This qualitative interview study explores the practices of adult female gamers who play the videogame The Sims, focusing on the motivations they have for playing and how playing a video game might influence their digital competence. We address the wider context of leisure and the household, investigating to what extent playing videogames has become domesticated in the daily life of the family. It is found that female gamers play The Sims because they enjoy the particular way it allows them to take control, fantasize, and be challenged. For some, it is clear that playing this video game has increased their digital skills. We notice that there is an interesting similarity between the pleasures of playing this videogame and more traditional ways of female media engagement such as reading women’s magazines or romance novels and watching soap operas. Our gamers similarly enjoy The Sims as leisurely moments for themselves, clearly and intentionally separated from domestic and family duties. We conclude that playing a videogame can be seen as a highly modern and liberating practice, as both playing in general and using ICT have traditionally not been a part of the female leisure domain.
This work explores the potential of doing collaborative data physicalization for discussing (un)sustainable practices. For this purpose, it draws on experiences from several data physicalization workshops during the period of 2018-2022, conducted in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, which were available to mostly inexpert groups of people, including almost a hundred primary school students. This paper particularly focuses on a recent held dataphys workshop with over 20 adult participants, such as including international students and climate activists. Based on learner reports (self-assessment questionnaires) (N=20), and observations, it was found that the process of making data physicalizations in workshop and educational settings can be beneficial for engaging in collaborative creative and critical discussion of (un)sustainable practices. Particularly, the participants positively indicated to have learned from the dataphys workshop on a 5-point Likert scale and agreed that it enabled (1) critical thinking, (2) data understanding, (3) creativity, (4) collaboration, and (5) awareness of (un)sustainable practices. This paper presents the workshop format, including ingredients such as live cartoon capturing, and challenges in realizing such value in the context of sustainability, such as including a wider public, the conscious use of data and materials, and discussable effective outcomes.
This paper describes a participatory design-oriented study of an ambient assisted living system for monitoring the daily activities of elderly residents. The work presented addresses these questions 1) What daily activities the elderly participants like to be monitored, 2) With whom they would want to share this monitored data and 3) How a monitoring system for the elderly should be designed. For this purpose, this paper discusses the study results and participatory design techniques used to exemplify and understand desired ambient-assisted living scenarios and information sharing needs. Particularly, an interactive dollhouse is presented as a method for including the elderly in the design and requirements gathering process for residential monitoring. The study results indicate the importance of exemplifying ambient-assisted living scenarios to involve the elderly and so to increase acceptance and utility of such systems. The preliminary studies presented show that the participants were willing to have most of their daily activities monitored. However, they mostly wanted to keep control over their own data and share this information with medical specialists and particularly not with their fellow elderly neighbours.
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