application/pdf Haptic Play - Encouraging sensory exploration of 5-7 year-olds Fröhlich, Maria Froehlich, Masterarbeit, 2021, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International Abstract This master thesis – ‘Haptic Play’ – is an attempt to create a tool or toy that encourages children to spend more time exploring their senses, especially the sense of touch. The effects of mainly physically-deficient stimulating environments of everyday life have an impact on all of us, but it’s even more dramatic for children. Touch is so obvious and ordinary in our everyday experience to the extent that it is perceived as almost meaningless, but it is crucial to our existence. Everything that needs to grow must not only be nourished, but must also be sufficiently physically stimulated. In a world in which a global pandemic has pushed us to rethink every touch interaction and proximity factor of daily interactions, there is even more urgency around this topic. In this work, I will specifically focus on 5-7 years-olds, not only because there is an overlap of extreme fascination for sensory impressions (2-6 years) with a life stage in which the sense of touch takes up (from 5 years), but also because during this life stage the sense of touch takes up significantly more room and has therefore more impact. In part one of this thesis I will touch upon a broad range of areas, from child development theories and pedagogy approaches to the connection between learning & play and early musical education. In all these reflections I focus on 5-7 year-olds and the area of haptics. The purpose of this part is not to cover a complete overview of these theories and topics, but rather to use a few selected approaches and methods to define a set of guiding design principles. These principles lead in part two of this thesis to a concept for a musical toy for children in the context of a kindergarten or play group with a strong emphasis on haptic exploration and sensory experiences. This sensory music toy uses natural materials with different haptic characteristics (like stones, marbles, pieces of wood, metal or clay) to create sounds. Every haptic characteristic is linked to a sound characteristic. The round playing field has no direction and promotes collaboration between small groups of children. By exploring the haptic characteristics and the spatial relation between the objects on the playing surface, they can build soundscapes and melodies. The game can start very simple, by just placing one object onto the wooden play board. Gradually complexity can be increased, but this can always be controlled by the children. My prototype is limited to a set of defined objects, but the future goal of this concept would be to have an open system in which almost any object found in the children’s environment can become part of the game. doi:10.57697/ma5z-r257 https://phaidra.kunstuni-linz.at/o:2636 eng CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ master's Dissertation