Stimulating physical and social play through open-ended play

In this paper, we describe our design research on tangible play objects that stimulate social and physical play. We illustrate our work by describing a design case about an open-ended play object for children called the ColorFlare. The ColorFlare is an object that detects the player’s movements and provides light feedback and that can communicate with other ColorFlares. A user test is described that examined how children use the ColorFlare to collaboratively create various (physical) games. We relate our research to definitions of embodied interaction: e.g. how do children allocate meaning to the interaction behaviour of the play objects and jointly create diverse games during the play sessions.