A Design Space of Sports Interaction Technology

With this monograph we introduce a new, systematic taxonomy of Sports Interaction Technology (Sports ITech) that defines a design space of existing and future work in this domain. We set the taxonomy in a context of our view on sport science and sports practice, target outcomes of sports and the underlying factors influencing them, and the role that sports technology plays to support sports science and practice. In that setting we systematically build and illustrate a taxonomy for the design space for Sports ITech as a sub-area of sports technologies, with specific attention for the adequate inclusion of knowledge from the sports sciences. We build on the basis of existing taxonomies and a vast body of literature from multiple domains of HCI, technology, sports science, and related work in Sports ITech, complemented with what we identified as obvious gaps in the literature. We finally share the conclusions after a discussion of the limitations of our work.

The contributions of this monograph are as follows. First, we offer a description of a design space, exemplified through existing work in a way suitable to support designers, technologists, and sports people with a design mindset to design, deploy, and adapt Sports ITech. Second, we see this as a call to action to bring HCI and the sports sciences closer together in the new field of Sports Interaction Technology, to set a shared agenda for future developments. Third, we offer this as the collation of a reading guide and wayfinding support in the literature from the many underlying disciplines of Sports Interaction Technology.