1

2

Outdoor play is important for the development of children both at physical level and mental level1. Nowadays, many children prefer to spend their time playing video games or watching TV at home instead of playing outside1. In this project, cooperated with other three classmates from Embodided Interaction course, we aimed to introduce IT Intervention to enhance the experience of children’s outdoor play at Pelle Svanslös playground at Uppsala, Sweden.

The Pelle Svanslös playground is located in the Carolina Park in Uppsala and was opened in June 2014. Inspired by a well known story of Pelle Svanslös books, the highly themed playground is built with swings, slides, a Merry- Go -Round, a Bakery Shop, a Police Office, a Pelle’s House, a Church, an Animal Hut, a Water Pump, and a small Pond. When our course began, the playground had been in operation for three months.

INTRODUCTION

A panorama of Pelle Svanslös Lekplats

1. Sturm, J., Bekker, T., Groenendaal, B., Wesselink, R., & Eggen, B., 2008, June, Key issues for the successful design of an intelligent, interactive playground. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Interaction design and children (pp. 258-265). ACM.

3

OBSERVATION & ISSUE

ISSUE: Most of the interactions with this playground are simple and predictable, children play as what the place tells them. Despite the Water Pump, the playground provides few opportunity for children to play together.

Simple Play ActivitiesFixed Object and Cleanliness of Playground

• The whole playground was highly themed as Pelle Svanslös. • All the objects in the houses were designed base on the theme and they were fixed. • Dirt seemed not allowed by adults. They spontaneously clean out the things that didn't fit to the playground.

ISSUE: The “cleanliness” of the playground seems to hinder children from bringing other resources to the playground. Besides, the current structure of the playground is restricted by the strong theme which in a way constrains children’s play.

• According to our observation, most of the play activities were simple and repetitive and they were very dependent on the facilities, such as drove the bus, pumped water.• The Water Pump was very popular among children as they could play together with it at the same time.

4

BRAINSTORMING According to the issues that we found, we set our GOAL as to support an open-ended play2 of children by encouraging them to create and communicate meaning of play.

Furthermore, we formulated our DESIGN QUESTION as:"How can interactive technology provides materials to allow more open-ended play activites?"

Based on the design question, a brain-storming was conducted in order to explore as much potential design solutions as possible. All ideas, written on posters, were collected together on a white board and categorized into several groups in terms of different patterns, such as, social interaction, creating things, role play, etc. Then we started analyzing and screening all these ideas.

After the discussion within our group and a feedback session with other students and supervisor, three major ideas emerged during the brainstorming:

Collecting ideas

Screening ideas Further discussion

• Role-playing as citizens of the playground,• Interactivity with natural material, • Letting the children paint.

2. According to Hopma, Bekker and Strum, open-ended play is “a form of play where game rules and goals are not predetermined. Instead, players can create their own game goals”.

5

In the interaction lab, we built a complete model of the playground to get a holistic view of the space and see how those ideas can fit in there. The mock-ups were built with strings to depict relationship between different playground areas.

MODELING

Big model made by all the materials that we can found from our Interaction Lab

Small model made by clay & paper

After we built the model, a design critique session was hold and during which we've narrowed down our concept ideas to one. We thought the Pig idea might be too simple as the play happens only in one place with predictable result children can easily get bored. Merry-Go-Round idea was also restricted since the only action children can do with it is pedaling.

DESIGN PROPOSAL

Therefore, the Postbox was choosen as our final decision beacuse the system facilitates play without limiting its meaning. Furthermore, it connects different places in the playground, allowing social interaction in the whole space.

DECISION

• The role-playing as a citizen idea was discarded after discussion because it was trying to introduce more physical objects whose functions and goals were already predetermined.• The idea of interactivity with natural materials seemed to be very promising at this stage.

• Letting the children paint was interesting. However this idea was not taken literally, but rather we wanted to take the general idea of letting children express themselves through a medium.

1. One of our initial ideas was about making the pig respond to, for example, the water pump to invite children to come and feed the pig. The pig will make a hungry sound or emit light.

2. This design idea was to build a tube in the middle of it with leaves inside. As they increased the speed of pedal ing, the leaves inside the tube would spin accordingly.

3. So, another idea came to the surface, what if the post box can actually “deliver” a post to the houses? A simple camera / scanner setup inside the post box and some displays in the houses could create such illusion. The letter could be available for picking up in the house.

6

SCENARIO 1. A boy sees a post box.2. The boy draws a postcard.3. The mail slot is blinking in order to promote him to put the mail into the mailbox through the hole.

4. He puts the post into box.5. He chooses a button which indicates the building to which he wants to send this mail. 6. After the mail enters the mailbox, the blinking stop and the system starts scanning and converting it into digital image. 7. Processes the image by adding some lovely stickers (e.g. image of Pelle Cat) and texts etc.8. Sending the post.

9. The house recieves the post. 10. The girl playing in that house is surprised by this mail.11. The post is displaying on the screen wall. She likes this postcard so she presses a button to print it out. 12. She takes the postard away with her.

7

RESULTS:GOAL: Preliminarily exploration of our idea.

METHOD:

In the first part of the experiment, one of our team member pretended to be a post man stood beside the postbox to help children complete writing a post card and send this post card to a house selected by children.

In the second part of the experiment,we remove postman and hide ourselves behind buildings while observing children’s behavior.

• Children were scared by the postman and stayed away from the postbox.

• After the postman was removed, children started approaching the postbox and drawing stuffs on papers. Some papers were left on the other places of the playground (picture left).

• There was one particular girl spent a long time on creating the postcard, then she took postcard and excitedly showed it to her parents. (picture below).

ITERATION 0

8

• The major part of the hole was covered by a front board. • Four clay-made buttons attached with hand drawing pictures, three of which represented buildings in the playground. • The question mark button, right corner, meant sending letter to a random building. • Colorful papers and pen were left on the top of the post box. • The back side of the postbox was covered with a wooden board which can be flipped up.

Front side of the prototype Back side of the prototype

GOAL: Preliminarily testing of the physical prototype and process.

PROTOTYPING v1.0:

METHOD:

STEP1: One of our group member is hiding behind the postbox when participants insert cards.STEP2: He/she can get postcard from the backside.STEP3: Take picture and send it to the tablet in the selected house.STEP4: Another group member stands in the building will show the image to the participant with iPad.

Wizard of Oz Technique

Our participant was a 5-year old girl (alias name Susan).After listening to the introduction of how to play by her mom, she wrote a postcard and sent it to the Pig House.

RESULTS:

ITERATION 1

9

1. Understand the system quickly: After she finished one session, one father and two children came by and checked the post box with curiosity. Susan started to explain how it works to them.

2. Familiarity with the place: Susan could matched icons on the button with the buildings in the playground easily. But she couldn't understand question mark button.

INSIGHTS FOR NEXT ITRATION:• From her understanding of the operation to this system, we found that more feedbacks were needed.

INSIGHTS FOR NEXT ITRATION:• We should replace the question mark with the image of another building in the playground.

GOAL: • Testing with younger age group. • Testing the light feedback when user press the button.

PROTOTYPING v2.0:

Changes from last prototype:• Four LEDS are installed under the buttons. They are controlled manually by the wizard everytime a letter comes in.• Question mark button had been removed from the board.

ITERATION 2

INSIGHTS FOR NEXT ITRATION:• Apparently, more durable physical buttons were demanded.

10

METHOD:The same methods from evaluation2 were applied with minor adjustments:• Intervention: The session began with an explanation to the parents on how the post box works so they can guide their children, but we didn't provide extra hint during play.• Wizard of Oz: The LEDS were lighten manually when postcards were put inside the postbox.

RESULTS:

2. Expectation at destination: Children expected to see the postcard from their own. There were few occasions where we showed them letters from someone else by mistake, they looked puzzled.

1. Letter sending behaviour: There were inconsistencies about whether to put the letter or to press the button first.

Another surprising finding was caused by a slip. After Marcus put his postcard in the postbox, the wizard did not blink the LEDs in time. Then he told his mother to wait for the system’s response instead of going to the destination directly.

Participants: one 3-year old boy (alias name Olof), and another 4-year old boy (al ias name Marcus). Both of them were accompanied with their mothers.

INSIGHTS FOR NEXT ITRATION:• The light feedback need to be better synchronized with user's behaviour.

INSIGHTS FOR NEXT ITRATION:• The tablet needs to be able to show multiple images at the same time and work more independently.

3. Creativity in content: The children showed amazing creativity on drawing the postcard. After they understood the concept of sending a postcard to somewhere, many meaningful postcards were created.

For example, Olof once wrote “Hej, Grisen! (Hi, pig!)” and sent it to the Pig House. Marcus d rew a f l ower and a l so a birthday cake with a message, “GRATTIS! (Congratulation!)”.

One of the children even drew a mouse and wrote “Till Pelle. (To Pelle, which is the cat in the story of Pelle Svanslös.)”.

11

PROTOTYPING v3.0:

ITERATION 3

Prototype 3.0 is designed based on the insights from previous tests, we are aiming at developing a more independent system without too much intervention from us:

• The buttons are now made by physical plastic material instead of clay.• Also, the buttons have their own assigned LEDs to give a more meaningful feedback. (example: red LED will light when the red button is pressed)• Cables enable the wizard to receive the input of which button is pressed.

• Frames for iPads are developed so we can leave the iPads inside the houses and watched them from a distance.

( Due to time constraint of the project and iteration of technical improvement, the third evaluation has not been completed.)

CONCLUTION We have come a long way from our close-to-naive observation of children to literally sending letters around for them in the playground.

During the whole design process, the initial goal of supporting open-ended play remains. But it is hard to say that our goal was fulfilled with our current design in a limited time period and with limited group of participants.

However, based on our evaluation results and insights metioned previously, in general, we can come to the conclusion that by providing the postbox platform, we can expect children to play in their own ways to create their own meaningfulness of play.