Tag: events

What I’m doing at the Festival of Games

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I’ve helped out with the pro­gram of this year’s NLGD Fes­ti­val of Games. If you’re into gaming’s fringe phe­nom­e­na, then this edi­tion is not to be missed. The conference’s theme is “play glob­al, glob­al play” and will cel­e­brate the impact of gam­ing beyond the screen. I curat­ed sev­er­al ses­sions focused on urban games and alter­nate real­i­ty games, some of which I will be present at myself. Here they are in no par­tic­u­lar order:

  • Adri­an Hon of Six to Start is com­ing over to Utrecht for a keynote titled “Why sto­ries in games suck”. Adri­an was one of the peo­ple behind the ambi­tious and influ­en­tial ARG Per­plex City. For a taste of what this ses­sion might be like, check out Dan Hon’s1 talk “Every­thing you know about ARGs is WRONG”.

  • Dur­ing a par­al­lel ses­sion, Evert Hoogen­doorn will look at per­for­mance in games. Evert heads up the Design for Vir­tu­al The­ater and Games pro­gram at the Utrecht School of the Arts. Know­ing Evert, this ses­sion won’t be just about performance…

  • I’ll be mod­er­at­ing a ses­sion con­sist­ing of three case stud­ies. You’ll get an exclu­sive look behind the scenes of the prac­tice of three sea­soned design­ers of urban games and ARGs. The pre­sen­ta­tions will be short but sweet, each fol­lowed by ample time for Q&A. The peo­ple I’ve asked to present are the afore­men­tioned Adri­an Hon, Nathalie Bräh­ler of Cul­tur­al Oil and Ronald Lenz of 7scenes.

  • The elu­sive Min­kette and myself will run a three-hour work­shop, where you’ll get a crash course in design­ing sim­ple but fun street games. We’re hop­ing to make this ses­sion very acces­si­ble, but also very much hands-on, phys­i­cal and active. Min­kette has been involved with Punch­drunk, Hide & Seek and The Soho Project; what bet­ter facil­i­ta­tor can you wish for?

  • The games devel­oped dur­ing the work­shop will be avail­able for playtest­ing dur­ing a sep­a­rate open ses­sion. You’ll get to play fun lit­tle games, and will be asked to vote on your favourite. The win­ner will receive an awe­some prize.

  • Update: Before the open playtest ses­sion, I’ll be host­ing a lunch ses­sion open to all peo­ple work­ing in the area of social and tan­gi­ble play. It’s on the pro­gram as “ARG lunch” but don’t let that fool you. If you make urban games, per­va­sive games, or any type of game that’s not lim­it­ed to what hap­pens on the screen, you’re wel­come to join us. We’ll be look­ing at how we can join forces in cer­tain strate­gic areas, but the ses­sion is also just about get­ting to know each other.

And there you have it. I’m quite hap­py with the way the pro­gram has shaped up, and I am excit­ed to see how the ses­sions turn out (though I’m sure they’ll be great). If this has wet your appetite, why not head over to the NLGD Fes­ti­val of Games web­site and get your­self a tick­et right now? I hope to see you there!

  1. Dan is Adrian’s broth­er and busi­ness part­ner [↩]

Looking back on a second This happened – Utrecht

Some more catch­ing up with things that occurred recent­ly; on Mon­day Feb­ru­ary 23 we1 had our sec­ond This hap­pened. I am quite sat­is­fied with how things went. 

For one; we had some unplanned cohe­sion2 amongst talks.3 Three out of four talks dis­cussed the use of field research (to use the term broad­ly). It was good to have some dis­cus­sion of how this is put in prac­tice, as I often find ethno­graph­ic tech­niques being pre­sent­ed as some kind of sil­ver bul­let, but with­out any clear demon­stra­tion of its appli­ca­tion. It was also cool to see field research being applied effec­tive­ly in such dif­fer­ent con­texts (pri­ma­ry school, the elder­ly, South Africa).

To my relief, a sig­nif­i­cant­ly larg­er per­cent­age of the audi­ence (com­pared to last time) was female.4 This was some­thing we had worked con­scious­ly towards, since the first edition’s testos­terone quo­tient was a bit too high. In my opin­ion, a more diverse audi­ence is con­ducive to the kind of relaxed, open and hon­est atmos­phere we are pur­su­ing. The main way we tried to draw in a more bal­anced mix of peo­ple was by invit­ing more female speak­ers. Three out of four talks were by women. All of them were great. It seems to have worked.

I love that This hap­pened seems to be a venue for the kind of unas­sum­ing and hon­est pre­sen­ta­tions we some­how stop giv­ing once we leave design school (or at least I have). I can’t think of oth­er events where I am treat­ed to such won­der­ful war sto­ries from the front-lines of inter­ac­tion design.

The dis­cus­sions after each ses­sion were good again as well. Lots of thought­ful ques­tions, crit­i­cal, but fair. Alper was kind enough to keep min­utes, and has blogged the most salient parts over at his site (in Dutch).5

Our friends in Lon­don launched a new web­site that now con­tains videos and slides of all talks from past events. The Utrecht ses­sions are on there too, so go have a look. It already is an amaz­ing col­lec­tion of high-qual­i­ty con­tent. Some of my cur­rent favourites are Troi­ka, Crispin Jones and Schulze & Webb.6

The next This hap­pened – Utrecht (num­ber three) is set for June 29. Hope to see you there.

  1. Alexan­der, Ianus and I [↩]
  2. Iskan­der spot­ted it first, this is a blog post in Dutch dis­cussing the par­al­lels between the talks [↩]
  3. Hon­est­ly, this was not some­thing we had aimed for before­hand. [↩]
  4. I real­ize in the tech scene this has once again become a hot top­ic, see for instance this dis­cus­sion over at Chris Messina’s blog. [↩]
  5. I’ve col­lect­ed more posts on our sec­ond edi­tion over at Deli­cious. [↩]
  6. While you’re there, why not vote for This hap­pened in the Brit Insur­ance Design of the Year 2009 awards at the Design Muse­um? [↩]

The 2nd Dutch ‘This happened’ is coming this way

We’re less than four weeks removed from the sec­ond edi­tion of ‘This hap­pened – Utrecht’. As you may know, this is an event I am orga­niz­ing and curat­ing togeth­er with Alexan­der and Ianus. We’re try­ing to offer an alter­na­tive to flashy prod­uct-focused (and fuzzy the­o­ry-based) ses­sions that are preva­lent in the inter­ac­tion design event land­scape. ‘This hap­pened’ pre­sen­ta­tions are short sto­ries about how a project came to be, warts and all. Think of them as the DVD extras for inter­ac­tion design.

This happened – Utrecht #1

On Mon­day Feb­ru­ary 23, we’ll return to The­ater Kikker in Utrecht, the Nether­lands for #2. Our first edi­tion was a suc­cess, and I’m real­ly look­ing for­ward to con­tin­u­ing the exper­i­ment. Here’s who we’ve invit­ed this time to come and shed light on one of their projects:

  • Niels Kee­tels, a game design researcher at the HKU, will be talk­ing about Soft­body. A game that is inter­est­ing because of its lush expres­sive visu­als, as well as the clever bal­anc­ing of open-end­ed and goal-direct­ed play. Oh, and how many games fo you know that had their mechan­ics inspired by hon­est-to-good­ness field research?
  • Sanne Kistemak­er of Muzus will present Piece of Fam­i­ly, which was devel­oped in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Voda­fone. It’s a com­mu­ni­ca­tion device designed for the elder­ly, com­posed of a sketch­pad and a scan­ner, which instant­ly posts whatever’s writ­ten to a blog. The design won a pres­ti­gious Dutch Design Award. 
  • Irene van Peer, a cel­e­brat­ed prod­uct design­er, will talk about the Mahlangu Hand-wash­er, which was fea­tured in the New York Times 8th Annu­al Year in Ideas. It is both a prod­uct (devel­oped as part of a san­i­ta­tion project in Africa) that involves con­vert­ing the cap of an emp­ty bot­tle into a home­made tap, as well as a set of instruc­tions that can be passed on from per­son to person. 
  • Final­ly, we have Nao­mi Schiphorst and Mieke Vullings of MIMOA, who will show how their free and open online guide to mod­ern archi­tec­ture came into being. The site is aimed at a broad audi­ence, not just archi­tects, and aims to build a durable community.

Head over to the This hap­pened – Utrecht web­site for expand­ed descrip­tions of the talks (in Dutch). The reg­is­tra­tion will open on Mon­day Feb­ru­ary 9. I hope to see you there!

What I’ve been up to lately

You might be won­der­ing what’s been going on at the Leapfrog stu­dio late­ly, since I haven’t real­ly post­ed any­thing sub­stan­tial here in a while. Quite some stuff has hap­pened — and I’ll hope­ful­ly get back into post­ing longer arti­cles soon — but for now, here’s a list of more or less inter­est­ing things I have been doing:

This hap­pened – Utrecht

We had our first This hap­pened – Utrecht on Novem­ber 3. I think we suc­ceed­ed in cre­at­ing an event that real­ly looks at the craft of inter­ac­tion design. I’m hap­py to say we’re plan­ning to do three events next year — all at The­ater Kikker in Utrecht — and we’ve got lots of cool speak­ers in mind. If you want to make sure you won’t miss them, sub­scribe to our newslet­ter (in Dutch).1

Teach­ing

My stu­dents are near­ing the end of their project. They’ve been hard at work cre­at­ing con­cepts for mobile social games with a musi­cal com­po­nent; they came up with 20 in total. Now they’re pro­to­typ­ing two of them, and I must say it’s look­ing good. They’ll have to present the games to the project’s com­mis­sion­er — a major mobile phone man­u­fac­tur­er — some­where the begin­ning of Jan­u­ary 2009. I hope to be able to share some of the results here afterwards.

Office space

Since Decem­ber 1 I am a res­i­dent of the Dutch Game Gar­den’s Busi­ness Club. That means I now have a nice office smack in the cen­tre of Utrecht. The building’s home to lots of won­der­ful games com­pa­nies, some, like me, oper­at­ing on the fringes — like Fource­Labs and Monoban­da. If you’re curi­ous and would like to drop by for a tour, a cof­fee and some con­ver­sa­tion, let me know.

Brain­storm

I was invit­ed do help com­pose one of the cas­es for the ‘Grote Ams­ter­damse Water­brain­wave’. A one-day brain­storm in which 45 stu­dents from var­i­ous insti­tu­tions were asked to come up with water-relat­ed inno­va­tions that would make the Nether­lands a sig­nif­i­cant glob­al play­er once again. It was organ­ised by the Port of Ams­ter­dam, Water­net and Verleden van Ned­er­land2. I also attend­ed the day itself as an out­side expert on games and the cre­ative indus­try in gen­er­al. Read a report of the event at FD.nl (in Dutch).

Book

Dan Saf­fer’s book Design­ing Ges­tur­al Inter­faces has been pub­lished by O’Reilly and is now avail­able. Turn to page 109 and you’ll find a sto­ry­board by yours tru­ly used for illus­tra­tion pur­pos­es. That’s the first time any work of mine is fea­tured in print, so nat­u­ral­ly I’m quite proud. I have yet to receive my copy, but got a sneak peek this week­end and I must say it looks promis­ing. If you’re a design­er need­ing to get up to speed with mul­ti-touch, phys­i­cal com­put­ing and such, this should be a good place to start.

That’s about it for now. There’s a lot of excit­ing stuff in the works, the out­comes of which I will hope­ful­ly be able to share with you in 2009. 

  1. The cre­ators of This hap­pened in Lon­don have been nom­i­nat­ed for a best of the year award by the Design Muse­um, by the way. Well-deserved, I would say! [↩]
  2. A cross-media cam­paign aimed at increas­ing aware­ness of Dutch nation­al his­to­ry. [↩]

Collaboratively designing Things through sketching

So far, Ianus, Alexan­der and I have announced three of the four peo­ple who’ll be speak­ing at the first Dutch This hap­pened. They are Fabi­an of Ron­i­mo Games, Phi­line of Super­nana and Dirk of IR labs The final addi­tion to this won­der­ful line-up is Wern­er Jainek of Cul­tured Code, the devel­op­ers of Things, a task man­age­ment appli­ca­tion for Mac OS X as well as the iPhone and iPod Touch.

When I first got in touch with the guys at Cul­tured Code, I asked who of the four prin­ci­pals was respon­si­ble for inter­ac­tion design. I was sur­prised to hear that a large part of the inter­ac­tion design is a col­lab­o­ra­tive effort. This flies in the face of con­ven­tion­al wis­dom in design cir­cles: You’re not sup­posed to design by com­mit­tee. Yet no-one can deny Things’ inter­ac­tion design is sol­id, focused and cohesive.

Things touch still life by Cultured Code

Wern­er and his asso­ciates col­lab­o­rate through vig­or­ous sketch­ing. Some­times they pro­duce many mock-ups to iron out appar­ent­ly sim­ple bits of the appli­ca­tion. A prime exam­ple being this recur­ring tasks dia­log. Just look at all the alter­na­tives they explored. Their atten­tion to detail is admirable. Also, take a look at the pho­tos they post­ed when they announced Things touch. I’m sure that, if you’re a design­er, you can’t help but love care­ful­ly exam­in­ing the details of such work in progress. 

Wern­er tells me he’s been busy scan­ning lots of sketch­es to share at This hap­pened – Utrecht #1. I can’t wait to hear his sto­ries about how the design of both the desk­top and mobile app have happened. 

Wern­er com­pletes our line-up. Which you can see in full at thishappened.nl. There, you’ll also be able to reg­is­ter for the event start­ing this Mon­day (20 Octo­ber). I hope to see you on 3 Novem­ber, it promis­es to be a love­ly filled with the sto­ries behind inter­ac­tion design.

How a student game became a Wii and DS title

It’s time to start reveal­ing the speak­ers for This hap­pened – Utrecht #1. First up is Fabi­an Akker, co-founder of the inde­pen­dent stu­dio Ron­i­mo Games. The stu­dio was fund­ed with mon­ey Fabi­an and his col­leagues earned by sell­ing the con­cept behind one of their games to THQ.1 The game is called De Blob, and the new ver­sion is now avail­able on the Nin­ten­do Wii and DS.2 As part of a 3rd year assign­ment at the Utrecht School of the Arts’ Game Design and Devel­op­ment course, De Blob was cre­at­ed for the munic­i­pal­i­ty of Utrecht. The aim was to allow peo­ple to explore the city’s future sta­tion area, which is under heavy recon­struc­tion. You could there­fore call De Blob a seri­ous game — a game that is not only fun but also use­ful. It is not often that a seri­ous game makes the tran­si­tion to a title aimed pure­ly at enter­tain­ment. It is more often the case that an enter­tain­ment con­cept gets inject­ed with some ‘seri­ous’ con­tent, with usu­al­ly dis­ap­point­ing results. At This hap­pened – Utrecht #1 Fabi­an, who was the orig­i­nal game’s lead design­er, will share the sto­ry of how it came to be.

Screenshot of De Blob, created by Ronimo Games, published by THQ

I announced This hap­pened – Utrecht #1 last week. The event takes place on Mon­day 3 Octo­ber at 20:30. Reg­is­tra­tion will open next Mon­day (20 Octo­ber) — space is lim­it­ed so mark your calendars!

Curi­ous about the rest of the line-up? Tomor­row, Ianus will announce our sec­ond speak­er. Update: go read what Ianus has to say about Phi­line of Super­nana.

  1. THQ is a large pub­lish­er of games, such as Saints Row and Age of Empires. [↩]
  2. The game was rede­vel­oped by an out­side stu­dio. [↩]

Announcing This happened – Utrecht

I’m hap­py to announce This hap­pened – Utrecht; a series of events for inter­ac­tion design­ers that I have been work­ing on togeth­er with Ianus Keller and Alexan­der Zeh. On Mon­day 3 Novem­ber we’ll have our first edi­tion at The­ater Kikker. I’m keep­ing the line-up to myself for now, but I can assure you it is awesome.

At This hap­pened, you’ll get four to five short lec­tures by inter­ac­tion design­ers about the process behind one of their projects. Each lec­ture is fol­lowed by ample time for dis­cus­sion. We invite speak­ers from many dif­fer­ent domains, such as prod­ucts, web, soft­ware, games, archi­tec­ture and art. This way, we hope to show that although the out­comes are dif­fer­ent, there is a lot to learn from fel­low design­ers work­ing in areas oth­er than your own.

This hap­pened has been going on in Lon­don for some time now, with great suc­cess. I can’t remem­ber when exact­ly I first came across the con­cept, but I do know that from the start I want­ed to intro­duce it in the Nether­lands. Imag­ine my excite­ment when I received an enthu­si­as­tic response to my pro­pos­al from the guys in London. 

I believe This hap­pened real­ly adds some­thing to the design event land­scape. It isn’t often you get to go some­where to hear about the hard work that went into fin­ished projects. Usu­al­ly, you either get a demo of what has been achieved, or you hear some­one talk about what it is he would like to work on, not what he’s actu­al­ly done. Nei­ther is very infor­ma­tive for prac­tis­ing design­ers. At This hap­pened, the focus is firm­ly on process, not on out­come, and on mak­ing & doing, not (only) on thinking.

Reg­is­tra­tion is free and will open around two weeks before the event starts. Watch this space, or keep an eye on the offi­cial This hap­pened – Utrecht web­site (in Dutch).

Reboot 10 slides and video

I am break­ing radio-silence for a bit to let you know the slides and video for my Reboot 10 pre­sen­ta­tion are now avail­able online, in case you’re inter­est­ed. I pre­sent­ed this talk before at The Web and Beyond, but this time I had a lot more time, and I pre­sent­ed in Eng­lish. I there­fore think this might still be of inter­est to some peo­ple.1 As always, I am very inter­est­ed in receiv­ing con­struc­tive crit­i­cism Just drop me a line in the comments.

Update: It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to briefly sum­ma­rize what this is about. This is a pre­sen­ta­tion in two parts. In the first, I the­o­rize about the emer­gence of games that have as their goal the con­vey­ing of an argu­ment. These games would use the real-time city as their plat­form. It is these games that I call urban pro­ce­dur­al rhetorics. In the sec­ond part I give a few exam­ples of what such games might look like, using a series of sketches.

The slides, posted to SlideShare, as usual:

Urban Pro­ce­dur­al Rhetorics @ Reboot 10
View SlideShare pre­sen­ta­tion or Upload your own.

The video, hosted on the Reboot website:

  1. I did post a tran­script in Eng­lish before, in case you pre­fer read­ing to lis­ten­ing. [↩]

Design-related endnotes for MoMo AMS #7

Yes­ter­day I attend­ed my first Mobile Mon­day in Ams­ter­dam. The theme was “val­ue” and in my mind, I had already equat­ed the term with “user expe­ri­ence”. This was a mis­take. Con­trary to my expec­ta­tions, the event was well out­side of my com­fort zone. Dis­cus­sions were dom­i­nat­ed by busi­ness and tech­nol­o­gy per­spec­tives. I found the expe­ri­ence frus­trat­ing at times, but I guess this is good. Frus­tra­tion often leads to new insights. There­fore, although this may not sound as a rec­om­men­da­tion, I would say MoMo is an event worth vis­it­ing for any design­er inter­est­ed in mobil­i­ty. It will remind you that in this indus­try, many ideas you take for grant­ed are far from accepted.

I thought I’d share some thoughts con­cern­ing the salient points of the evening.

Context

Con­text was often equat­ed with loca­tion. To me, these two are far from the same. Loca­tion is, at best, a com­po­nent of con­text, which also involves what peo­ple are doing, who else is there, what objects are present, etc. But, more impor­tant­ly: Con­text aris­es from inter­ac­tions, it is rela­tion­al and there­fore can­not be objec­ti­fied. Coin­ci­den­tal­ly, Adam Green­field has post­ed some valu­able insights on this top­ic.

As an exam­ple, con­sid­er a per­son present in the White House, in the pos­ses­sion of a firearm, in clear sight of the pres­i­dent. The mean­ing of this sit­u­a­tion (i.e. the con­text) depends com­plete­ly on who this per­son is and what his moti­va­tions are. He might be work­ing (body­guard­ing the pres­i­dent), he might be at war (mak­ing an attempt at the president’s life) or he might be play­ing around (the gun isn’t real, he’s the pres­i­den­t’s son). 

Any­way — I sub­scribe to the view that we should not attempt to guess con­text, the above exam­ple has hope­ful­ly shown that this is an impos­si­ble task. (At least, as long as we can­not reli­ably read the minds of peo­ple.) In stead, we should ‘lim­it’ our­selves to giv­ing places, things, etc. a voice in the con­ver­sa­tion (mak­ing them self-describ­ing, and account­able) and hav­ing con­text arise those voic­es, as deter­mined by the peo­ple involved. 

Open source

Ajit Jaokar posit­ed that open source mobile soft­ware (such as Android) will lead to new device man­u­fac­tur­ers enter­ing the are­na. The anal­o­gy was made to the PC indus­try with the emer­gence of white-label box­es. I won­der though, for this to tru­ly hap­pen, should­n’t the hard­ware be open-sourced too, not (just) the software?

In any case, I think hav­ing more hand­set man­u­fac­tur­ers is won­der­ful. Not in the least for the fact that it will open the door for a more diverse offer­ing, one poten­tial­ly tai­lored to regions so far under-served by device man­u­fac­tur­ers. Which brings me to my next point.

Local, global, diversity, relevance…

Sev­er­al speak­ers allud­ed to the fact that mobile is a glob­al mar­ket, and that busi­ness­es shouldn’t be shy about launch­ing world-wide. I see sev­er­al issues with this. First of all, with­out want­i­ng to sound too anti-glob­al­is­tic, do we real­ly want to con­tin­ue on mak­ing stuff that is the same no mat­ter where you go? I find diver­si­ty a vital stim­u­lus in my life and would hate to see soft­ware expe­ri­ences become more and more the same the world over.

Let’s in stead con­sid­er the fol­low­ing: A ser­vice that might make per­fect sense in one locale very like­ly does not offer any dis­tinc­tive val­ue in anoth­er. I think the exam­ple of the now defunct Skoeps1, which was dis­cussed at the event, illus­trates this per­fect­ly. It did not work in the Dutch mar­ket, but offers real val­ue in ‘devel­op­ing’ coun­tries, where the amount of video crews on the ground is lim­it­ed and images cap­tured by locals using mobile phones are there­fore a wel­come addi­tion to the ‘offi­cial’ coverage.

Context redux

Which brings me back to the ques­tion of con­text, but in this case, the role it plays not as a com­po­nent of a ser­vice, but in the design and devel­op­ment process itself. I was sad to see the most impor­tant point of Rachel Hin­man’s video mes­sage go unno­ticed (at least, judg­ing from the fact that it was not dis­cussed at all). She said that start­ing point for any new ser­vice should be to go out “into the wild” and observe what peo­ple are doing, what they want, what they need, what they enjoy and so on.2 From this real and deep under­stand­ing of people’s con­texts, you can start mak­ing mean­ing­ful choic­es that will help you cre­ate some­thing that offers true value.

It was this notion of start­ing from peo­ple’s con­text that I found most lack­ing at MoMo AMS. Besides Hin­man, I was sur­prised to find only Yme Bosma of Hyves3 allud­ing to it. Who’d have thought?

  1. Skoeps — pro­nounced “scoops” — was a social video site focused on cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism. It went out of busi­ness because not enough “users” were “gen­er­at­ing con­tent”. Ugh. [↩]
  2. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, Hin­man works at Adap­tive Path. Athough I very much agree with her pre­sen­ta­tion’s premise, I felt her exam­ple was a bit disin­gen­u­ous. I find it hard to believe Apple designed iTunes to fit the mix­tape usage sce­nario. This, I think, is more of a hap­py coin­ci­dence than any­thing else. [↩]
  3. Hyves is the biggest social net­work­ing site of the Nether­lands. [↩]

Slides and summary for ‘More Than Useful’

Update: The video and slides are now avail­able on the con­fer­ence site.

The con­fer­ence From Busi­ness to But­tons 2008 aimed to bring togeth­er the worlds of busi­ness and inter­ac­tion design. I was there to share my thoughts on the applic­a­bil­i­ty of game design con­cepts to inter­ac­tion design. You’ll find my slides and a sum­ma­ry of my argu­ment below. 

I real­ly enjoyed attend­ing this con­fer­ence. I met a bunch of new and inter­est­ing peo­ple and got to hang out with some ‘old’ friends. Many thanks to InUse for invit­ing me.

Diagram summarizing my FBTB 2008 talk

The top­ic is pret­ty broad so I decid­ed to nar­row things down to a class of prod­uct that is oth­er-than-every­day — mean­ing both wide and deep in scope. Using Norman’s The Design of Every­day Things as a start­ing point, I want­ed to show that these prod­ucts require a high lev­el of explorabil­i­ty that is remark­ably sim­i­lar to play. After briefly exam­in­ing the phe­nom­e­non of play itself I moved on to show appli­ca­tions of this under­stand­ing to two types of prod­uct: cus­tomiz­able & per­son­al­iz­able ones, and adap­tive ones. 

For the for­mer, I dis­cussed how game design frame­works such as MDA can help with sculpt­ing the para­me­ter space, using ‘expe­ri­ence’ as the start­ing point. I also looked at how games sup­port play­ers in shar­ing sto­ries and spec­u­lat­ed about ways this can be trans­lat­ed to both dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal products. 

For the lat­ter — adap­tive prod­ucts — I focussed on the ways in which they induce flow and how they can rec­om­mend stuff to peo­ple. With adap­ta­tion, design­ers need to for­mu­late rules. This can be done using tech­niques from game design, such as Daniel Cook’s skill chains. Suc­cess­ful rules-based design can only hap­pen in an iter­a­tive envi­ron­ment using lots of sketching. 

The pre­sen­ta­tion was framed by a slight­ly philo­soph­i­cal look at how cer­tain games sub­lim­i­nal­ly acti­vate cog­ni­tive process­es and could thus be used to allow for new insights. I used Break­out and Por­tal as exam­ples of this. I am con­vinced there is an emerg­ing field of play­ful prod­ucts that inter­ac­tion design­ers should get involved with.

Sources ref­er­enced in this pre­sen­ta­tion:1

As usu­al, many thanks to all the Flickr pho­tog­ra­phers who’ve shared their images under a CC license. I’ve linked to the orig­i­nals from the slides. Any image not linked to is prob­a­bly mine.

  1. Most of these are offline books or papers, those that aren’t have been hyper­linked to their source. [↩]