The main purpose of the project Playful Experience is to understand what constitutes enjoyment of using a product; what kinds of experiences the product can elicit, and how to design something that evokes certain kind of experience. Attributes such as fun and pleasure are currently abstract and there are uncertainties as how the different possibilities for supporting playful experiences can be addressed in design. Furthermore, there are huge variations between users in what they find pleasurable or fun. For some users, fun constitute of hard challenges that stretch their abilities to the extreme, while for others pleasurable experience constitutes casual social interaction, aesthetics and beauty.
The project is partly based on a vision of a society where enjoyment, experience and play is regarded as essential and important for human well being, and partly on the increased acknowledgement in the research community that enjoyment is often impossible to neglect in studies of how people actually use technology. There are several reasons why mobile devices could be especially relevant to study in terms of playful experiences, e.g. as they:
- provide sensors and media that allow new possibilities for play and playful designs
- are used in social settings where playful activities emerge easily
- are carried with users, and thereby get embedded in daily routines, in transitional ‘non places’ , while waiting, etc
Here we start out from the simplistic understanding that Playful Experiences refer to experiences that provide ’pleasure’ or ‘amusement’ for someone. However, it is also recognised that playfulness differs largely between people and contexts and is a matter of human attitude, rather than an intrinsic property of an activity, system or device.
Henriette Cramer
Helena Mentis
Nicolas Belloni
Goranka Zoric
Elsa Kosmack Vaara
Jon Back
