Move It Like Picasso: A Flexible Platform to Combine Movement, Drawing, and Communicative Play

Tangible and embodied explorations have delivered many designs to rejuvenate many traditional leisure activities such as parlor games, and dancing, and offered ideas on how to bridge inter-generational divides through play, and allow players of different skill levels to compete relatively equally. However there seem to be few examples of designs for non-competitive play which allow participants to take very different roles. Bringing together elements of playing with dance, communication, and drawing, we present the Move It Like Picasso platform. This facilitates a collaboration between a player trying to physically trace flickering lines from an animation which are unpredictably triggered by the second player’s bodily movements. We offer this as an example of how combining simple digital technologies and everyday physical materials may offer a route to rich social play experiences that might simultaneously appeal to a wide range of tastes.