Playful design: Designing for ludic engagement
Often we design with a specific purpose in mind. A product is created for a determined audience to make an action easier. When you are designing for ludic engagement, the purpose does not matter. It is up to the user to determine what to do with the product. Sounds weird, does it?
People do not only pursue activities with intent. People do also engage in so-called ludic activities. Ludic activities are playful and stimulate the mind. Examples of everyday ludic activities are scrolling, playing word games, watching tv, or admiring the view. Such activities are not just a way to relax or waste time. Ludic activities can be a mechanism for developing new values and goals, learning new things, and achieving new understandings.
How to Design Ludic?
There are 3 things to keep in mind while designing for ludic engagement:
- ludic design promotes curiosity, exploration and reflection,
- ludic design de-emphasises the pursuit of external goals, and
- ludic design maintains openness and ambiguity.
Thus, ludic design should not be designed with a specific goal in mind, but instead offer a range of possibilities. The users should be able to explore and discover new actions and meanings.
Example 1: The Drift Table
To visualise the options of ludic design, I would like to refer to the Drift Table. The Drift Table is part of a case study of designing for ludic activities at home. The Drift Table is a coffee table with a viewport. Through this viewport you could see a video, giving you the impression that you are drifting over a landscape. By putting objects on different parts of the table you could then shift the view to a different place. If you placed an object, such as a mug, on the right upper corner of the table, the view displayed would shift to the right until the object was removed.
This activity seems rather trivial, however, research suggests that this product was quite enjoyable. Several people who have used the Drift Table engaged with the viewport a lot, and were inventive in finding new activities to pursue. The Drift Table promoted social engagement. People watched through the viewport together and started conversations about the destinations shown. People interacted with the Drift Table as a kind of break from work or household activities. To speed up the shifting process, people even specifically selected heavy objects on the table. This indicates that it is not merely used as something extra, sometimes the Drift Table was the main activity.
Example 2: The Photostroller
Another example of ludic design I came across is the Photostroller. At first sight you might consider the Photostroller to simply be a tv. In this case the product is however used in a different way. The Photostroller consists of a screen, with a remote controller on top of legs with wheels. On the screen different photos are displayed for a specified amount of time. Based on these photos the users can then start a conversation, share their thoughts or simply enjoy the view.
The Photostroller was created as a resource for older care home residents. It came to the attention that the residents of care homes are often cared for physically, but besides the arranged daily activities the residents have limited options to perform. Therefore researchers and designers decided to create a product which would support the residents’ ludic experiences such as pleasure, engagement and sociability. The Photostroller in practice was used as background, inspiration or view. This shows that the Photostroller offers a wide spectrum of possibilities.
As can be concluded from the observations around the Drift Table and Photostroller, products designed for ludic engagement stimulate curiosity and memory. Users come up with activities themselves which makes them pursue these activities for pleasure instead of fulfilling an external goal.
Conclusion
I hope I gave you a few insights into the possibilities of ludic design. Design can be with inter, but it does not have to be. The (final) user can take the lead sometimes too and we, the designers and developers, can take a seat and enjoy the journey of discovery with them.
Keep in Mind
When designing for ludic engagement there are many things to keep in mind. You do not want you or your product to become biased or too directed. When your product is finished ask yourself these 3 questions:
- Does the product offer a range of possibilities for people to explore?
- Does the product present a new point of view to the user?
- Does the product avoid the appearance of a computer?
Does the product check all the marks?
References
Gaver, W., Boucher, A., Bowers, J., Blythe, M., Jarvis, N., Cameron, D., … & Wright, P. (2011, May). The photostroller: supporting diverse care home residents in engaging with the world. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1757–1766).
Gaver, W. W., Bowers, J., Boucher, A., Gellerson, H., Pennington, S., Schmidt, A., … & Walker, B. (2004, April). The drift table: designing for ludic engagement. In CHI’04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (pp. 885–900).
