Game probes: design space exploration in the area of multilingual family communication.

Abstract: The focus of this thesis project is exploration of the design space of the area of multilingual family communication. The project elaborates and adds to the concepts of design space and design openings and applies these concepts to the research area. In a common design process the focus at design space predominates at the early stage of design development, when problems and solutions are not found yet and the goal is to create a handful of design openings. Those design openings are leading the designer in different directions of the development of the design proposals. Some design openings and proposals are introduced in this project as illustrations of the design space exploration. The idea of game probes is discovered in this work as a tool of design space exploration. Multilingual children have been attracting my attention as an interaction designer during the last few years. Playful interaction is one of the basic communication channels between a parent and a child of the pre-school and early school age. Artefacts are powerful elements of design research, moreover tangible, visual and embodied experiences enable creativity, exploration and re-thinking of given ideas. All these key concepts are widely discovered through such methods as cultural and technology probes and critical design. The notion of game probes was established in this project through finding connections between its goals and practices of probing methods, playful activities and critical game design.