Designing Digital Climbing Experiences through Understanding Rock Climbing Motivation

Interactive systems have been used successfully in sports to assist people in achieving their performance goals, however, we believe that some aspects are often overlooked. In this paper we focus on rock climbing and we examine existing work on climbing from varying fields, including sports science, psychology, and climbing literary works, in order to identify recurring motivational themes. In total we identify and describe five key themes from these works: “risk as a measure of progress”, “maintaining challenge”, “social engagement”, “experiencing beauty and nature”, and “documenting and reliving the experience”. We then examine how existing digital climbing experiences address these themes and suggest ways in which these interactive climbing designs could embrace the themes they do not yet address. We believe this work will be important not only when designing digital climbing experiences, but also digital experiences for other extreme sports.