Abstract

Action sports have been under research spotlight due to increase in research opportunities and popularity. Though previous work focused on performance and success metrics, research on mental and emotional aspects, which make up an important part of the learning experience of action sports is still lacking. By focusing on climbing and climbers’ learning experiences, we aimed to extract user insights into learning practices of sportspeople and identify design opportunities to enhance these practices. Initially we gave climbing lectures to interaction designers, as a first-hand experience of learning processes. Then we conducted co-creation sessions with climbers and designers to identify learning needs and generate possible design proposals. Analyzing these, we identified three user insights that summarize climbers’ learning needs: bodily awareness, social feedback and learning how to fall, and design opportunities for addressing these, grouped as how to design feedback for climbers and how to address mental challenges of the climbing.

Keywords

bodily interactions, climbing, codesign, action sports

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Conference Track

Research Paper

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Jun 25th, 9:00 AM

Designers in action: Insights and design opportunities for supporting embodied learning in climbing

Action sports have been under research spotlight due to increase in research opportunities and popularity. Though previous work focused on performance and success metrics, research on mental and emotional aspects, which make up an important part of the learning experience of action sports is still lacking. By focusing on climbing and climbers’ learning experiences, we aimed to extract user insights into learning practices of sportspeople and identify design opportunities to enhance these practices. Initially we gave climbing lectures to interaction designers, as a first-hand experience of learning processes. Then we conducted co-creation sessions with climbers and designers to identify learning needs and generate possible design proposals. Analyzing these, we identified three user insights that summarize climbers’ learning needs: bodily awareness, social feedback and learning how to fall, and design opportunities for addressing these, grouped as how to design feedback for climbers and how to address mental challenges of the climbing.

 

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