Going for the prize of most cryptic post title ever. Give you a clue, “EX” as in EXercise. If you are reading this blog, and looking for, or into, ways to make exercise a fun and engaging experience then you might just have done some UXD! Still confused? Well the inspiration for this post was a profile of a really cool sounding job – wait for it – a “User eXperience researcher/Designer”. At last there are people out there whose job it is to make technology fit round people and not the other away around!!!
So, if you are interested in or in the business of helping people have a really great experience when they are physically active, then whether you realized it or not, looks like you too have been doing some EX-UX Design. Which now leads me nicely onto ExerGaming. It got me thinking as to whether or not “good” ExerGames are EX-UXD’d? Is ExerGaming about designing exercise to fit around people rather than try to get people to do things that don’t appeal to them and are just not a good experience.
No, this post is not about the wish for a bigger, brighter, sharper flat screen TV. Nor is it about longing for a mobile phone that is yet to come, one that my current model is not worthy to call. Rather it is about a manifestation of what I consider to be the reality of 21st century living where many people exist both in the physical world and in one or more digital worlds.
Last night I had an experience of a “digital dream” in which I was a fugitive being pursued through a digital landscape. The best way I can describe it is something like Logan’s Run meets Second Life. I managed to dodge my pursuers across a bizarre digital landscape with several narrow escapes. Finally I made a bid for freedom by clambering aboard the last train to leave the digital world. I was awoken from my slumber just as the train pulled into my stop. It was a great feeling to be back in the real world. But I wonder, what would have happened if I had missed my stop?
Whilst I am not going to attempt to attribute any meaning to the dream, I would consider to have significance as a sign of the blurring of the boundary between physical and digital worlds. Why does any of this matter? Well, if you are trying to understand human behavior and only pay attention to the influences present in the physical world and neglect to consider the influences that arise in digital worlds, then you are not going to get the complete picture.
Part of the Quest of writing this blog has involved me “getting in touch” with my creative side. I have ventured into a range of varied experiences with a variety of new forms of art, media and technology. Often these have been a catalyst for novel ideas for ways to tackle some of the social and health problems of society in the 21st century. If you were to ask me what my guiding design principle was it would be:
Make if Fun and Make it Easy
So I have to hand to these guys in managing to successfully make taking the stairs fun.
If you go down to the shopping mall today you might be in for a big surprise! How about a few steps of Machine Dance (Dance Dance Revolution) between purchases? Well coming to a shopping centre near you (in Scotland) is a roadshow for the latest health promotion campaign being run by the Scottish health promotion agency.
A sustainable business model for ExerGaming is a hot topic at the moment. It has been occupying my thoughts for some time and I had a particularly insightful conversation around this topic today. However, I must first point out in choosing a title for this post, it is not my intention to belittle or trivialize campaigns to combat poverty in the world which are just as much my problem as anybody else’s. Rather, it is the focus of this blog is on ExerGaming and seeking to maximize the potential health benefits. Second, the calculations that the title is based on a very rough and in order to maximize the impact, a dollar rather than a pound (sterling) was adopted as a currency that is easy to relate to.
Okay, first the competition. A round figure for a cost of a video game is $30 and on average will hold interest for 30 days. So you can have an engaging interactive experience for $1 per day.
In terms of promoting a physically active lifestyle, the current target is one hour per day, 7 days per week, 52 weeks per year. Do some rough calculations, it seems that a Dollar a Day for every man, women and child might just be enough to provide enough facilities and opportunities for the whole population to be physically active. A dollar a day doesn’t seem much and would be small price to pay in terms of the savings on future health care costs.
The problem comes when you start to multiply up the number. For a school say of 500 pupils, over a school year of 200 days that amounts to $100,000 per school. Now some of that money will already be invested in physical infrastructure and facilities, but where is the rest of the money going to come from? Our own pockets? One less soda?
Thursday evening is the local late night shopping night. After picking up a couple of small items it was time to head to the grocery supermarket. There was a particularly groovy compilation of music playing and my toes where soon tapping away as I weaved my trolley up and down the aisles. I was so inspired that I even engaged in some impromptu performance art as a swung my trolley round in graceful arcs and pulled 270 and 540 degree turns.
I began to tire and switched to playing “Guess the Trolley Owner”. In this game, whenever you spot trolley coming round a corner or one that has been temporarily abandoned, you a have a split second to guess the appearance of the owner. This is not as difficult as it may seem as the relative amounts and composition of “healthy” and “unhealthy” foodstuffs can be quite revealing. We are after all to a large extent what we eat.
At the checkout the music was interrupted by an advert for a new ExerGame that will give you a high quality work out and have you looking great in now time. Nothing wrong with that, but I couldn’t help but wondering if the problem was a little closer to home. What if the store turned shopping into an ExerGame by mixing up all the items so that you had to wander round the store and hunt them down? But maybe then by spending more time in the store, people would buy more stuff and negate the increased calorie burn. But hold on, don’t supermarkets do that anyway?
