Dennis Kappen
Humber College, Industrial Design, Faculty Member
- University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Computer Science, Department Memberadd
- HCI, Mobile HCI, Emotional Computing, affective Computing, HCI, Understanding the Publicness of Public Places, Urban Regeneration and The Future of Cities, Cultural Spaces in The Contemporary Urban Landscape, Social Interaction of Older Adults, Co-located Gaming, and 24 moreSocial Engineering, Usability, Accessibility, Cognitive Psychology, Metadata, Semantic Web, Cross-Cultural Communication, Cultural Identity, Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, Collaborative Learning, Group Cognition, Philosophy, CSCL, Computer Support, Computer Science, Interaction Design, Industrial Design, Human Factors, Social Interaction, Gamification, Gamification Design, Gamification of online interactivity and interactions, and Gamification of healthcareedit
- User Experience is the key attribute that sustains any product or service in the marketplace. Human Centered Design s... moreUser Experience is the key attribute that sustains any product or service in the marketplace. Human Centered Design strategies are the essential foundations of successful product strategies. No product exists in the market because it is a mass of engineered plastic and bundled technology; but, because it sells a dream, a projected lifestyle or an unfulfilled desire that we crave for.
Specialties:
User experience design, user centered innovation, Product innovation, strategic product design and development, CAD design using Alias Studio Tools and Solidworks, Ergonomics and human factors designedit
Gamification has enabled technology to facilitate behavior change through increasing the engagement and motivation of people in health and wellness domains. While research on physical activity (PA) and why older adults engage in PA... more
Gamification has enabled technology to facilitate behavior change through increasing the engagement and motivation of people in health and wellness domains. While research on physical activity (PA) and why older adults engage in PA exists, there are not many long-term studies on how gamification influences technology use and adherence to PA by older adults. We conducted a synchronous, 8-week, experimental study with older adults in the 50+ age group. Participants were randomized into three groups: Gamified technology, non-gamified technology and a control group. We conducted a weekly semi-structured interview with them focused on their PA motivations, setting up goals, accomplishments, fears or barriers, (immediate and long-term) rewards, and tracking in PA. Thematic analysis (TA) of the interview data showed these distinct variations in themes for the three groups over the 8-week period. This indicates that motivational affordances or gamification elements can be customized for older adults to suit their current health conditions and PA participation barriers. We define gamification design guidelines for PA motivation of older adults based on self-determination theory, setting up progressive goals, accomplishments to track PA quality, intangible rewards, and activity tracking.
Research Interests:
Gamification has become popular as a behavior change strategy to increase the motivation and engagement of users in a health and wellness applications. Motivational affordances or gamification elements can help to foster intrinsic or... more
Gamification has become popular as a behavior change strategy to increase the motivation and engagement of users in a health and wellness applications. Motivational affordances or gamification elements can help to foster intrinsic or extrinsic motivation for an activity as mundane as achieving fitness and wellness goals. Research indicates that there are many motivations among older adults for playing digital games and exergames to encourage physical activity (PA). Although studies investigate the influence of game elements in exergames on older adults PA, our study focuses on the usage of gamification elements for gamified PA technology. We designed Spirit50, a gamified PA technology app and conducted an expert evaluation using long form questionnaires and the Heuristics Evaluation for Gameful Design instrument. Content analysis and comparisons of expert ratings of the heuristics provided specific insights into motivational affordances for older adults' PA technology.
Research Interests:
Despite the emergence of many gameful design methodologies in the literature, there is a lack of methods to evaluate the resulting designs. Gameful design techniques aim to increase the user's motivation to interact with a software , but... more
Despite the emergence of many gameful design methodologies in the literature, there is a lack of methods to evaluate the resulting designs. Gameful design techniques aim to increase the user's motivation to interact with a software , but there are presently no accepted guidelines on how to find out if this goal was achieved during the design phase of a project. This paper presents the Gameful Design Heuristics, a novel set of guidelines that facilitate a heuristic evaluation of gameful software, with a focus on the software's potential to afford intrinsic and extrinsic motivation for the user. First, we reviewed several gameful design methods to identify the most frequently employed dimensions of motivational affordances. Then, we devised a set of 28 gamification heuris-tics that can be used to rapidly evaluate a gameful system. Finally, we conducted a summative empirical evaluation study with five user experience professionals , which demonstrated that our heuristics can help the evaluators find more motivational issues in interactive systems than they would without the heuristics. The suggested method fulfills the need for evaluation tools specific to gameful design, which could help evaluators assess the potential user experience of a gameful application in the early phases of a project.
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Background and Aim: Gamefulness is commonly cited as the primary goal of gamification, a family of approaches employed in education, business, healthcare, government, and elsewhere. However, gamefulness is defined imprecisely across the... more
Background and Aim: Gamefulness is commonly cited as the primary goal of gamification, a family of approaches employed in education, business, healthcare, government, and elsewhere. However, gamefulness is defined imprecisely across the literature. To address this, we present a theory of gamefulness that splits gamefulness into more specific constructs and outlines their effects in a process model.
Method: We integrate extant literature from psychology, human-computer interaction, and other fields to define gameful design, systems, and experiences. Most critically, we argue that gameful experience is the core focal construct of this theory and define it as an interactive state occurring when a person perceives non-trivial achievable goals created externally, is motivated to pursue them under an arbitrary set of behavioral rules, and evaluates that motivation as voluntary.
Results: We present six resulting propositions: (1) gameful systems lead to gameful experiences, (2) gameful systems impact psychological characteristics, (3) effective gameful design leads to gameful systems, (4) effective gameful systems lead to behavioral change, (5) appropriate behavioral change causes the distal outcomes gamification designers target, and (6) individual differences moderate the effectiveness of gameful systems.
Conclusion: Gameful experience theory provides researchers with a unified foundation to study gamification from any social scientific lens.
Method: We integrate extant literature from psychology, human-computer interaction, and other fields to define gameful design, systems, and experiences. Most critically, we argue that gameful experience is the core focal construct of this theory and define it as an interactive state occurring when a person perceives non-trivial achievable goals created externally, is motivated to pursue them under an arbitrary set of behavioral rules, and evaluates that motivation as voluntary.
Results: We present six resulting propositions: (1) gameful systems lead to gameful experiences, (2) gameful systems impact psychological characteristics, (3) effective gameful design leads to gameful systems, (4) effective gameful systems lead to behavioral change, (5) appropriate behavioral change causes the distal outcomes gamification designers target, and (6) individual differences moderate the effectiveness of gameful systems.
Conclusion: Gameful experience theory provides researchers with a unified foundation to study gamification from any social scientific lens.
Research Interests:
Exertion games, also referred to as exergames, have become popular because they combine physical activity (PA) with game mechanics, such as actions, challenges, and achievements. Exergames have been also used to encourage PA among older... more
Exertion games, also referred to as exergames, have become popular because they combine physical activity (PA) with game mechanics, such as actions, challenges, and achievements. Exergames have been also used to encourage PA among older adults, as technological interventions to help achieve the latters’ health and wellness goals and as aids to rehabilitation. To the best of our knowledge, no systematic review of empirical studies on exergaming and older adults’ PA has been reported in the literature. Our review indicates that exergames make a measurable contribution to the improvement of health and wellness goals of older adults. Our systematic review identifies 9 categories and 19 themes of exergame applications in the domain of older adults’ PA. We aggregate these categories and themes into three broader exergaming clusters, of “training,”“rehabilitation,” and “wellness.” Additionally, we outline pathways for future empirical research into applying exergames as health and wellness interventions for older adults through physical activities.
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Designing fitness programs to combat a sedentary lifestyle and foster older adults' motivation and goal-setting is not yet well-understood beyond point-based systems. To improve older adults' (over 50 years) health and wellness, we... more
Designing fitness programs to combat a sedentary lifestyle and foster older adults' motivation and goal-setting is not yet well-understood beyond point-based systems. To improve older adults' (over 50 years) health and wellness, we studied a gamified physical activity intervention over eight weeks in an experiment (N=30) with three conditions (gamified, non-gamified, control). Our qualitative analysis showed the gamified group exhibited more engagement and interest in performing physical activity facilitated by technology. Results from our quantitative analysis indicated significance in the perceived competence dimension compared to the non-gamified and the control group. Perceived autonomy was significant for the non-gamified group against the control group. The findings from qualitative and quantitative analysis show motivation, enjoyment, and engagement were higher in the gamified group. This provides support for successfully facilitating older adults' physical activity through gamified technology, which helped us create guidelines for older adults' adaptive engagement.
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Gamification has been repeatedly framed as an emerging multidisciplinary research field. However, it is unclear how multidisciplinary the field actually is. To answer this question, this paper presents initial results of a broader scoping... more
Gamification has been repeatedly framed as an emerging multidisciplinary research field. However, it is unclear how multidisciplinary the field actually is. To answer this question, this paper presents initial results of a broader scoping review of gamification research published between 2010 and 2016. Close to 2,000 peer-reviewed English-language journal and conference papers were identified across 11 databases and categorized by discipline. Results indicate an explosive growth of literature peaking in 2015. Early on, Information and Computing Science dominated the field, to be overtaken by the sum of other disciplines in 2013, education, economics and tourism in specific. This indicates that gamification was initially a field within computer science and HCI and has only recently become truly multidisciplinary .
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Maintaining good health and wellness is challenging because of the many factors that could influence the state of our minds and bodies, which together define our quality of life. Prominent among these factors are lifestyle choices, which... more
Maintaining good health and wellness is challenging because of the many factors that could influence the state of our minds and bodies, which together define our quality of life. Prominent among these factors are lifestyle choices, which could be described as individual behaviors that either increase or decrease the chances
of contracting diseases or sustaining injuries. These choices include, but are not limited to, reducing stress, maintaining an active lifestyle to include regular fitness and physical activities, and adopting healthy eating behaviors by regulating both the quantity (portion size) and the quality of food consumed.
of contracting diseases or sustaining injuries. These choices include, but are not limited to, reducing stress, maintaining an active lifestyle to include regular fitness and physical activities, and adopting healthy eating behaviors by regulating both the quantity (portion size) and the quality of food consumed.
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Motivational affordances are attributes of interactive technologies or game elements that promote participation in physical activity (PA) routines. Although these affordances have been previously integrated into technologies in... more
Motivational affordances are attributes of interactive technologies or game elements that promote participation in physical activity (PA) routines. Although these affordances have been previously integrated into technologies in non-tailored approaches, the motivations of adults for PA are specific (e.g., to improve one's health, wellness, or fitness). There are no previous comparisons of either the motivation to participate in PA or motivational affordances that facilitate PA in different age groups. Therefore, we conducted an online survey with 150 participants using the Exercise Motivations Inventory-2 scale (EMI-2) together with long-form questions to explore motivational affordances and PA technology preferences in four age groups. Our results suggest health-related pressures are significant motivations for PA in different age groups. Additionally, a content analysis of preferences allowed us to distinguish between gamified motivational affordances and feedback elements. These results provide age-group-specific gamification design guidelines for incorporating motivational elements in PA technology.
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This paper describes the design and a preliminary implementation study of a gamified knowledge management system (KMS) that supports the learning component within knowledge management (KM). KM includes acquiring social capital through the... more
This paper describes the design and a preliminary implementation study of a gamified knowledge management system (KMS) that supports the learning component within knowledge management (KM). KM includes acquiring social capital through the process of acquisition, sharing, and dissemination of knowledge within a company. Employees often lack the motivation to share their implicit knowledge with one another and are reluctant to engage in a collaborative forum for such knowledge exchange. We developed a gamified learning component of an enterprise KMS to help foster this process of collaborative and participatory learning. More importantly, this game combines trivia and strategy elements as game elements to motivate the players for knowledge exchange. We report preliminary results from an exploratory study with nine participants which indicates that the above combination of game elements does contribute to participatory knowledge learning within an enterprise KMS.
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Staying physically active is essential to wellbeing in late life. However, many older adults experience barriers to physical activity. Past research has investigated the development of playful interactive systems to support exercise... more
Staying physically active is essential to wellbeing in late life. However, many older adults experience barriers to physical activity. Past research has investigated the development of playful interactive systems to support exercise routines and reduce access barriers. Yet, little research has been done on older adults’ needs and preferences regarding technologies that support physical activity. We address this issue through an exploration of older adults’ exercise motivations grouped around themes relevant to technology design. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 19 older adults, and followed up with a focus group study of physical trainers and older adults with an active lifestyle. Based on our results, we discuss their conflicting perspectives and challenges on exercise and technology, which leads us to contribute design strategies to support designers as well as researchers wishing to create meaningful and playful gamified fitness applications for older adults.
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Social player experiences are important to understand in co-located gaming scenarios, because these experiences relate to player performance. Player-audience relationships have been studied before, but prior research focused on player... more
Social player experiences are important to understand in co-located gaming scenarios, because these experiences relate to player performance. Player-audience relationships have been studied before, but prior research focused on player attributes and typology. In our study, we investigated the effect of different co-located audience types (silent, positive, negative) and no audience on player experience.
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We propose the notion of semi-iconic game input (i.e., sharing some properties of game objects instead of being a complete iconic representation of them) and investigate influence of controller representation on player experience. In... more
We propose the notion of semi-iconic game input (i.e., sharing some properties of game objects instead of being a complete iconic representation of them) and investigate influence of controller representation on player experience. In particular, we developed game controllers at different degrees of realism (symbolic, semi-iconic, and iconic). We present the developed controllers and initial usability findings.
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Gamification has become popular as a behavior change strategy to increase the motivation and engagement of users in a health and wellness applications. Motivational affordances or gamification elements can help to foster intrinsic or... more
Gamification has become popular as a behavior change strategy to increase the motivation and engagement of users in a health and wellness applications. Motivational affordances or gamification elements can help to foster intrinsic or extrinsic motivation for an activity as mundane as achieving fitness and wellness goals. Research indicates that there are many motivations among older adults for playing digital games and exergames to encourage physical activity (PA). However, very few specific gamification elements (motivational af-fordances) have been defined for technology artifacts pertinent to older adults' physical activity (PA). We designed Spirit50, a gamified PA technology app and conducted an expert evaluation using long form questionnaires and the Heuristics Evaluation for Gameful Design instrument. Content analysis and comparisons of expert ratings of the heuristics provided specific insights into motivational af-fordances for older adults' PA technology.
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Older adults are often not physically active because they lack motivation, time, and/or physical ability. Not only does this impact the life of older adults, but it also affects society as a whole, because the cost of healthcare attached... more
Older adults are often not physically active because they lack motivation, time, and/or physical ability. Not only does this impact the life of older adults, but it also affects society as a whole, because the cost of healthcare attached to maintaining the health of older adults is continually rising. This thesis addresses the problem by investigating the disenchantment of older adults with physical activity (PA), reasons for their lack of participation in PA, and contributes motivational affordances for PA. This thesis makes three important contributions to human-computer interaction: a) the development of adaptive engagement guidelines for PA technology for older adults. b) the Exercise Motivation Technology Framework (EMFT) - a framework to aid in the design and development of PA technology for older adults, and c) the Kaleidoscope of Effective Gamification (KEG) - a design and analysis tool for helping designers design and develop gamified apps. These contributions were achieved through a phased investigative approach. The analysis of preliminary studies (Phase 1) resulted in the development of the EMTF for older adults PA technology. A survey study (Phase 2) on the preferences of motivational affordances for PA across different age groups suggested that ‘health pressures’ and ‘ill-health avoidance’ were significant exercise motives for PA in different age groups. Age-differentiated guidelines from Phase 2 were used to develop and evaluate Spirit50 (Phase 3), a gamified technology artifact, specifically developed under my supervision for adults over 50 years of age. Phase 4 was a synchronous, three-condition (gamified, non-gamified, and control groups) experimental study over an eight-week period with a total of 30 participants. Expert evaluation (Phase 5) to review technology facilitation of PA using the Spirit50 app also pointed to the usefulness and the applicability of gamification as a behaviour change technology for delivering PA solutions for older adults. The findings of this thesis contribute to understanding PA motivation among older adults on a granular level from a technology facilitation standpoint using gamification strategies. The EMTF model helped to design PA technology by combining desirability, customization, and motivational affordances for older adults. Finally, this thesis contributes to tailoring and personalizing of adaptive engagement strategies using specific gamification elements like goals supported by challenges, selection of quests based on ability, progressive feedback, and rewards validating performance and efforts as potential ways to deliver age-centric PA technology for older adults.
Thesis can be downloaded from https://ir.library.dc-uoit.ca/xmlui/handle/10155/881
Thesis can be downloaded from https://ir.library.dc-uoit.ca/xmlui/handle/10155/881