Ec(h)o: Situated play in a tangible and audio museum guide

In this paper we discuss an adaptive museum guide prototype in which playfulness is a key design goal for the interaction experience. The interface for our prototype is a combined tangible user interface and audio display. We discuss how we determined the specific requirements for play through an ethnographic study and analysis based on ecological concepts of Bell and Nardi & O’Day. We found that we could consider play in two main forms in regard to the interface: content and physical play. We also found that play is highly contextual. Designers need to consider the situated nature of play for two reasons: 1) to best serve the overall design purpose; 2) in order to understand the nature and degree of play required. We augmented traditional user experience evaluation methods of questionnaires and interviews with observational analysis based on Djajadiningrat’s descriptions of aesthetic interaction.