Yellow is Mine!: Designing Interactive Playgrounds Based on Traditional Childrens Play - Entertaining the Whole World - page 65

5.3 Project Goals

The previous section shows that there has been extensive research on the development
and evaluation of interactive playgrounds. However, the design process for interactive
playgrounds is a topic that has received relatively little attention so far and has thus
remained rather ad-hoc.
Our vision of an ideal interactive playground features the best of two worlds: the
open-endedness, social interaction and physical exercise found in traditional outdoor
play, and the exciting and virtually limitless interaction possibilities provided in
modern computer games. It should actively stimulate the development of children's
physical, social and creative skills, without forcing game specific rules upon them
(i.e. emergent gaming).
Although goals like these have been addressed in previous work, a structured
method to proceed from these goals towards the design and implementation of an
interactive playground that fulfils them has been lacking so far. We aim to fill the gap
between these high-level goals and the very specific user-system interactions that
form an interactive playground. We believe that such a structured approach not only
helps to meet these goals, but also simplifies the design process.
The project focuses on children in the age group between 8 and 12 years old. These
children are able to perform advanced physical activities, define games rules and
socially interact with each other (Del Alamo 2004 , p. 226; Schenk-Danzinger 1977 ,
p. 251-252). Furthermore, they are capable of actively taking part in evaluations
involving group discussions and interviews.

5.4 A Taxonomy for Playground Play

Our goal was to design an intelligent, interactive playground, based on elements of
traditional children's (outdoor) play . In order to design our interactive playground
using elements of traditional children's play, we need a taxonomy to describe these
elements in a structured way. For this, we draw from related work in interaction
design, we introduce the idea of Gamespace in playgrounds, and finally elaborate
our taxonomy based on an analysis of many types of traditional playground play.

5.4.1 Play, Games, and Playgrounds

Huizinga, in the topic Homo Ludens , argues that it is almost impossible to capture the
properties of play in a single definition. Because the act of play does not necessarily
have a goal and is by definition not bound to rules, almost any act could be considered
an act of play (Huizinga 1950 ). Games are a more formalized and strict form of play.
“ The game has a beginning, a middle, and a quantifiable outcome at the end. The
game takes place in a precisely defined physical and temporal space of play. Either