What social practices are people involved when staying in a game café? What kind of social setting is the game café? What are the attitudes towards playing computer games at home and in public among parents? What are the media representations of co-located game playing in public? What are the sensory experiences of playing co-located game play in public? This dissertation gives a descriptive and analytical account of the contexts and meanings of playing co-located computer games in public settings such as game cafés and LAN parties. The overall aim with the dissertation is to describe and investigate the social and cultural meanings and contexts of playing computer games in a game café. The research questions have been investigated in four empirical studies. The dissertation shows that people are involved in various social practices and activities aimed at supporting and maintaining social relationships among friends and peers. The game café can be seen as a third place, as it used by players for recreation and an escape from the pressure of home and school, a place which feels like home, is familiar and welcoming. However the game café is a limited third place used by young men who likes to play online and network games. The dissertation also shows how the social environment provides for specific sensory experiences. These sensory experiences involve sitting together side by side slapping each other’s shoulders and legs, eating candies and drinking sodas, listening to music. The representations of co-located game playing in public reproduce traditional gender roles where professional gamers are represented by men and causal gamers are represented by women (and men) as well as construct youth as party lovers. The study also suggests that parents’ attitudes towards their children playing games in public draw on traditional values and ideas about children’s play and social relationships. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 4: Submitted. </p>

In a digital and fast-paced world, museums are constantly updating their practices to support visitors’ experiences and interactive exhibits are increasingly gaining popularity. I collaborated with the Natural History Museum of Denmark to design an interactive room for their upcoming new building, specifically for the exhibit with the working title “Night in the Open Land”. The project adopted a design methodology that focused on playfulness and senses and included experience prototyping with museum visitors. The final prototype was designed to replicate a slow and contemplative experience of being outside at night. A playful interactive flashlight was used to find hidden animals and interact with the exhibition, enhancing exploration. The torchlight and the sounds and movements of visitors served as input for an interactive system, which produced sounds, video and smell as outputs. The flashlight enhanced the playful and explorative aspect of the room and allowed for shared and focused attention by all family members. Furthermore, olfactory stimuli were highly appreciated by visitors. At the intersection between museum studies and Interaction Design, this project is relevant to Interaction-as-Experience and reinforces how multisensory interactive exhibits are effective in catering to diverse audiences. The results of this project suggest that incorporating interaction design into public spaces like museums can enhance visitors’ experiences, fostering engagement, learning, and enjoyment.

Increasingly, culturally and ethnically diverse environments provide an abundance of ordinary, everyday intergroup encounters, especially in public settings---often consisting of a conglomeration of positive and negative experiences. Yet few intergroup contact studies have focused on measuring and assessing contact in public settings. Reasons for this include both theoretical and methodological considerations. However, before the impact of mundane, everyday encounters on prejudice reduction can be assessed, it is necessary to examine the following questions: (1) Which situations are perceived as intergroup contact by participants? (2) How do individuals conceptualise where the boundaries for contact lie? (3) How are public and private forms of contact typically experienced? (4) Do they differ in the ways researchers have assumed in the past? and (5) Which methods are most appropriate for assessing public encounters? How can memory bias, temporality and locatedness be taken into account? Using qualitative, quantitative and near-time in-the-field methods, the following research examines these aspects in both public and private settings and provides first insights into how a novel method---the Contact Logger---can be used to assess the effects of public and private contact on attitudes. A three-day diary/interview study (N=17) explored how contact is experienced, understood and conceptualised in a variety of everyday intergroup contexts. This was followed by a survey study (N=525) that examined the boundaries of what is typically perceived as being contact. Insights from both studies fed into the development of a context-aware mobile application, which enabled the capturing of near-time intergroup encounters in situ. The usability of the resulting research tool---the Contact Logger---was tested, leading to further refinements. Following an initial feasibility study (N=104) that explored contact between young and older people, a field experiment (N=112) examined intergenerational contact in public and private contexts. Data collected with the Contact Logger were analysed on aggregate and day-to-day levels, and where possible compared to traditional retrospective survey data. Results from the first two studies indicated that while traditional intergroup encounters, such as contact with family and friends, are clearly conceptualised and viewed as contact, experiences and perceptions of contact in public settings are more disparate. Moreover, effects of such contact on attitudes are dependent on the idiosyncratic meaning attributed to the specific encounter as well as past experiences. Near-time data from a field-experiment (Study 5) provided evidence that intergroup encounters reported in situ compared to retrospective survey data differed in key variables (i.e., contact quality, duration, perceived status and group typicality). Correlational analyses between near-time and retrospective measures showed less correspondence than expected. Further, additional day-to-day analyses revealed that attitudes towards older people were less positive during weekends than weekdays, indicating that attitudes may be more dynamic than previously thought. Findings, as well as the different methodological and theoretical approaches, are critically discussed. Finally, a broad range of further applications for the Contact Logger are presented and important limitations are discussed.