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L. Scheepmaker, Ch. Frauenberger, K. Spiel:
"The Things We Play with - Roles of Technology in Social Play";
Talk: CHI Play '18, Melbourne, Australien; 2018-10-28 - 2018-10-31; in: "CHI PLAY '18: Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play", ACM (ed.); ACM, New York, NY, USA (2018), ISBN: 978-1-4503-5624-4; 451 - 462.

Social play, and the role of technology in it, is a topic of central concern to the CHI PLAY and HCI community. In this paper we provide an overview of philosophical, psychological and sociological concepts and theories of social play and use these as a lens to conduct a literature review of research on interactive technologies in play contexts. Our chosen scope includes technologies which afford free play in groups of children within the same physical space. We identify how assumptions and stances about play influence which kind of technologies are designed, which social elements are supported and how success is defined and assessed. Finally, we propose a novel perspective on designing playthings which conceptualises them as boundary objects. We argue that such a perspective is particularly valuable when designing for heterogeneous groups of children and, thus, also has the potential to make a contribution towards designing effective roles of technologies for social inclusion.

Boundary Objects; Free Play; Interactive Technologies; Literature Review; Smart Objects; Playthings; Social Play; Open-ended Play

http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3242671.3242695

Project Head Christopher Frauenberger:
Social Play Technologies