Rob Tieben @ Work

Press campaign about Playful Interactions

Recently, I’ve been featured in the TU/e press campaign, about playful persuasion, playfit, and my vision. Photos, a commercial on national television, and a 1-minute video about my work. Clearly a commercial, but still - a nice overview of my work!

More information:Commercial on Dutch television | YouTube
One minute interview/report | YouTube

Press campaign about Playful Interactions

Recently, I’ve been featured in the TU/e press campaign, about playful persuasion, playfit, and my vision. Photos, a commercial on national television, and a 1-minute video about my work. Clearly a commercial, but still - a nice overview of my work!

More information:

  1. Commercial on Dutch television | YouTube
  2. One minute interview/report | YouTube

Games [4Health] Jam 2012: Public Play

Together with Menno Deen, Janienke Sturm and Luuk Waarbroek, I organized the 2nd Games [4Health] Jam; this year’s theme was ‘public play’, and once again the 70 students created working games that motivate people to play in an active way - within 50 hours!

The results have been presented and exhibited at the Dutch Design Week Stadhuis exhibition, the Games for Health Europe conference, and at the Games in the City conference.

More information:

  1. Video overview of the presentations: vimeo
  2. Video impression of the gamejam: vimeo
  3. Game jam website & overview results: url

Course: games in the swimming pool

35 students from 3 education programs, 40 teenagers, a swimming pool, and 7 interactive games in the water: the course swimgames.nl was a great success!
In this course, developed and lectured by Menno Deen and myself, our students designed and developed interactive games in the swimming pool. Cameras, RFID readers, buttons: it was all added to the Tongelreep swimming pool, and evaluated right away by eager teenagers.

Hart van Nederland, a national news agency, also covered us in a news feature.

More information can be found at Swimgames.nl

More information:

  1. Video overview of ‘in-progress’ concepts: Vimeo
  2. Video overview of final concepts: Vimeo
  3. Hart van Nederland news item: HvN
  4. Course website & overview results: url

PlayFit Student Explorations

In the PlayFit project, I am - and have been - coaching several students projects at ID TU/e and Fontys ICT GD&T. In these projects, students design and develop prototypes to motivate teenagers to be physically active, based on the principles from the PlayFit project and my design-research.


The pictures show some examples of student’s explorations:

  • the LightScribe app, a mobile app that allows light scribing - painting with light. By Hanna Zoon.
  • dotMirror, an interactive mirror that visualizes your silhouette in a enhancing way. By Troy Reugebrink.
  • Bomb It, an installation in the swimming pool that records user’s jumps and bombs, and displays them on a large screen. By vd Bogaard, Donkers, Jacobs, Leenders, Verhoeven and v Woelderen.
  • Tea Seat, connected seats that allow playful sitting: movements on one seat, such as tilting, are translated to the other seat. By Al Abdeli, Janssen, Kersteman and Scheffer.

Second price Health 2.0 Challenge

Together with Menno Deen and Ton Sleegers, I won the 2nd price in the Health 2.0 Challenge. We won this price of 2000 euro with our game-concept RopeJump.
RopeJump is a multiplayer game in the swimming pool, where players take turns to dive to the bottom of the pool, and try to hit the underwater button at the exact right moment. If they succeed, and their avatar jumps over the rope, the next player has to dive down. A social (co-op) game of swimming, fun, holding your breath, and discussing tactics and strategies to win from other teams!