Situated Play Design: a Novel Approach to Designing Playful Technology

User involvement is well established in game and play design. But in a time when play design is becoming relevant in domains beyond pure entertainment, and play blends into everyday activity in diverse ways, we need to revisit old, and develop new, user involvement methods. Using a situated perspective and Research through Design, we presented Situated Play Design (SPD), a novel approach for the design of playful interventions aimed at open-ended, everyday activities that are non-entertainment based. Like user-centered game and play design methods, our contribution leverages user engagement; like Participatory Design methods, our method acknowledges the co-creating role of end users. SPD extends those approaches by focusing on uncovering existing manifestations of contextual playful engagement and using them as design material. Through two case studies, we illustrated our approach and the design value of using existing and emergent playful interactions of users in context as inspirations for future designs. This allowed us to provide actionable strategies to design for in-context playful engagement. This project was led by Ferran Altarriba Bertran and co-authored with Elena Márquez Segura, Jared Duval, and Katherine Isbister.