Read ahoy: A playful digital-physical viking experience to engage children in finding and reading books

Abstract

A digital/physical installation part a series of pilots developed for Habo Municipality, Sweden, in the context of a public co-design effort aimed at creating a shared understanding of the possibilities offered by digital transformation and the development of a connected city framework, “Read Ahoy!” provides children with a simple game-like challenge: find books randomly distributed in a number of locations by matching conceptual, spatial, aural, and verbal clues. Built as an embodied experience for library spaces, “Read Ahoy!” is narratively centered on a Viking crew in need of help after they have lost much of their precious cargo of books in a storm, on their way back after a trade expedition. The story grounds the challenge in tropes familiar to Swedish culture and gives children a playful setup and well-defined goals as they search for books. “Read Ahoy!” explores how children entering the school system search and make sense of information in a blended space, structurally recreating the way they customarily mix action in digital and physical space. Theoretically anchored in Benyon’s conceptualization of blended spaces, in Bates’ information seeking theory and information search tactics, and in Resmini and Lacerda’s formalization of information-based experience ecosystems, “Read Ahoy!” was designed and implemented as a low-budget end-of-year project for the students in the Master’s in Information Architecture and Innovation at Jönköping International Business School, Jönköping, Sweden, under the supervision of the authors. It was framed to meet the UN SDG4’s sub-targets on “Early childhood development” and “Universal Youth Literacy” and installed in Habo Library from June through August 2019 where it was used extensively by local children under the supervision of librarians during the summer. A full description of the installation and preliminary post-mortem reflections are offered in the paper.