Playscapes: A design perspective on young children's physical play

Abstract

In early childhood, children develop motor skills that form the basis of their future physical activities. This development can stagnate when children face long-term hospitalization due to injury or disease. Most interventions to facilitate their physical development are built on exercise and structured play, and have ignored the value of spontaneous and unstructured play. For this reason, we introduce 'Playscapes' as a design perspective on young children's physical play. Playscapes is inspired by outdoor play, and accounts for three qualities: bodily play, dispersed play and free play. These qualities can help interaction designers to generate designs that help children playfully develop physical competence. The design perspective is used for developing two design interventions specifically for children with cancer. To point out the merits of Playscapes, the design interventions are compared with two exercise-based interventions. Finally, challenges and future steps are discussed for further developing Playscapes.