Last week Slacklaunched their Emoji reactions feature. This allows you to attach emoji to a message and for others to chime in and vote for an emoji or add their own. I am very excited by this for a number of reasons.
We use Slack fairly heavily. We have channels for specific projects and we have channels that create a frame of shared presence and cultural reference for our close network. In these channels we already use emoji and animated GIFs quite intensively. They are visual fragments of emotion that can be quickly thrown across the digital divide. Many people like to trivialise these but they are in fact essential non-verbal cues.
Slack nailed the product design of this new feature. That much is to be expected from a company with their track record. What makes it particularly relevant for me to write about here is that this feature is a great example of playful design. Kars identified it as flux in action because: “This is adding variability to what used to be one-dimensional.”
With the emoji feature Slack has identified an existing behaviour that they could better support. People respond to each other with emoji and other images. This is fun but it can quickly become overwhelming. Emoji reactions are just the right amount of functionality and structure to allow people to more richly express themselves. The result is more expressive interactions and more effective communication.
Emoji reactions is a great new feature that will see a lot of use (at least from us) and it demonstrates how playful design is a central part of product design.
At the start of this week, we looked back on the playtest of project SHACHI’s second beta version. I went over to the client to discuss the outcomes, and the whole team collaborated on a plan for the next sprint. Meanwhile Alper took a moment to update the project financials.
More planning happened on KOKORO. We’ll have roughly two weeks for the first design sprint on a product which will help teenagers improve their mental health. I visited the client to discuss the plan for the sprint, and we collaborated on a sketch of the product’s underlying system.
We’ll be exploring a conversational UI for this project so copy is really important. Because of this I immediately started writing in Gingko—a useful tool for this sort of thing because it supports a multidimensional document structure. I also did a tiny bit of sketching on the interface itself, but we’re keeping it super simple. Alper meanwhile explored the best technologies to prototype with.
On Thursday I joined Erwin for a number of Skype calls with teenagers about KOKORO’s subject matter—what common causes of “hassle” are, how they deal with them, etc. We’re trying to involve the target audience in as many ways as possible in this project. Challenging, but enjoyable.
Last but not least, I processed the outcomes of our workshop with SodaProducties for project TEDASUKE into a sketch of a user journey. I headed over to them as well to review and amend the sketch. The next step will be to clean it up, deliver it, and move on to sketching of the product itself.
I was in the Netherlands all of last week for some joint work with Kars. I hope to be stationary in Berlin for a bit now since all the back and forth does get a bit tiring and we have lots of studio work to chew on ahead of us.
Kars gave a demo of SHACHI to a bunch of museums on Monday while I flew to Amsterdam. Tuesday we finished some final things for the playtest on Wednesday. The playtest script was similar though this time we had a game that was nearly content and feature complete. Niels ‘t Hooft joined us to take a look at the Airborne Museum and to help us document the entire thing. We’re discussing the results with the client and planning our next steps but we are confident that we are headed into the right direction.
Kars planned the first design sprint for KOKORO which is an interesting project we will talk more about later.
Thursday morning we went straight into a user journey workshop for TEDASUKE. That client has a social enterprise which they want to realign into something where the people doing stuff can self-organize themselves. We’ll be helping them come up with a strategy and concept that they can take to market.
Yes, we work hard. But we manage to enjoy ourselves as well, as you can tell from the nice photo above taken by Tim during a rare occasion: All of project SHACHI’s team physically copresent in our Utrecht studio.
Alper was in NL to run project KOKORO’s first workshop together with me. We spent a full morning with the client and various experts mapping a new product idea using engagement loops. It was very fruitful.
We will be playtesting a new version of SHACHI soon, so the team spent a week polishing, while I mainly concerned myself making sure all preparations for the test were made in time.
Halfway through the week Alper headed back to Berlin with a fresh batch of Bycatch copies in tow.
Meanwhile, I did planning work on the first design sprint for KOKORO and also for project TEDASUKE: We’ll be kicking this one off soon with a workshop as well, but focused on mapping user journeys.
In February of this year I went over to Reinwardt Academy to work with exhibition direction students. I was invited by Mario Jellema to share my perspective on the role of play and playfulness in museums. I enjoy talking to students, but I like working hands-on with them even more. So we turned the session into a small workshop. The result was an interesting and enjoyable afternoon, which demonstrates what can happen if we put the activity of play front-and-center in a design project.
I started by talking a bit about our work in the museum area, using Beestenbende as an example, and also the work we are currently doing in project SHACHI for the Museums Association. Our approach is always to look for the activities that are at the heart of an exhibition’s subject, and use that as a starting point.
I then introduced the assignment: To redesign the famous Art of this Century gallery so that it becomes (more) playful. The gallery was created by Peggy Guggenheim in the 1940s and was located on 57th Street in New York City. We chose this exhibition because it was at the time revolutionary for its marriage of the gallery’s interior architecture with the artworks on display. As such it would offer rich material for the assignment.
We had a conversation about what play and playfulness are. We discussed how play is Contextual, Carnivalesque, Appropriative, Disruptive, Autotelic, Creative and Personal. We also talked about how playfulness is different from play in that it’s an attitude, not an activity which lacks the autotelic aspect of play itself. For this I made liberal use of Miguel Sicart’s excellent Play Matters, which I’ve covered in detail in a couple of blog posts already.)
As an example we looked at Ann Hamilton’s piece The Event of a Thread. The piece features on the cover of Play Matters, and I thought it would be a good fit for the work the students had ahead of themselves, seeing as how it is spatial, uses props, people and many other things to create a deeply playful work of art.
The main point I wanted to get across was this: Play is like language; a way of understanding ourselves and the world around us. In this way it can be used as a tool alongside others in the design of an exhibition. Even if the exhibition isn’t to be a plaything (a game or a toy or a playground), visitors can be encouraged to approach it with a playful attitude. If they are, then they might engage more deeply with the exhibition.
The intended outcome of the exercise was a physical scale model that one person can walk through with a figurine, while describing and acting out what it is they do, while another person describes and acts out the responses of the exhibition.
Being a strong adherent of dogfooding, I shared a video of a simple example I came up with myself. Starting from the curved canvas wall that was part of the AotC gallery, I proposed making it adjustable by visitors.
Quickly whipping something up with ready-to-hand materials (in this case LEGO and paper) and acting out the interactions is a basic interaction design technique. I shortly talked about sketches versus prototypes. I wanted to be sure students understood that it would be fine for their models to be more tentative and evocative, than specific and didactic. For this I referred to the classic Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton, one of the few interaction design textbooks I know of that is as useful for playful design as it is for purely instrumental projects.
A final bit of design theory I shared was the notion of an iterative process. I encouraged them to move swiftly from ideating to sketching to testing to reflecting and back to ideating again. To that end, this is the structure I gave them for the workshop:
Step 1: Ideate and prototype one thing a person can do, solo.
Step 2: Pair up and play each other’s prototypes. Reflect on them. What was enjoyable about it, and why?
Step 3: Come up with a new idea, based on the original two prototypes but better. Make sure you test it and improve it at least once.
Step 4: Present (demo) the ideas to each other. Let people ask questions and make suggestions for improvement. Makers don’t respond but just listen.
There was plenty of paper to work with. I also brought a bunch of LEGO, including a fresh batch of minifigs still in packaging. The pleasure with which these were opened and admired was a nice way to segue into a more playful mindset. I also brought a secret weapon: a Muji LEGO hole punch, which is a great tool for building LEGO/paper hybrids. I wish I’d brought a couple more back from Japan.
We also provided large printouts of copies from an exhibition catalogue on the gallery for reference and remix purposes.
This workshop’s focus was on getting acquainted with new concepts and processes. Even so, some interesting and enjoyable outcomes were produced. They included a picture gallery in which the pieces rotate to follow a particular visitor (which reminded me of Random International’s Audience), and a cylindrical space which rotates as the visitor moves around it (reminiscent of Villa Volta in Dutch amusement park Efteling).
Students learned about play and playfulness, sketching player experiences and the iterative design process. But the most important thing they learned was the importance of playing well together. This is a vital skill for successfully testing models such as the ones made in this workshop. It requires imagination and spontaneity, similar to that found in improv theater.
For example, those playing the role of the exhibition had a tendency to tell the person playing the visitor what to do. It appears they would think of the created experience as a linear path to be followed. It takes some time to adjust to the notion of a visitor/player being the person who completes the experience. This also requires a particular attitude from the player, to forget about all they know as a co-creator and to really inhabit the role of a first-time visitor, as they move their figurine through the model and narrate their actions.
I am convinced such skills can be practiced by playing many different things, with many different people, all the while being mindful of how physical stuff and the social rules come together to shape an experience. It’s a valuable skill to have as a designer of exhibitions, or of any other thing used or inhabited by people. Workshops like this help develop those skills, and I always enjoy facilitating them.
Last week Kars talked with the Airborne Museum about the upcoming playtest for SHACHI and also demoed our progress to the client. We are planning a minor polish sprint while we wait for that playtest.
Kars also attended the Hacking Habitat life-hack marathon about debt and facilitated a session of Playing with Rules for a group of people involved with the subject.
In my absence Kars prepared the kick-off workshop for our new project KOKORO where we will use the engagement loops model to found our design with.
In media appearances: both of us are featured separately in Vrij Nederland’s ranking of the Netherlands’s top 101 nerds. We are honoured, kind of.
I agree @CForaita I really enjoyed the inspiring talk from @whatsthehubbub@alper — It was also wonderful to meet Alper & to see you Chris
I spent last week in Vienna from Tuesday onwards to present at the ÜBERALL app congress about playful design. I combined the visit with a fact-finding mission for Cuppings which proved to be extremely fruitful. I drank lots of coffee in Vienna’s excellent third wave coffee bars while preparing my presentation.
And another Star joins us ;) Meet @alper who will unravel the mystery of Engagement Loops in improving your app. pic.twitter.com/kOpU02b7vI
I returned from a long holiday in South-East Asia to find the business humming along nicely thanks to Alper’s capable stewardship. I’ve mentioned this before, but the fact that all of our work lives in Asana makes it super easy for me to catch up on things and pick up where I left off.
I took over design direction on SHACHI from Alper, who had the tough job of being both design and technical lead in the past few weeks, but performed admirably. We spent the remainder of the week working with Tim and Niels on the game’s second beta. It’s a joy to see an increasing amount of gorgeous art and witty prose find its way into the game.
I called our friends at Drop to discuss BANKEN’s progress, and later on provided some suggestions on how to deal with a couple of design issues that emerged from a recent test. They were mostly related to clarifying the interactions in interactive video, which to a non-gamer audience can be a lot less obvious than to those who have played The Walking Dead, etc.
We also started preparing work on two new projects. One is code named KOKORO and involves prototyping a playful product for the improvement of mental well-being of middle school children. The other is code named TEDASUKE, which is concept development for a tool with which volunteer workers in a variety of social enterprises can develop their skills.
Towards the end of the week Alper and I had a call with Lekha to share stories about Bycatch’s successful launch at TWO5SIX, and the subsequent media coverage. (Check out the blurbs on the game’s website. If you want to support us in our efforts to break new ground in the issue game space, consider ordering a copy or two, or share the story about the game with your friends.) We also discussed marketing efforts going forward.
Alper did a great job explaining Bycatch to Dutch national radio, resulting in a cool item which you can listen to here (if you understand Dutch).
Odds and ends: I drafted a blog post on a playful museum exhibition design workshop which I ran a while ago, due to be published soon. Alper also went to another Unity meetup. He tells me he learned some stuff, which is always nice.
Finally, a heads-up: Alper will be in Vienna for Überall App Congress on June 10–11. He’s closing keynote of the second day, and will be talking about “design for a playful world” (of course).
Last week I processed the last of the media attention for Bycatch. We now have a fairly handsome list of praise in various languages at the top of the page (check it out!) with Kotaku, Killscreen, Deutschlandradio Kultur, WIRED, NOS and Bright. We might add one or two more to that but with that it’s time to close off this chapter and move forward to our next steps. Next up most likely we will make a video about the game. We will also be talking about and playing Bycatch around the world over the course of the year.
SHIJIMI hit a minor snag that will be resolved in the following weeks. It does look like everybody is enthusiastic about the project so it looks increasingly likely that this will move out of the tentative stage.
Project SHACHI is well underway considering some changes happening over on the client side. For us it mostly means that the current sprint could not be completed due to external factors and we will be postponing our playtest.
We will be involved in an upcoming symposium about automated game design organized by the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. We consulted on this before thanks to our associate Joris Dormans’s involvement in the project. The topic of computer aided game design including further work on Machinations is something that is highly relevant to our practice. More on this later.
Last week we were mostly concerned with capturing the press attention the launch of Bycatch netted us. You can see most of the attention posted over at the official website but we were happy to read things written on WIRED, Kotaku, NOS, Control-Online among other places. Not to mention the stuff still in various pipelines. All of that attention resulted in a lot of sales. So much in fact that our Berlin based fulfilment operation is running low on product. Don’t let that stop you from ordering our game though. We have plenty more in our Utrecht office.
On the other track work on SHACHI picked up pace and we’re busy building that while we wait for our next playtest opportunity. Other than that it was a fairly quiet week with a couple of meetings here and there.
Last week I was in the Netherlands to participate in a pitch meeting in Tilburg. The rest of the week I worked at the Utrecht studio in Kars’s absence, took some meetings and coincidentally caught up with a bunch of friends. I went over to SodaProducties to talk over a bit of invention we will be doing for them soon. Pictured below is their view on our studio.
The rest of the time I was busy picking up project management for SHACHI’s final beta sprint after which we should have a fully functional though not yet finished product.
Audio of the talk at re:publica 2015, recorded by re:publica (Audiopodcast re:publica 2015), via iVoox.
Before I flew back to Berlin on Friday evening I prepared everything for the launch of Bycatch the next day in Brooklyn. Subalekha went on stage during TWO5SIX and talked about the game and the thinking behind it. Now that we have finally launched, we’re busy keeping track the ongoing coverage and orders that are coming in.
Slack’s emoji reactions are playful product design in action
Last week Slack launched their Emoji reactions feature. This allows you to attach emoji to a message and for others to chime in and vote for an emoji or add their own. I am very excited by this for a number of reasons.
We use Slack fairly heavily. We have channels for specific projects and we have channels that create a frame of shared presence and cultural reference for our close network. In these channels we already use emoji and animated GIFs quite intensively. They are visual fragments of emotion that can be quickly thrown across the digital divide. Many people like to trivialise these but they are in fact essential non-verbal cues.
Slack nailed the product design of this new feature. That much is to be expected from a company with their track record. What makes it particularly relevant for me to write about here is that this feature is a great example of playful design. Kars identified it as flux in action because: “This is adding variability to what used to be one-dimensional.”
With the emoji feature Slack has identified an existing behaviour that they could better support. People respond to each other with emoji and other images. This is fun but it can quickly become overwhelming. Emoji reactions are just the right amount of functionality and structure to allow people to more richly express themselves. The result is more expressive interactions and more effective communication.
Emoji reactions is a great new feature that will see a lot of use (at least from us) and it demonstrates how playful design is a central part of product design.