Philips Design has created a boardgame called Spark to help generate insights. It looks like it is a pretty simple premise – there are a set of characters (basic personas) and a set of situations. As you roll the dice and the characters land on the situations, you have to brainstorm the implications.
According to Slava Kozlov, Senior Consultant in Strategic Futures Design at Philips Design:
“You can experiment without taking risks. Suspend your values and beliefs and adopt different roles which allow you to consider issues from a different angle. Learn how to deal with new situations effectively. Think more unconventionally while remaining relevant. And, in the process, enjoy yourself more!”
In many respects it’s not all that innovative. Personas and scenarios are often used in brainstorming sessions. But one of the aims of this approach seems to be to take the activity away from the slightly forced nature of some brainstorming sessions. In theory (as much research shows) the more participants’ minds relax into a playful state, the more laterally creative they should start to think.
There is a quite a bit of talk in the PDF article about “serious games” and a mention of The Serious Games Institute. I’m not a fan of this kind of terminology, the same as the idea of serious play. I understand why people use this, but it is an immediately apologetic framing of play. Play is play and it is important – it doesn’t need the prefix of being serious to make it so. It doesn’t do much to advance the value of play.
As for the game, I can imagine in a corporate culture that this could be a useful tool allowing people to enter into a suspended-judgement, creative idea generation space because is “only a game”. Of course the flipside could also be the case – that it or its outcomes are not taken seriously because it’s a game. It is good to see these ideas becoming more accepted and mainstream though.
I’ve just finished up a chapter in my PhD about social play. Most of it is about online interaction, but quite a bit is about how to bring strangers together to make connections in public spaces.
Serendipitously, Iain just posted this clip thanks to Knotty’s. If you don’t get why social networks work, watch this:
Great to see magneticNorth’s new website live. Brendan gave me a sneak peek of it yesterday and I love it.
The navigation is very playful and intuitive. Actually it is intuitive because it is playful. You basically scribble a doodle and this makes a mask into which a piece from their portfolio opens. You can then click on that item to view more info about the work or simply make another scribble to look at a new piece. The navigation across the top is a history that you can move back and forth through or reset.
What is nice about the whole thing is that you just don’t have worry about doing anything ‘right’. You can scribble any shape and you can scribble over the top of other scribbles and everything automagically sorts itself out.
Go and have a play yourself and tell me what you think.
[UPDATE: Quite some debate started about this, which I'm very happy to be part of. I wrote a long response, which is almost a post in itself, but decided to leave it in the comments.]
Josh Nimoy has made a version of his (unpleasantly named) Ball Droppings piece for Google’s Chrome Experiments site. Simple and addictive, you basically draw lines and adjust the dropping rate to set the balls in bouncy, musical motion. The Javascript version doesn’t work in Safari (sigh), but Firefox on the Mac does the job.
The whole Chrome Experiments site is worth poking around – there are some nice interactive toys there. Casey Reas’ Twitch is a fun set of little challenges that move from browser window to browser window:
Browser Ball is a ball that you can throw around different browser windows. Its author, Mark Mahoney asks, “If I tell you it’s less lame than it sounds, will you give it a shot?” It is, indeed, less lame than it sounds and strangely compelling (though it send my CPU crazy).
There are plenty more of these little experiments with the technology. It will be great to see if Google Chrome is actually any good once it comes to the Mac (I haven’t tried it in BootCamp yet), but many of these experiments work in other browsers.
Exploring these ideas will, no doubt, lead to some interesting applications, but they’re fun in their own right too, so take them in that spirit. The comments say it all:
By Bill the non computer geek on April 01, 2009
Saw the demo. So just what does this do? I see a ball bouncing to different windows……so?
Inspired by the Tenori-On, Andre Michelle put together Tonematrix. Each square creates a wave force that spreads across the grid (I don’t think that affects the sound though).
It reminds me quite a bit of a piece Andy Allenson made at Antirom years ago that was a multi-user grid sequencer. The smart thing about it was that you could adjust the grid cell amounts to produce complex polyrhythms. It was done in Director and I can’t find it online anymore unfortunately, but it was very compelling. I was always amazed that he got it working over the network too – around 10 years ago now.
I am glad to see sound finally getting some attention in Flash (now that pixels have arrived too). The work Andre has been doing is amazing, but I’d really like to see it being used for more unique, unusual and playful experiments rather than reproducing vintage sequencers and synthesisers (that’s what Reason is for, right?). Somehow that seems to be a missed opportunity – Tonematrix is a more interesting direction.
Regular readers will know I’m pretty cynical about VR and I’ve never been much of a fan of the CAVE system. The last time I used one at iCinema I was treated to an interface that looked like it was designed in 1989 and a headache from the glasses.
The above video is from IDEO’s trip to WATG’s labs, where they have an iCube set up. It’s pretty entertaining to see Dave lose his balance as he stands on the edges of virtual walls and it’s clearly working on a fairly immersive level in a way I have never experienced in any VR that I have tried. The reason, usually, is that the equipment and the environment are so imposing that you can’t really ever engage your willing suspension of disbelief and immerse yourself. That’s the irony of immersive VR systems.
I think part of the reason this is working well here is because WATG are hospitality architects, so they know a thing or two about making compelling environments and have some decent 3D chops. The landscape Dave is wandering around in looks at least as good as Unreal Tournament 2003 instead of Manic Miner.
It also helps that the headset is rather smaller these days, though the joystick device that the woman guiding him uses looks like a cordless power drill. It’s hard to tell what this would really be like when the novelty wears off.
I can see it’s use in terms of an architectural projects and, maybe, a product design, but I’m still wary that you would get much of a real feel for either of those things from the VR version. VR still feels like a technology waiting for a use rather than a useful technology. (Check out the beginning of this video where she’s standing lost and forlorn inside a Windows desktop – this would be my nightmare).
One last thing, I wish IDEO wouldn’t tag it “serious play” as if they need to justify using the word play. I know they use it to reference Tim Brown’s talk, but play is play and it’s a legitimate as anything else.
Great collection of “free interactions” and insightful commentary from Chris Noessel on the Cooper blog. Basically these are little interactive extras, sometimes by-products of a design, sometimes seemingly deliberate (like the iPhone example above). Things that you like to just play with and that have no obvious, functional ‘use’, hence the term “free interaction”.
I don’t think we should be surprised that things like these make a difference – play and playfulness is critical to an interaction whether it is physical or virtual. Whether it is the weight of a nice piece of cutlery in your hand or an elastic interface element on-screen, they all make the everyday object and usage more engaging. It’s often an unconscious affect going on too, but designers who understand this do very well indeed.
It is also a different mindset. It’s interesting for me that Noessel calls it a “free interaction” because that comes from a position that ‘normally’ interactions should always have a tool- or purpose-like function. That mindset seems to be oblivious to the idea that creating pleasurable affect is an important and useful function.
I think it is great, although strangely newbie (he is no newbie), that he ends with a Call To Action for interaction designers:
Since we want our designs to be humane and, presuming they fulfill their utilitarian purposes well, emotionally satisfying, I suggest that designers begin to include one free interaction in their designs to enable the channeling of energy and simple expression. Design this interaction such that:
It’s “free,” i.e. having no significance to the task or content
It’s discoverable in ordinary use of the product
It’s quick and repeatable (Less than half a second.)
It’s pleasant
Almost everything I’ve been involved with in interaction design has been about trying to foreground this playful aspect.
I just noticed a whole series of word-association and other games going on in the comments of Fail Blog posts. I have no idea if this is a new phenomenon, but I haven’t seen it before. Nor is it clear if any of these people know each other from elsewhere, but there is a whole little community gameplay scene that appears to spontaneously twist and turn.
I always find it fascinating how people will bend almost any activity towards play and communication. Blog comments are of course already set up for communication, but it’s the ability to have them nested on Fail Blog that seems to create a the boundaries for the playfulness.
Is this something new or have I just been in a cave or something? Anyone know of other examples of this happening?
Stephen Sniderman’s excellent 1999 essay, Unwritten Rules, in The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology talks about the tacit agreement of unwritten (and impossible) rules required for any kind of play or game. He uses currency as an analogy – we all know the piece of paper is inherently worthless but don’t argue over it when we buy a carton of milk. We mutually agree that a dollar is worth a dollar.
Then, this sentence jumped out at me:
“The system works even though no one can explain it fully and even though we all know it could collapse at any moment if people stopped trusting each other or the system itself.”
I would have loved to have gone to the Serious Play conference, but seem to remember it cost serious money too. This talk from Tim Brown of IDEO sums up a great deal of my own thinking and research, although he got there first of course!
It’s much, much harder to put into practice than people think. Undoing the sense of embarrassment adults feel and the guilt that we’re “not working” is surprisingly difficult, even in design studios.
@yaccovijn You can only check one and then it pops up a window trying to persuade you why that's not a decent reason and to please stay. in reply to yaccovijn20 hrs ago
talks about the tacit agreement of unwritten (and impossible) rules required for any kind of play or game. He uses currency as an analogy – we all know the piece of paper is inherently worthless but don’t argue over it when we buy a carton of milk. We mutually agree that a dollar is worth a dollar.
Playing Word Games in Blog Comments
by Andy Polaine on November 23, 2008
in General
I just noticed a whole series of word-association and other games going on in the comments of Fail Blog posts. I have no idea if this is a new phenomenon, but I haven’t seen it before. Nor is it clear if any of these people know each other from elsewhere, but there is a whole little community gameplay scene that appears to spontaneously twist and turn.
I always find it fascinating how people will bend almost any activity towards play and communication. Blog comments are of course already set up for communication, but it’s the ability to have them nested on Fail Blog that seems to create a the boundaries for the playfulness.
Is this something new or have I just been in a cave or something? Anyone know of other examples of this happening?
Tagged as: Blogging, comments, games, Play
{ 4 comments }