ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses agency of the user in the creative processes of digital (co)design. To achieve this, the authors situate the user and designer in a design process, in which their relationship, framed by a context of shared use, embodies experience and digital materiality. In doing so, they carry out an ethnographic exploration of an interactive design process that aims to support children’s physical activity and sociality: the Interactive Slide. The Interactive Slide is a full-body, multi-user, non-invasive interactive experience composed of a large inflatable slide that is augmented with interactive technology. As an academic research project, the social problem-solving aim that guided the slide’s design was to promote physical activity and face-to-face socialization among children. The project, as with other exertion interface designs, aimed to contribute to research in interactive body games as a way of compensating for the increasingly sedentary behaviours and isolated forms of sociality among young generations, usually associated with video games and digital technologies.
