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

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.

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!

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.