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In this chapter, the authors elaborate on serious games and playful interactionsin modern scientific practices, and on the way they can engendermutual scientific growth. They use a research-through-design approach, inwhich three possible scenarios and prototypes are studied to envisage thenew role of the public library in practicing science in a changing society.Their conclusion is that the public library of the future should employcitizen science projects that are fun, accessible, malleable, and participatory,so that its new role can focus on offering meaningful informationat the right time in the right place, contextualizing information usingplayful solutions, bringing together communities to share information,and enabling new scientific practices in unexplored fields.
Playful Mapping is the result of many years of joint enterprise in which we, as authors, devel-oped a close intellectual collaboration. As a book, it emerged towards the end of the ERC project Charting the Digital that ran from 2011-2016, and during a still-ongoing Erasmus+ project; Go Go Gozo. Over this five year period, members of the Playful Mapping Collective got to know each other as colleagues and friends, participating regularly in diverse academic and social activities, such as conference panels and workshops.1 The authorship of this book therefore reflects an interesting collaborative experiment, enrolling researchers who have been working together in an active way over the past half-decade. This preface explains the genealogy of the emerging and open collaboration through which we developed ideas
Young people spend a large part of their day sedentary, both at school and at home. The aim of the PlayFit project is to persuade teenagers to lead a more active lifestyle by using digital as well as non-digital games and play. In this position paper, we describe in detail the three key principles of our vision concerning the design of game-based interventions for stimulating physical activity: playful persuasion, ambient action and play profiles. In our vision teenagers take part in playful activities and games throughout the day. In these activities, casual action is inherent to the fun experience, thus reducing teenagers' sedentary behavior. Relevant information about their activities and preferences is stored in a personal play profile, which affects the games they play and through which they can communicate to their peers. We illustrate this vision by means of several innovative game concepts.
A world where technology is ubiquitous and embedded in our daily lives is becoming increasingly likely. To prepare our students to live and work in such a future, we propose to turn Saxion’s Epy-Drost building into a living lab environment. This will entail setting up and drafting the proper infrastructure and agreements to collect people’s location and building data (e.g. temperature, humidity) in Epy-Drost, and making the data appropriately available to student and research projects within Saxion. With regards to this project’s effect on education, we envision the proposal of several derived student projects which will provide students the opportunity to work with huge amounts of data and state-of-the-art natural interaction interfaces. Through these projects, students will acquire skills and knowledge that are necessary in the current and future labor-market, as well as get experience in working with topics of great importance now and in the near future. This is not only aligned with the Creative Media and Game Technologies (CMGT) study program’s new vision and focus on interactive technology, but also with many other education programs within Saxion. In terms of research, the candidate Postdoc will study if and how the data, together with the building’s infrastructure, can be leveraged to promote healthy behavior through playful strategies. In other words, whether we can persuade people in the building to be more physically active and engage more in social interactions through data-based gamification and building actuation. This fits very well with the Ambient Intelligence (AmI) research group’s agenda in Augmented Interaction, and CMGT’s User Experience line. Overall, this project will help spark and solidify lasting collaboration links between AmI and CMGT, give body to AmI’s new Augmented Interaction line, and increase Saxion’s level of education through the dissemination of knowledge between researchers, teachers and students.
Every organisation needs to have organised Company Emergency Response (CER) staff. The training of CER must combine knowledge acquisition with knowledge application in performing physical procedures and demonstrating skills. However, current training does not secure well-prepared CER-staff in the long term. Playful learning is that a more engaging type of training can be created which combines knowledge with skills training. But while social interactions can strongly and positively impact learning as well as motivation, this is not easily facilitated within digital learning environments Two questions are particularly important for playful learning designers: • How can playful learning make use of the combination of digital and non-digital working mechanisms to foster learning and motivation? • How can trainees learn and play together if they are not always present at the same time in within the same learning environment? The saying at IJsfontein is that individually you can progress, but only together you can persevere. The aim of this collaboration with Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen is to provide playful learning designers with concrete and reusable design guidelines for leveraging social processes in playful learning across the digital/non-digital boundary. As such, we seek to contribute to the practically-oriented design knowledge available to the creative industry through design research that is grounded in practice. This type of design knowledge can only be fully developed when evaluated across different contexts of application. Therefore, we will form a consortium of partners from the creative industry to write a joint follow-up funding application
Every organisation needs to have organised Company Emergency Response (CER) staff. The training of CER must combine knowledge acquisition with knowledge application in performing physical procedures and demonstrating skills. However, current training does not secure well-prepared CER-staff in the long term.Playful learning is that a more engaging type of training can be created which combines knowledge with skills training. But while social interactions can strongly and positively impact learning as well as motivation, this is not easily facilitated within digital learning environmentsTwo questions are particularly important for playful learning designers:• How can playful learning make use of the combination of digital and non-digital working mechanisms to foster learning and motivation?• How can trainees learn and play together if they are not always present at the same time in within the same learning environment?The saying at IJsfontein is that individually you can progress, but only together you can persevere. The aim of this collaboration with Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen is to provide playful learning designers with concrete and reusable design guidelines for leveraging social processes in playful learning across the digital/non-digital boundary. As such, we seek to contribute to the practically-oriented design knowledge available to the creative industry through design research that is grounded in practice.This type of design knowledge can only be fully developed when evaluated across different contexts of application. Therefore, we will form a consortium of partners from the creative industry to write a joint follow-up funding application