This is Me: Evaluation of a boardgame to promote social engagement, wellbeing and agency in people with dementia through mindful life-storytelling.

Receiving a dementia diagnosis is a difficult experience for most people and often affects their wellbeing negatively. To support people's wellbeing, in a therapeutic context, life-storytelling, reminiscence and mindfulness are used with people with dementia. In an everyday context, traditional games are used as a resource for stimulating memory, cognition and social activity. While an increasing number of creative strategies are available to support people with dementia, the area of board games design and their effect on wellbeing is underexplored. This paper reports on the evaluation of the This is Me (TIM) mindful life-storytelling board game by the European project MinD. Using a co-design methodology, TIM was developed with and for people with mild to moderate dementia to support their wellbeing by enhancing self-empowerment and social engagement. A focus group methodology was used to evaluate TIM with 50 people with dementia and 19 carers across four countries. TIM was evaluated with regard to the usability and experience of the design as well as people's emotional wellbeing, social engagement and agency. The thematic analysis demonstrated that the combination of life-storytelling and mindfulness allowed players to engage in meaningful social interaction and, as a result, they reported enjoyment, learning, more acceptance of the past and present situation, and that they perceived looking forward into the future together with others as helpful. The study demonstrates that design can be a useful means to support people with dementia in aspects of emotional wellbeing, social engagement and a sense of agency.

Act like a user, work like a teacher: evaluation of experience design works through peer-testing.

Experience design is a growing field that attracts many designers' attention. One of the challenges of experience design is to be emphatic with the users and be critical about evaluating the results of the design process. This challenge requires several skills and knowledge, which the designers could gain during their higher education. While user-centred design methods have extensively been used, teaching how to critically evaluate experience design from the users' perspective is barely addressed in design education. To address this challenge, I explored the suitability of peer assessment in two consecutive years of Design and Meaning, a third-year Industrial Design Engineering Bachelors' course at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. I followed a set of activities and developed peer-testing approach to amplify the role of design students in evaluating experience design works. In this approach, the students tested their peers' experience design works by pretending to be the users of the experience and assessed the works as if they were the experience design teachers. To prepare the students for this activity, I employed peer feedback and evaluation-preparation sessions during the course. Results showed that peer-testing could significantly contribute to experience design courses' evaluation-related learning goals when the students are provided with sufficient guidance. Results from both years provided promising evidence that peer-testing could be a method for teaching experience design evaluation in higher education design courses.

How Are Sports-Trackers Used by Runners? Running-Related Data, Personal Goals, and Self-Tracking in Running.

The purpose of this research is to explore the roles that sports trackers and running-related data play in runners' personal goal achievement. A two-week diary study and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 22 runners to explore how runners engage with their running-related data to set and achieve their running goals. We found that participants pursued and transitioned between different running goals as their needs, abilities, and surrounding environment changed. We also found multiple motivations that shaped the use of sports trackers. We identified two main categories in runners' motivations for using trackers and data to achieve their goals. These categories were (i) documenting and tracking in running, and (ii) supporting goal-oriented reflections and actions, with various reasons for use while preparing for and during running. This study provides insights into the psychological effects of running-related data and signals practical implications for runners and developers of tracking technology.