Like interactive toys, the idea of an interactive playground is not limited to traditional buildings and could be either a small prop, which the user can carry with them, or a digital application that can integrate with the existing playground environment. Without interactions the entire experience is boring and arguably ineffective. Contact our London head office or media team here. This indicated that the physical dancing game was a successful motivator for bonding participants. With the body being the main channel for sensory interactions, Malinverni and Burguès [1] linked the usage of the full body during games to children’s higher cooperative behavior. Participants who played the full body game version achieved higher scores in the game, displayed better teamwork, and reported better impressions of their group members after the activity. Interaction Design is designing interaction between users and products. Reconsiderations regarding the time length and the complexity of the game task were made to ensure children would be in good conditions for performing the following design task. Interaction Design is abbreviated as IxD is a branch of user experience design. Through gamification, the application of game elements to other activities, educators can utilize the self-motivational aspects of games to encourage children’s positive social behavior. A promising subcategory of the interactive toys is the interactive playgrounds. Furthermore, the indications are about how the group sessions were administered and do not necessarily point out a certain toy or game task as more suitable to promote cooperation. Through observation, it was noted that, depending on the age, this leadership position led to authoritarian behavior in the design task, with the leader not giving an equal voice for all group members. Login to your personal dashboard for more detailed statistics on your publications. As an example, Suzuki et al. However, technology cannot be stopped and children’s interest to interact with technology should not be discouraged, but rather utilized to support their development. Considering social studies findings, we defined the following elements as possible contributors to children’s social development, which should be aimed by interactive games: Existence of rules and attribution of specific roles, Restriction of individual power and resources, Challenging but achievable difficulty curve, Excitement and novelty levels of game experience, Focus on cooperativity rather than competitivity. The main considerations which led to this assumption were the game simplicity and the displayed engagement during game sessions. In the design for interaction principle, play artifacts assume a support role, mediating or facilitating social relationships between children and peers or caregivers. It can even be an entire installation, with different products exchanging information on a network-connected server [8]. The Differences Between Visual and Interaction Design So, now it is known that interaction design, for the most part, is related to how a user is going to interact with a system … This can be observed in Figure 4 below. However, since the 1990s, the rise of electronic technology together with the digital video game industry has reconfigured the general ideas of what a toy could be. Generally UX is taken to be an umbrella term. Through this chapter, existing works will be utilized to exemplify these concepts illustrating differences and connection points in-between. For example, children could connect a switch to activate an electronic light, sound, or motor. found that haptic inputs increased the immersion children had when reading and listening stories [13]. With traditional playground environments serving as examples, a well-established toy or game that can promote different interactions among children is more likely to have a longer life-spam and more thoroughly aid on their personal growth. Results indicated that participants in both game groups displayed higher trust in their group members and were more willing to share their reward than participants who did not play the game. Considering that, we believe that giving the choice to the players to select between a more relaxed or energetic session could also be positive for their engagement. Playing is a self-motivating and pleasurable activity, and through gamification (the application of game elements), different tasks can become more engaging. A toy is a dedicate artifact for the act of playing. It can, for instance, identify children’s play pattern through an artificial intelligence and use this information to provide direct motivating feedback such as increasing or decreasing the difficulty of game, or changing the balance of sensory stimuli such as the intensity of lights and sounds. John Kolko, Author of Thoughts on Interaction Design, gives the following definition to interaction design: “Interaction Design is the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, system, or service. Interaction scheme: the spheres influence each other, and each interaction generates different outcomes. This program is offered as a two and half years Master of Design program in interaction design. The subsequent group task of this study was a co-design challenge where had to design a new interactive toy together. These observations suggest that, among two physical game sessions, having an easier difficulty entry could be safer for more participants to join and engage with the group game task. However, a different observation in the test runs of the dance game sessions was that participant who could not select which song to play displayed less engagement with the task. Modern day technology possesses a wide range of smart detectors and sensory feedback devices that can still be better explored in new toy designs. [17] developed a game to observe its impact on children’s sociability. Rather than analyzing how things are, interaction design synthesizes and imagines things as they could be. Learnability. By looking into the fundamental aspects of design and interaction, we will discuss how play can promote positive interactions and how interactive technology can contribute to those. Moreover, the interaction with different technologies also affects children’s social play interactions, which should be considered in the design of toy. Still according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary [15], the word “interaction” can mean: (1) the act of talking or doing things with other people; (2) the action or influence of things on one another, or; (3) mutual or reciprocal action or influence. The necessary leadership for completing a game challenge did not necessarily transpose into the necessary leadership skills for dialoguing in a group design task. The second point is that smart toys are expanded to new media and devices such as tablets, augmented-reality and virtual reality glasses, breaking the division between digital and analogic experiences. Although no differences were observed on cooperation among group conditions, results indicated that participants who played the group game reported higher confidence with their designs and were significantly more likely to submit them to the competition. The constant feedback generated by the artifact in the response of children’s inputs is what would define its interactivity and where technology is more deeply inserted. An interaction designer delivers mockups, blueprints and prototypes. Considering children’s sociability, a parallel field called “social game studies” seek to understand how different game elements can influence children’s social development [19]. However, differences between game conditions were not found at significant level. About 36 participants aged 6–14 y/o joined this study. HeadquartersIntechOpen Limited5 Princes Gate Court,London, SW7 2QJ,UNITED KINGDOM. As PhD students, we found it difficult to access the research we needed, so we decided to create a new Open Access publisher that levels the playing field for scientists across the world. More information about the procedures and evaluations can be found in [24, 25]. Game session 2 observed group game effects on children’s task engagement, while game session 3 focused on children’s cooperative behavior. And UX designer salaries are soaring—upwards of $110K in cities like San Francisco and New York. The games were mediated in different moments by technological and traditional toys, but technology integration did not indicate to be the main influencing factor of children’s group interactions. How? It was originally coined to help people think more holistically than just “pixels on a screen” - UI. Interaction design associated more with the way a user utilizes or interacts with a product and also the method of how to design the process of interaction that between a user and a product. We must also point that, if children are going to perform a group task after playing a game, they would need to be equally engaging. These new toys are named “Interactive” or “smart” toys [10]. We are IntechOpen, the world's leading publisher of Open Access books. This context took opportunity of an existing children’s design competition of the Interaction Design with Children 2018 (IDC2018) conference [27]. They have to understand the target users and their expectations, also the interaction behaviors between the users and product. These will be followed by a series of studies of children’s social interactions when under the influence of different game conditions. Although physically demanding, dancing is a simple group activity which does not require children to overthink situations and which can help with their movement synchronization. Regarding the complexity and time, another observation is that the interactive blocks were of high complexity and required children’s extended attention. With studies having yet to find the extension of these effects, this remains as an important step to responsibly design new interactive play tools. In other words, the toy is interactive. Game simplicity, flexibility, and high engagement rate indicated to be the main contributive aspects of games to children’s posterior impressions and behavior in the group tasks. Games should instead seek to give a positive sense of achievement for the participants. Game experiences can help children realize their individual limitations and perceive playing together as a more fun activity. To date our community has made over 100 million downloads. This might also have prejudiced their engagement. An interaction designer's mission is the same on every project: create an experience that users will love. Browse Instructional Design and Interactive content selected by the eLearning Learning community. Interactive design and interactive toys. How do children interact with each other and how can interactive technology contribute? The interaction design program at NID would focus on aspects of design and behaviour of various forms of digital products ranging from mobile, web based to dynamic ones in gaming, education, transportation, healthcare, banking, retail and other domains. I first learned about Information Architecture back in 2008. Nowadays, electronic games can be considered toys and the boundaries between the virtual and tangible elements are not so strict [4]. Playground environments provide an important role as “design for interactions,” fostering social relationships through play activities. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary [9], the word “interactive” can mean: (1) mutually or reciprocally active or (2) involving the actions or input of a user. Job opportunities for people with design skills are increasing like never before (an estimated 13% increase from 2010 to 2020). Another way of using technology to facilitate interactions would be by automatically altering the sensory stimuli or the difficulty level of a game according to the number of children or to their given feedback. Users interact with the toy and the given mechanical feedback perpetuates different interactions. The Ultimate goal of interaction design is to create products that allow users to achieve their objectives in the most efficient way. It is old in the sense of the progression of technology and old in the sense of the web. Three group conditions were established: (1) a relaxing dance group, where participants would dance easier choreography songs with less movement, (2) an energetic dance group, where they would dance more energetic songs with a more demanding choreography, and (3) group conversation condition, where children did not play any game. To assist in this distinction, interaction design can be thought of as: This context led to a series of new play tool proposal called “interactive” or “smart” toys. The set was composed of circuit blocks that could be connected to activate different responses. Open Access is an initiative that aims to make scientific research freely available to all. Licensee IntechOpen. games that produce more significant results by joining force with others, artifacts to facilitate communication between children, or. Results indicated no difference between participants who played the easy group challenge and participants who did not play the group game. Only then can we design the user interface for our app that invokes all these thoughts, actions and feelings. While one group played games with a competitive focus for a week, the other group played cooperative games instead. It is clear that IA will continue to rem… For example, the fast development of tablet computers has developed into one of the current most profitable play markets. The same concept can be applied with the definition of interactive toys. Disciplines such as social game studies consider the activity of play as an important way for children to understand their surroundings, communicate, and develop affection [1, 2]. Up until the 1980s, toys were mostly represented by a highly profitable plastic industry. Considering that, the following guidelines where defined for designing artifacts for interactions among children. In simple words, interaction types are the ways users interacts with the system, things we do in order for the system to understand us. Interactive playgrounds should: keep the game rules and mechanics simple. Here comes interaction design, quoting Bill Verplank, interaction design is design for human use. However, under the “design for interaction” principle, technology should not be the main attraction of a toy but should rather assume a supporting role for encouraging children’s social relationships. toys and games that can strengthen their affective bonds. For example, Zhao et al. provide different feedbacks to the users. A third game challenge was designed to specifically observe its effect on children’s group behavior. Participants had 10 minutes to perform individual sketches and 10 minutes to perform group discussion. When we consider the interactivity of games, it is important to allow some flexibility to attend to different children’s preferences. Under these guidelines, technology is not the main aspect of “interactive toys” and any toy or game that has been designed with social interaction in mind can be considered as “interactive” [17]. 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