preschool children. Given innovations in embedded hardware and the Internet of Things (IoT), researchers have looked at the design of tangibles for children's outdoor play and these include both games [44,45] and open-ended interactions [24,25,50,52].…”