Situated Play Design

Situated Play Design is a design approach developed by Altarriba Bertran and colleagues that treats play as something emergent from a specific social, physical, and cultural setting rather than something to be engineered into a generic product. It combines ethnographic observation, bodystorming, embodied sketching, and rapid prototyping to chase the latent "play potentials" of everyday situations. In accessibility and health-game research, Situated Play Design is used to ground interventions in the actual rhythms of clinics, classrooms, and homes, so that resulting technology fits the context rather than displacing it.