Designing a technological playground: A field study of the emergence of play in household messaging
- Siân Lindley ,
- Richard Harper ,
- Abigail Sellen
Proceedings of the 2010 SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems |
Published by Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
Winner of SIGCHI Honorable Mention award.
We present findings from a field study of Wayve, a situated messaging device for the home that incorporates handwriting and photography. Wayve was used by 24 households (some of whom were existing social networks of family and friends) over a three-month period. We consider the various types of playfulness that emerged during the study, both through the sending of Wayve messages and through the local display of photos and notes. The findings are explored in the context of the literature on play, with the aim of identifying aspects of Wayve’s design, as well as the context in which it was used, that engendered playfulness. We also highlight the role of play in social relationships, before concluding with design implications.
Copyright © 2007 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library --http://www.acm.org/dl/.