Buruk, O. ‘Oz’, Matjeka, L.P. and Mueller, F. ‘Floyd’, in press. Designing Playful Bodily Extensions, In the Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, Hamburg, Germany
Proud to announce that our paper about best practices for designing bodily extensions has been accepted for CHI2023.
Based on five in-depth interviews and workshops with the designers of Monarch, the Interactive Cosplay Tail, Wigglears and Arm-a-Dine, the paper extracts and describes a set of 5 design guidelines for designing playful bodily extension.
While much research has been done about bodily extensions as bodily functionalities such as prostheses, we were in knowing about how bodily extensions can be playful – and not just for utility purposes. Concrete.y, we were interested in mapping best practices for designing playful bodily extensions – what makes them playful, how are they playful and how to accommodate bodily play in such designs.
The paper describes the process and results. As soon as it is published, I will link to it from here.
Abstract
ABSTRACT
Interactive technologies offer novel opportunities for physically extending our bodies, with the most prominent examples being prosthetics along with systems emerging from the wearables community. However, most such systems appear to focus on instrumental benefits, missing out on the opportunity to use bodily extensions for play and its associated benefits (including a lower adoption barrier and the potential to reveal a broader understanding of such technologies). To begin understanding the design of playful bodily extensions, we interviewed five designers of bodily extensions that have been showcased in prestigious academic venues or turned into commercial products. Here we present themes and actionable advice from these interviews for the design of playful bodily extensions through a thematic analysis. Our work aims to support the design of future playful bodily extensions while promoting the experiential qualities of bodily extension design, with the ultimate goal of bringing more playful experiences to people’s lives.
