Mahecha Arango, Ovais, Youssef, Das, Van Koningsbruggen & Hornecker, TEI 2024 · Artifact + user study · Read 2026-08-02
1. What they did
A two-player horse-racing installation. Each player hauls on a rope to drive a horse up a vertical track; first to the top wins. The game is rigged: at the start you draw a passport at random, and a high-ranking one (Germany, visa-free to 190 countries) makes your horse fast while a low-ranking one (Bangladesh, 40) makes it slow.
The physical cost of pulling, plus visible unfairness, plus the framing of a horse race, turns an abstract fact about passport inequality into something felt in the arms.
2. Method
Two days in a public exhibition (Bauhaus-Universität Weimar’s annual Winterwerkschau) → 25 people interacted → 15 semi-structured interviews → Reflexive Thematic Analysis. Data: researcher observation notes on site, sticky notes on a whiteboard, interview recordings.
Consent strategy worth copying: in a public setting, no consent gate before natural observation; debrief after the game ends, then ask for interview consent.
3. Findings and contribution
- Narrative sensification — narrative physicalization combined with data sensification, so that the user becomes the protagonist of a data story rather than looking at one.
- Four themes: From Innocence to Awareness · Physical Exhaustion and Emotional Frustration · Validation and Empathy · Questioning the System.
- Physical exhaustion is an effective affective channel. No text is needed to explain that you lost.
- Playful framing makes a serious subject approachable — “It’s a dark topic, but it made it a bit more light.”
- Three design lessons: the interaction must afford the narrative; multiple readings must be allowed rather than one correct feeling enforced; bodily exhaustion works as an information channel.
4. What it gives me
- The closest template to the thesis I want to write. Installation plus user study plus a concept, without a philosophical manifesto. Structure: Intro → Related Work → Installation → Study Approach → Findings → Discussion → Conclusion.
- The method transfers wholesale: two-day exhibition + 15 interviews + RTA is the configuration TEI and DIS accept.
- Narrative sensification is directly citable if my installation uses a social issue as a storyline with the audience playing a role.
- Embodied metaphor as a design method: decide what you want them to feel → work backwards to the bodily action → choose an interaction form that already carries cultural memory (pulling a rope = a horse race = a contest = fairness).
- Gameful is not the same as fun. The gameful elements exist to produce a tension that has to be felt. Can I deliberately build an equivalent unfairness or difficulty into mine?
- The consent procedure can go into my ethics application as-is.
5. Questions it left me
- I skipped their Related Work — data sensification, narrative visualization, decolonial computing, showroom research. I need to know which traditions this paper is speaking to.
- Beyond inequality data, what kinds of data or subject does narrative sensification apply to? Can sensory experience itself be narratively sensified?
- If my installation is single-player, with no competitor, can it still be gameful? Does gameful require multiplayer?
- How did they keep 15 visitors around long enough to interview them? How would I solve that in my own exhibition?