if people want to be "anywhere else but here" in relation to their hospitalisation then where is the "anywhere else"?

Reading about 'cultural probes' with kids- Applying probes – from inspirational notes to collaborative insights- TUULI MATTELMAAKI (2005)
This serves to help me developing a 'Cultural Probe' for use with children ,families etc (this is after Gavers et al 1999) .
 they "purposefully invite or provoke users to reflect on and verbalize their experiences, feelings and attitudes, and to visualize their actions and contexts"  Mattelmaånki (2005)  

I've begun developing a series of about 6 cards that can be used as provocations ( A bit like the IDEO cards) and hope to have them roughed out this week
these will be included alondg with a booklet that has a series of visual and written provocations
an 'interactive kit' including conductive plasticine,leds and batteries that will enable people ( I hope) to make a 3d version of an environment,
collage materials

what I want to find out is if as the literature suggests that people want to be "anywhere else but here" in relation to their hospital stay then where is the "anywhere else" ?

flipping the question, again..

How can a responsive, playfully created environment affect healthcare outcomes for children and their families?

Sometimes my methodology seems to creep into the question..Is this a good thing? or is this an aspect of the research approach rather than the research itself?
Need to ensure that what I'm actually interested in is articulated in the question or else I veer off course like an Italian cruise liner..

so in the above thought the 'playfully created' aspect is a method however the use of play is also an important aspect of the overall concept..as is participative research which in the above I haven't mentioned..
hmmmm.


Reading Jayne Wallace's Thesis:Emotionally charged: A practice centered enquiry of digital jewellery and personal emotional significance.(2007)
really hunting out how a research question is framed. This work seems far more in depth than the past two- especially how the positioning of the research has occurred. Wallace seems to embed the 'lit' research -or the critical appraisal into other practice- into her narrative.

Enchantment & More thoughts on my research question

. More on enchantment from Golan Levin:
“...my objective was to make something that would ideally captivate the users’ attention enough to
precipitate what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a ‘state of flow’…where one gets consumed by the
medium and becomes sort of one with it…that it becomes an extension of the self. ” (Levin, 2003)


Levin, G (2003) presentation at user_mode = emotion + intuition in art + design Tate
Modern 2002 http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/archive/user_mode/#golan

 and now to that research question..

Can enchantment derived from immersive, performative and playful environments affect children’s healthcare outcomes?

-Can a  responsive environment  use enchantment to transform children's experience of healthcare? 

 -Could responsive environments  affect people’s experiences within the healthcare context ?

 -Is a responsive environment  more than a social backdrop; could it affect the social interactions taking place within it? 

-Does a responsive environment encourage social interaction with each other? Does this create a transformative event?

considering tools for participative,playful concept generation`

Finished reading Brigid `Costello's Thesis.
further readings too..
especially useful to inform  design of 'cultural probe' to use in  participative, playful concept generation..

Isbister, K., Hook, K., Sharp, M. & Laaksolahti, J. 2006, ‘The Sensual Evaluation
Instrument: Developing an Affective Evaluation Tool’, Proceedings of
Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2006, Montreal, Canada,
ACM, pp. 1163–1172.

 Hutt's piece in Sutton Smith's book looks well worth a closer look.


Hutt, C. 1985, ‘Exploration and Play in Children’, in Child‘s Play, B. Sutton-Smith & R.
E. Herron (eds.), Robert E. Krieger Publishing, Florida, pp. 231–250.


The ''embodiment' of experience and the 'sensual'  through sound (sonics?) seem to contribute to the sense of transportation and transformative event..look at

Ihde, D. 2007, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, 2nd edn., State University
of New York Press, Albany, NY.

Overall Costello had an interesting frame work and some valuable lessons both in terms of structure and also in considering how to structure a practice led approach.

designing!

working on content + images+ categories for cards for 'cultural probe' kit for kids in hospital.
based on the provocation that in hospital people would "rather be anywhere but here"(VitalArts 2010).
so where is here if you can't move from where you are?
Is it an imaginary space?
Is it a physical change in the environment that is analogous to where you'd like to be?
Is it connected to your support network?-Family , Friends? can they see it, touch it and respond to it also?
 Does this place 'transport' you, is it enchanting?
Does it smell of hot toast?

Vitalarts, (2010).  from http://www.vitalarts.org.uk/bartsand-the-london-breast-care-centre-west-wing

a little Massumi

When I think of my body, and ask what it does to earn that name, two things stand
out. It moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time. It moves as it feels, and it
feels itself moving. Can we think a body without this; an intrinsic connection between
movement and sensation, whereby each immediately summons the other?

Brian Massumi. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University
Press, 2002. On line http://www.brianmassumi.com/textes/Introduction

Ludic Automatons by Mary Thompson

Little creatures doing their ludic jive. http://www.marythompson.co.uk/