1) The Thoughtless Acts that I focused on are ways that people find to indicate which team they are during pick-up sports. The most common thoughtless act that occurs is the typical division of teams into “shirts vs. skins” where one team will remove their shirts. This of course is very much limited to games which are composed of predominantly male and teen or older players. Some females are comfortable playing in just a sports bra if they are on the “skins” team, but it seems more often that females are instead all put together on the “shirts” team. Other thoughtless act solutions to this problem often involve adjustments in the wearing of players’ clothes (when I did Taekwondo, half of us would turn our belts around backwards) or even just choosing teams based on colors of shirts already being worn (if half the players just happen to be wearing white shirts already).
2) While there are already some design solutions for this problem (scrimmage vests and “pinnies”) these are typically used only during organized sports such as during PE class, and they are also less convenient for switching teams between rounds such as happens more often during recess play when children may join or leave a game at different times and affect the balance of the teams.
Our midterm project, Gather Ring, does already aim to solve this problem through its ability to assign teams at the start of a game and to indicate team membership by glowing different colors. This solves both the visibility of team indicators and also reduces limitations on who can be assigned to which team (always being on a team with the same people because it’s easier to know who your teammates are, girls always having to be on the same team, etc.)
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