140 Active Parks: ‘Phygital’ urban games for sedentary and older people Emmanuel Tsekleves 1 , Adrian Gradinar 1 , Andy Darby 2 , Marcia Smith 2 1 Imagination Lab, Design, Lancaster University, LA1 4YW, UK e.tsekleves@lancaster.ac.uk, a.gradinar@lancaster.ac.uk 2 Highwire Centre for Doctoral Training, Lancaster University, LA1 4YW, UK a.darby@lancaster.ac.uk, m.smith10@lancaster.ac.uk Abstract. We present our work in the Active Parks project, aimed at encourag- ing older and sedentary people to take casual physical exercise in urban spaces, such as parks. This is achieved through the co-design of playful ‘phygital’ (physical and digital) artefacts and games to be installed in the park. The initial testing of our proof-of-concept prototype received extremely positive feedback as a potential way of motivating people to keep active in the park and in bridg- ing the generation gap. Keywords: Playful design, Physical-digital interaction, Co-design, Urban games 1 Introduction Green spaces, such as parks are seen as a key contributor to wellbeing and the en- vironment and have a proven track record in reducing the impact of deprivation and delivering better health and wellbeing, a dding to the creation of a stronger sense of community [1]. Several parks in the UK are currently underutilised, especially by sedentary and older people. In the Active Parks project we are exploring how to en- gage older and sedentary park users in taking casual physical activity through playful ‘phygital’ (physical and digital) interactions. Wo rking together with local community groups who look after the park, the Lancaster City Coun cil and NHS Lancashire Pub- lic Health, we have co-designed a play ful ‘digital health trail’, which offers a new way of motivating and taking casual physical activity specific to local people in their park (using Ryelands Park in the city of Lancaster, in the UK as a use case). 2 Related Work Playful design, the mapping of playful experiences from video games to other non- game context experiences, has gained interest in recent years with a number of mod- els been investigated [2]. A number of ‘phyg ital’ urban games have been developed, which offer playful experiences. These focu s on encouraging exploitation and discov- ery of urban spaces in a leisurely and playful manner by connecting the digital (mo- bile phones with GPS/NFC technologies) with the physical world (e.g. building, city B. Schouten et al. (Eds.), Games for Health 2014, DOI 10.1007/978-3-658-07141-7_19, © Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden 2014