Multisensory Games on Children's Empathetic Feelings and Cooperative Behavior: Developing a Kansei-Based Sensory Playground Design Workshop

Abstract

How, from childhood, can we start to develop a more empathetic and cooperative society? Based on the play value for children's social development, this research aims to back up the surge of `interactive playgrounds`, a proposal that combines the interactive attractiveness of modern multi-sensory technologies with traditional elements of playground environments. In order to understand their sensory effects, we propose a play and design team workshop with children, where we will observe if different stimulus during play activity can affect their empathetic considerations toward others and their practical collaborative behavior. On this paper, we focus on this workshop experiment plan, describing its goals, the intended tools for obtaining data with infant collaborators, and our expected results. From the results, we expect to develop guidelines for sensory stimulus usage on new interactive playground and play tools designs.