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Games 4 Health

What motivates people in their 20s to improve their amount of physical activity in a Dutch urban environment?

Team

Rick Borgeld

Interaction Designer / Researcher


Paula Barreto

Marketeer/ researcher


Karen de Graaf

Researcher


Suzanne Tromp

Researcher


Commissioner:

Description

Kick-off week

This week we started with the Kick-Off at MediaLAB. We got to know our teammates, colleagues and all the projects. Our project will be Games 4 Health for the next five months and we are really excited to make it happen.

Our first assignment was to think about a Userscene. The ‘Userscene’ portrays some specific user moments of a target audience. So we came up with three different Userscenes. The first user is the person that is already healthy but wants to learn more about it and get healthier. The second one wants to be healthy but puts other priorities first, or is just waiting for someone to take him/her out. The last person doesn’t really think about getting healthy, and won’t really think it is necessary to work out or eat better.

For our video we chose to portray the second user, because we think this is the person who is more open to options. These users are thinking about getting healthy, but maybe they just don’t know where to start or they need someone to trigger them. Also, we think that the biggest problem is for people to get out of their houses and really do it, not just think about it. In the video you can see someone who is arriving at home from work and all his options are open. Will he stay with his roommate and play some games or will he go with run with the girl and have some drinks? Our user is facing a dilemma that a lot of people face everyday. Our job eventually is to create something that will stimulate the user to do physical activities, e.g. dance classes, because it’s fun and healthy. So the main question is: “Should I stay or should I go?”.

At Monday we met our partner. The NISB is the National Institute for Sports and Physical Activities. We had a lot of things and ideas to talk about, and we are very happy that the NISB is open for all kinds of outcomes, not just one technology. Later in the week we had a very inspiring Makey Makey workshop where we built our own interactive game like a big Tetris and a Dance Dance Revolution.

We are looking forward to creating the research question in the following days and presenting it to our partner.

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