Design and Development of Games and Interactive Installations for Environmental Awareness

Digital games and playful interactive installations are considered a promising means to raising awareness about the environment and persuading people to adopt an environmental friendly behavior. However, the selection and use of appropriate methods and paradigms for designing and evaluating such systems and successfully blending the ‘fun’ element with the messages to be communicated is still an active research issue. The aim of this paper is to investigate the benefits and drawbacks of using games and playful interactive technologies for changing people’s attitude towards the environment through a series of projects developed and publicly presented during a campaign for reducing the use of plastic bags. The development included the identification of the projects’ goals, an analysis of people, activities, target behavior and context of use, and finally the design and prototyping of the interactive installations. In total, eight projects have been developed, six interactive installations and two digital games that have been publicly presented, used and evaluated during the campaign. An additional user evaluation of the two games has been performed in the laboratory, to gain more insight on their usability and impact. The paper presents an overview of the design process and methodology, the main design elements of each project, and a number of observations and preliminary evaluation results.