Together with Menno Deen, Mark van Kuijk and Janienke Sturm, I organised our 2nd Games [4 Health] Jam. A weekend in which 65 students and alumni from the Netherlands and abroad engaged in a game design competition, focused on developing games that motivate teenagers to be physically active.
A great success, and very enjoyable! More details can be found at gamesjam.nl

PlayFit Explorations

In the PlayFit project, which is closely connected to my PhD project, we try to motivate teenagers to become casually active through playful interaction. In other words, we design enjoyable installations in and around the school, that invite teenagers to start playing - and while playing, they inherently have to use their body. We call this playful persuasion.
Challenges for us are how to invite and elicit teenagers to start playing in an active way, and how to prolong the invitation and enjoyment for subsequent encounters.

The pictures show some examples of my explorations:

• the Magic Mirror, a sort of funhouse mirror that distorts the mirror image. This installation was placed in a high school, and evaluated - teenagers explored and used it in various active and enjoyable ways.
• Whisper Balls, small balls that can be used to record and play voice messages.

Together with Tilde Bekker and Ben Schouten, I published a long paper for the BHCI 2011 conference, about my curious-action project.
After presenting it at the conference in Newcastle, our publication was rewarded with the Best Long Paper Award!

Downloads:

1. Tieben, Bekker and Schouten (2011). Curiosity and Interaction: making people curious through interactive systems. Proceedings of BHCI 2011.
2. Interfaces – Magazine of BCS Interaction Group – autumn 2011 issue

Publication at Chi-Sparks conference

Together with Tilde Bekker, Janienke Sturm and Ben Schouten, I published and presented a long paper at the Chi-Sparks conference in the Netherlands. The article, named ‘Eliciting casual activity through playful exploration, communication, personalisation and expression’, covered findings and insights from our PlayFit project and the first year of my PhD.

Downloads:

1. Tieben, R., Bekker, M.M., Sturm, J. and Schouten, B.A.M. (2011). Eliciting casual activity through playful exploration, communication, personalisation and expression. In: Proceedings of CHI-Sparks 2011.
2. Recording of my talk on Vimeo

Together with Ben Schouten, Antoine van de Ven and David Schouten, I published a book chapter about Human Behavior Analysis in Ambient Gaming & Playful Interaction. This chapter gives an overview of the history of gaming, and the changes through time for input and output. It will be published in ‘Computer Analysis of Human Behavior’, edited by A.A. Salah and T. Gevers.

Downloads:

1. Schouten, Tieben, van de Ven and Schouten (2011). HBA in Ambient Gaming and Playful Interaction. In: Computer Analysis of Human Behavior, 2011.