playing hard- to -forget: creativity in game design for person- centred dementia care

© MIRROR Project - Co-Funded by EU IST FP7 – www.mirror-project.eu

Playing Hard-to-Forget:Creativity in Game Design for Person-Centred Dementia Care

Anja Sisarica, Neil Maiden, Julienne MeyerICLCity 2012, London

© MIRROR Project - Co-Funded by EU IST FP7 – www.mirror-project.eu

Creativity and play in problem solving

▪ Creative solutions are not accomplished by intellect alone, but by the play instinct. – C. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 1933

▪ Let my playing be my learning, and my learning be my playing. – J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 1938

© MIRROR Project - Co-Funded by EU IST FP7 – www.mirror-project.eu

Application in dementia care

▪ Even with impaired memory, every person is unique – changing hearts and minds of carers results in truly person-centred care

▪ Maintaining identity, sharing decision-making, creating community, promoting positive culture (source: My Home Life)

© MIRROR Project - Co-Funded by EU IST FP7 – www.mirror-project.eu

Creativity

Dementia care

Serious games

Ima @ MIRROR

Me

City @ MIRROR

RNHA, MHL

© MIRROR Project - Co-Funded by EU IST FP7 – www.mirror-project.eu

Game contents

Game environment

Game rules & borders

Implicit creativity support

User behaviour, User

experience, User judgement, Game feedback,

Learning, Explicit

creativity support

Learning outcomes

Creative outcomes

How do variations of creativity support and game design influence players’ learning and creative problem solving outcomes?

© MIRROR Project - Co-Funded by EU IST FP7 – www.mirror-project.eu

Playing hard-to-forget

▪ Uncovering reasons that lie behind behaviours or emotions

▪ Implicit creativity support: analogy (Other Worlds) when being a detective in a game

▪ Explicit creativity support: combinational creativity techniques offered when managing the clues

▪ Boardgame vs. Video game

© MIRROR Project - Co-Funded by EU IST FP7 – www.mirror-project.eu

© MIRROR Project - Co-Funded by EU IST FP7 – www.mirror-project.eu

Goals for the future work

▪ Define the relationship between creativity and games for motivated learning in terms of reflective problem solving, by proposing a domain-independent descriptive model;

▪ Iteratively inform design of the model and verify its mechanisms by designing and evaluating prototypes in dementia care domain, in a series of empirical studies.

© MIRROR Project - Co-Funded by EU IST FP7 – www.mirror-project.eu

Creative mind plays with the objects it loves. – K. Robinson, Out of Our Minds, 2001

Want to get in touch?anja.sisarica.1@city.ac.uk@anjasisarica