Hubbub has gone into hibernation.

Highlights from Play Matters

By Kars | Published: March 10, 2015

In my review of Play Mat­ters I talked about why I think it is a must-read for any design­er. I thought I’d fol­low that up with some high­lights from the book.

These are most­ly from the first two chap­ters. Miguel first talks about what play is. He offers a min­i­mal def­i­n­i­tion which states that play is con­tex­tu­al, car­ni­va­lesque, appro­pria­tive, dis­rup­tive, autotel­ic, cre­ative and personal.

Miguel then goes on to dis­tin­guish play from play­ful­ness. The for­mer is an activ­i­ty, the lat­ter an atti­tude. In addi­tion, play does not have a goal besides play itself, while play­ful­ness does. This move of dis­tin­guish­ing between play and play­ful­ness is very pro­duc­tive. It allows us to be more artic­u­late about play­ful design.

Play hap­pens in con­texts cre­at­ed for play, in those con­texts in which the autotel­ic nature of play is respect­ed. […] The con­texts in which play­ful­ness hap­pens are not designed or cre­at­ed for play: they are occu­pied by play.

The basic idea of play­ful design is that things can be used for prac­ti­cal pur­pos­es but with a play­ful atti­tude. Things that are explic­it­ly cre­at­ed for this are play­ful designs. The act of cre­at­ing play­ful designs is a chal­lenge to the tra­di­tion­al rela­tion­ship between users and designers.

Play­ful designs are by def­i­n­i­tion ambigu­ous, self-effac­ing, and in need of a user who will com­plete them. […] Play­ful design breaks away from design­er-cen­tric think­ing and puts into focus an object as a con­ver­sa­tion among user, design­er, con­text, and pur­pose. […] Play­ful designs require a will­ing user, a com­rade in play.

If we accept that users are the ones who com­plete play­ful designs, the role of the designed sys­tem itself also changes. It is put on the same plane as users, just as the design­er was before. Miguel’s account of the con­texts with­in which play hap­pens is one of flat­tened hier­ar­chies or per­haps more accu­rate­ly: net­works. Net­works of peo­ple, things, spaces, etc.

This approach to design down­plays sys­tem author­i­ty, a minor but cru­cial revolt against the rel­a­tive sci­en­tism of design, from games to word proces­sors. […] Play­ful design is per­son­al in both the way the user appro­pri­ates it and the way the design­er projects her vision into it. […] Play­ful tech­nolo­gies are designed for appro­pri­a­tion, cre­at­ed to encour­age play­ful­ness. These objects have a pur­pose, a goal, a func­tion, but the way they reach it is through the oblique, per­son­al, and appro­pria­tive act of playfulness.

I love that last bit, because it loops back to the first dis­tinc­tion between play and play­ful­ness. Play is autotel­ic while play­ful­ness isn’t. But play­ful­ness isn’t a thin lay­er on top of an oth­er­wise goal-ori­ent­ed expe­ri­ence. There is a back and forth between goal pur­suit and playfulness.

This may seem triv­ial. But putting tech­nol­o­gy aside for a moment, we can see tiny acts of play­ful­ness in human activ­i­ty all the time. They can be tiny flour­ish­es by which we express our per­son­al iden­ti­ties. Even so, they are what make us humans engaged with the world.

With tech­nol­o­gy medi­at­ing, enabling and con­strain­ing our engage­ment with the world the poten­tial for play­ful­ness is not a giv­en any­more. Peo­ple may play regard­less of their con­text, but we can active­ly accom­mo­date for it. This is a design­er’s responsibility.

At stake is more than our cul­ture of leisure or the ide­al of people’s empow­er­ment; at stake is the idea that tech­nol­o­gy is not a ser­vant or a mas­ter but a source of expres­sion, a way of being. […] Play­ful­ness allows us to extend the impor­tance of play out­side the bound­aries of for­mal­ized, autotel­ic events, away from designed play­things like toys, or spaces like the play­ground or the stadium.

After the chap­ters on play and play­ful­ness, Miguel goes on to talk about toys and play­grounds. Games have attract­ed most of the atten­tion in the con­ver­sa­tion about play­ful design. But we can play with all kinds of play­things, not just games. In this regard, games don’t matter—play matters.

Miguel then goes on to dis­cuss beau­ty and pol­i­tics, which should be of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to artists and activists.

In the final sec­tion, one chap­ter is devot­ed to the chang­ing role of the design­er. Miguel sug­gests we should not mod­el our­selves after game design­ers, but in stead aspire to be archi­tects of play. The book clos­es with a med­i­ta­tion on the role of com­pu­ta­tion in play­ful design. The state­ment quot­ed above about tech­nol­o­gy as a source of expres­sion is expand­ed upon. I will end with it here, but not before rec­om­mend­ing this inspir­ing, evoca­tive book one last time.

com­put­ers should take their place in the world and play with us—not for us, not against us, but togeth­er with us.

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Week 289

By Alper | Published: March 9, 2015

Cam­parc Mk II is in its final stages of devel­op­ment with some touch ups on the soft­ware and con­struc­tion still to be done. There was also a break­through with the stream­ing of video over a 4G con­nec­tion work­ing for the first time. This is great since it will mean the balls can be deployed anywhere.

Received a bunch of Kontakt beacons for the current project

SHACHI saw a bunch of devel­op­ment where we are near­ly at a fea­ture com­plete alpha ver­sion which we will be pol­ish­ing a bit this week in prepa­ra­tion of a playtest. We also received the bea­cons from Kontakt.io which we will use for playtesting.

For BANKEN Kars par­tic­i­pat­ed in a sketch­ing ses­sion to cre­ate on overview of the prod­uct and plan out the course of the project.

For SHIJIMI I did research and sketched out what we think the con­cept should be. I then briefed our artist Mar­ius Mörders to illus­trate the con­cept mod­el for a pre­sen­ta­tion next week.

We put on a blurb by Hans de Zwart on the Bycatch web­site. More blurbs and release updates are forthcoming.

Unity Berlin Meetup

I closed off the week attend­ing the reboot of the Berlin Uni­ty meet­up. I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised by the turnout and the insight about game design you get by talk­ing to peo­ple actu­al­ly cre­at­ing games.

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Engagement loops are the best way to motivate people using game mechanics

By Alper | Published: March 6, 2015

It has been a plea­sure to see our asso­ciate Sebas­t­ian Deter­d­ing’s think­ing evolve through his pre­sen­ta­tions over the years. It has been a treat to read every new deck and to fol­low his rea­son­ing in detail. You can also trace a very dis­tinct line about games, user expe­ri­ence, psy­chol­o­gy and ethics that has become more pro­nounced over time.

Recent­ly Sebas­t­ian pub­lished “Mag­ic Won­der Pix­ie Dust”, a pre­sen­ta­tion which serves as our main ref­er­ence when design­ing for moti­va­tion. This one comes in at 204 slides and it touch­es on every­thing you need to know to do this. I’ll go through it tak­ing the engage­ment loop slide as a guide (below and 101 in the pre­sen­ta­tion) and talk about how we apply it as a design method in our day-to-day con­sult­ing work.

Engagement Loops

We use this engage­ment loop as a way to struc­ture activ­i­ties around learn­able chal­lenges. Peo­ple who start a chal­lenge go through this loop and get rein­force­ment while they try to achieve mas­tery. Mul­ti­ple loops can be inter­linked where cer­tain actions or com­ple­tion will move you to anoth­er loop. Oth­er peo­ple can also go through this sys­tem and their social inter­ac­tions will also feed into the var­i­ous loops.

I’ll walk through each ele­ment of the engage­ment loop below.

Business Goals and User Needs

When­ev­er we start the design of a moti­vat­ing and engag­ing prod­uct or ser­vice, we try to find a cor­re­spon­dence between what the organ­i­sa­tion wants and what users want. Find­ing this is a pre­con­di­tion to be able to do any­thing at all. To find out user needs, we’ll look to see what con­crete user research is avail­able. We’ll also fig­ure out what the busi­ness actu­al­ly wants to achieve. Ask­ing through a series of “Why?” ques­tions is a good way to get to a core busi­ness goal.

Challenge

The next step is to see what kind of inter­est­ing chal­lenge we can find. This needs to be some­thing that a user would like to get bet­ter at. We will then cre­ate a loop around this chal­lenge to rein­force that process of improvement.

Motivation

The moti­va­tion (slide 113 and onwards) is the thing that makes a user actu­al­ly want to be bet­ter at this chal­lenge. This can be any of the social, psy­cho­log­i­cal or phys­i­cal fac­tors from slide 117. The spe­cif­ic moti­va­tion informs the kind of goals we can work towards.

magic-pixie-wonder-dust-3000-enterprise-edition-designing-motivational-experiences-117-638

Goal/Call to Action

The goals (slide 175 and onwards) we offer users can be any­thing, but they need to be clear and rel­e­vant to the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. If they aren’t, the sys­tem will lose cred­i­bil­i­ty and quick­ly alien­ate users. The goals also need to adapt to a user’s increas­ing mas­tery of the challenge.

Action/Resource

The resource a user can per­form an action on (slide 189 and onwards) should be small enough to quick­ly over­see and make progress on. This makes it eas­i­er and quick­er to go through the loop. It can then tie into a larg­er sys­tem if that makes sense.

The action that some­body can per­form should not be con­strained to a sin­gle but­ton or val­ue. The agency of the per­son going through the loop is valu­able. We should use that by giv­ing them the free­dom to act and express themselves.

If the action is too big, we’ll split up the loop into sev­er­al loops.

Feedback

The feed­back we offer (slide 151 and onwards) should appeal to the moti­va­tion we iden­ti­fied ear­li­er. This feed­back could either be imme­di­ate feed­back on the action the user just per­formed, or progress feed­back on where they are with regards to the challenge.

Giv­ing peo­ple feed­back in the form of extrin­sic rewards is effec­tive in the short term but it is not sus­tain­able in the long run. Either avoid it entire­ly or prop up your exter­nal rewards with intrin­sic rewards so they tran­si­tion into some­thing that is longer lasting.

Player Journey

The play­er jour­ney is about embed­ding the loop in a broad­er con­text and see­ing where some­body comes from and where they can go when they are done with this par­tic­u­lar loop. You could pic­ture this as a cus­tomer jour­ney, but with all of the touch points replaced by loops.

The engage­ment loop mod­el makes it fair­ly straight-for­ward to design engag­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices. We iden­ti­fy chal­lenges, come up with loops and decom­pose those into what­ev­er kind of inter­ac­tion flows are nec­es­sary for the prob­lem at hand. In our opin­ion this is the best method to design for agency, com­pe­tence and motivation.

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Week 288

By Kars | Published: March 2, 2015

I was joined by Alper in the Utrecht stu­dio again this week. With all that’s going on in NL at the moment it’s nice to have him on site a lit­tle more frequently.

One of the things we did was start the sec­ond sprint on SHACHI. Alper and Tim worked togeth­er on the alpha ver­sion of the game with some guid­ance from me. It involved a lot of tweak­ing of our pro­to­typ­ing set­up in Uni­ty, which was con­ve­nient to do while co-present. For the remain­der of the sprint they will try to con­vert my very sim­ple phys­i­cal pro­to­type into some­thing dig­i­tal. We will iter­ate from there. In addi­tion, art styles were explored and iBea­cons were select­ed and purchased.

Prototyping Home Rule

I was present at the kick-off of project BANKEN with the client and the rest of the team, which is col­lec­tion of dif­fer­ent small com­pa­nies each spe­cial­is­ing in a part of the prod­uct. Hub­bub is con­sult­ing on this. We’ll be doing some design direc­tion and some pro­to­typ­ing. Lat­er in the week I did some think­ing about how to best approach this.

I did some copy writ­ing for Cam­parc Mark II and I head­ed over to Aldo’s work­shop on Fri­day to review the penul­ti­mate sprint. I got to admire more nifty 3D print­ed parts, such as the tape cable pro­tec­tor below.

Tape cable protector part

Alper, Lekha and I dis­cussed Bycatch’s pric­ing at length. After much tweak­ing of a spread­sheet we were suit­ably fried but we had deter­mined a course for­ward. We also reviewed a sto­ry­board for a pro­mo­tion­al video. Once we have that in hand, we’ll be in a good place to offi­cial­ly launch.

Oth­er project work includ­ed Alper doing some think­ing about SHI­JIM­I’s con­cept visu­al­i­sa­tion, and us deliv­er­ing the final batch of KUMA mock­ups to the client.

On the peo­ple front, we had a long over­due chat with Joris, catch­ing up on our work and explor­ing things we might do in the com­ing peri­od. Arjen also dropped by to share his expe­ri­ences at Knutepunkt.

And final­ly, I blogged a review of Play Mat­ters and we were very pleased with a com­pre­hen­sive item on Deutsch­landra­dio Kul­tur about Bycatch.

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Play Matters

By Kars | Published: February 26, 2015

Crowd at Ann Hamilton, The Event of a Thread

When Miguel Sicart’s Play Mat­ters was pub­lished in August of last year it imme­di­ate­ly went on my to-read list but it took me a while before pick­ing it up. When I did I was imme­di­ate­ly hooked. Not since The Well-Played Game have a I come across such a thought­ful treat­ment of play.

Play Mat­ters is also the best dis­cus­sion of play­ful design I have read in book form or for that mat­ter any place else. Giv­en the fact that we have adopt­ed the term “play­ful design” to describe what we do, I am always look­ing to improve my own think­ing on the sub­ject. In that regard, Play Mat­ters is very help­ful as it pro­vides a vocab­u­lary for talk­ing about play, play­ful­ness, and play­things, and the craft of design­ing for them.

In fact, it is such a good book on the sub­ject, that I would rec­om­mend it to any design­er, not just design­ers of play­things, by which I mean games, toys and play­grounds. It will make you think dif­fer­ent­ly about the rela­tion­ship between the things you make and the peo­ple you make them for. It will help you under­stand that any­thing can be played with, and that this is a good thing.

Miguel con­vinc­ing­ly argues for an under­stand­ing of play as an act of per­son­al expres­sion. Play is a way for peo­ple to under­stand and engage with the world. Seen this way, play is an act of pro­duc­tion, not con­sump­tion. Put in lofty terms, which Miguel does­n’t shy away from, when we play we are ful­ly human.

Because of this, play mat­ters. And because of this, it is impor­tant for us design­ers to acknowl­edge the role of play in our work, even when it is our job to make things that are pri­mar­i­ly meant to be use­ful. Even use­ful things can be approached with a play­ful atti­tude. When we design for this kind of play­ing-while-work­ing we break out of tech­nol­o­gy-as-ser­vant-or-mas­ter dichotomy.

Play Mat­ters is a mere 176 pages long. The final third of the book is tak­en up by notes for those want­i­ng to do fur­ther read­ing and research. It may be short, and writ­ten in an acces­si­ble style (which I wel­come) but it is not shal­low. The book rewards con­tem­pla­tion, and per­haps more impor­tant­ly it invites direct appli­ca­tion in dai­ly practice.

In short, Play Mat­ters is high­ly rec­om­mend­ed to any­one inter­est­ed in play. But per­haps more impor­tant­ly, I think it is required read­ing for any­one inter­est­ed in design.

Update: I blogged some anno­tat­ed high­lights from the book.

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Week 287

By Alper | Published: February 23, 2015

A week in which we got a lot of things done.

KUMA is near­ing com­ple­tion with anoth­er round of mock­ups run by the client. Aldo is mak­ing steady progress on the next ver­sion of Cam­parc. We are going to do an ear­ly con­cept explo­ration for SHIJIMI about games in urban development.

Most of my time went into a muse­um game we’re design­ing code­named SHACHI. We are find­ing our feet in Uni­ty and play­ing around with bea­cons right now. We’ll jump into devel­op­ment in earnest this week. I have got­ten into the habit of shoot­ing a video of the day’s find­ings with my S100. This is an easy high-fideli­ty way to share the design progress.

I also wrote a piece on why we are using Uni­ty for this project and why we think it’s an impor­tant design tool.

Bycatch had a qui­et week while we pre­pare to launch it.

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Unity makes iterative design easy

By Alper | Published: February 20, 2015

We are cur­rent­ly in the mid­dle of a project for which we are using Uni­ty 3D to quick­ly cre­ate a work­ing pro­to­type. We had want­ed to use Uni­ty for a while now because oth­er tools felt too con­strained. Now we final­ly have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to do so.

Oth­er design com­pa­nies and depart­ments are also find­ing out about the ben­e­fits of Uni­ty. I saw two jobs for Uni­ty experts through my net­work in the past weeks as opposed to absolute­ly none before. IXDS were look­ing for a Uni­ty expert and this week I saw that HERE have a per­ma­nent posi­tion for a Uni­ty pro­to­typer.

There are two main rea­sons why Uni­ty is a great tool for iter­a­tive design.

First, Uni­ty is a pro­duc­tion qual­i­ty tool in which you can pro­to­type quick­ly. Uni­ty will allow you to drop your assets into it and place them in a 2D/3D scene. Uni­ty will take almost any­thing you throw at it and if not you can find a library for it (for exam­ple see this work­flow by Zach Gage). If you add some behav­iours to these objects, you can then quick­ly have some­thing that is inter­ac­tive. These behav­iours can be pro­grammed ful­ly but Uni­ty is aimed fore­most at non-pro­gram­mers. Final­ly you can pub­lish your project with a sin­gle action to a mobile device, desk­top or web­site. There are sim­ply no oth­er tools that sup­port this work­flow and are this mature.

2015-02-20 17_49_08

Sec­ond, the fact that the edi­tor and the engine are with­in the same appli­ca­tion enable things that are oth­er­wise impos­si­ble. In Uni­ty you can declare any prop­er­ty of an object to be pub­lic. Uni­ty will then auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate a con­trol in the inspec­tor which you can use to tweak this prop­er­ty. You can then run your appli­ca­tion in the edi­tor using the play but­ton and tweak the val­ue while it is run­ning. In the GIF above (from this tuto­r­i­al) you can see some­body play­ing around with the speed of a car. This ‘live-cod­ing’ capa­bil­i­ty is one of the most impor­tant fea­tures of Unity.

Dur­ing almost every project we have done we want­ed to be able to tweak vari­ables of a run­ning appli­ca­tion. When you want to do play­ful design, you need to fine-tune things to make your game or app feel just right. Cur­rent­ly the only way to do this is through a dif­fi­cult and time con­sum­ing edit-com­pile-run-test cycle. Xcode has some ways to expose vari­ables but they are dif­fi­cult to set up and share with­in a team. Uni­ty has this as a key feature.

This being said, actu­al­ly get­ting start­ed in Uni­ty isn’t easy. There are lots of ways to do every­thing which does­n’t make it very straight for­ward. But the doc­u­men­ta­tion has improved mas­sive­ly since the last time we tried it and the basic ver­sion is now free. There are also many pow­er­ful libraries built on top of Uni­ty for peo­ple cre­at­ing games. It seems like a mat­ter of time until there will also be libraries and assets for peo­ple mak­ing oth­er things.

Uni­ty is one of the most pop­u­lar engines for doing game devel­op­ment right now. Larg­er com­pa­nies pick­ing it up for design pro­to­typ­ing is an inter­est­ing devel­op­ment. It shows the need for hav­ing tools that allow design­ers and pro­gram­mers to be able to pro­to­type togeth­er. One of the few oth­er tools out there that facil­i­tates such an inte­grat­ed pro­to­typ­ing work­flow is the increas­ing­ly pop­u­lar Framer. I look for­ward to see­ing more tools for bet­ter iter­a­tive design like these emerge.

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Week 286

By Kars | Published: February 16, 2015

We made some good progress on sev­er­al projects this week. The big one is Home Rule. Alper and I kicked it off with some plan­ning for the next two weeks. Then we imme­di­ate­ly start­ed crack­ing on things. Alper got a pro­to­typ­ing set­up in Uni­ty up and run­ning, includ­ing iBea­cons inte­gra­tion, and pro­ceed­ed to do some “mate­r­i­al explo­ration”. Mean­while I did some pre­lim­i­nary game design, out­lin­ing mechan­ics and imag­in­ing a play­er’s expe­ri­ence when going through a full game loop.

On the Bycatch front, we had to fix a lit­tle prob­lem affect­ing some cus­tomers when they tried to make a pur­chase. All should be func­tion­ing prop­er­ly again, so why not go an grab your­self a copy?

Alper wrapped up his review of an inter­view by Dude about his mot­ley career, and had some rather dash­ing por­trait pho­tos tak­en for pub­li­ca­tion along­side it.

Alper also pre­sent­ed on Bycatch and our approach to play­ful design at IXDS.

I pre­pared and ran a work­shop on play­ful design for a group of stu­dents fol­low­ing a minor in exhi­bi­tion direc­tion at Rein­wardt Acad­e­my. We redesigned Peg­gy Guggen­heim’s famous Art of This Cen­tu­ry gallery to be more play­ful than it already was, and in the process got some expe­ri­ence with phys­i­cal pro­to­typ­ing and playtest­ing. All in less than 2,5 hours.

Playful exhibition design workshop at Reinwardt Academy

On the project KUMA front, we received and processed feed­back from KLM on the first round of mock­ups, and I spent some time with Tim going over all of it and mak­ing a plan for the required adjust­ments in the sec­ond round, which we’ll deliv­er in rough sto­ry­boards first.

I spent some time research­ing the 4G offer­ings of the major mobile oper­a­tors in NL for Cam­parc Mark II. I was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to find that Voda­fone offers month­ly con­tracts for data sims. In the­o­ry this should suit our needs per­fect­ly so the next step is to test one in the field. If all goes well our Cam­parc balls will be able to roam the city absolute­ly free, which would be glorious.

And on Fri­day, I head­ed over to Aldo’s lab­o­ra­to­ry to review the first Cam­parc Mark II devel­op­ment sprint. Quite a few struc­tur­al improve­ments had been made despite delayed deliv­ery of var­i­ous parts. Get­ting a live demo of all the nice lit­tle details and mak­ing plans for the next sprint was a love­ly way to end a pro­duc­tive week.

SD card protector on Camparc Mark II

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Week 285

By Alper | Published: February 8, 2015

The best news last week was the go-ahead on SHACHI. We’re excit­ed to start work on that in the new week.

Work on the next ver­sion of Cam­parc has start­ed for the STRP bien­nal.

Kars ran a work­shop at Beren­schot togeth­er with Jeroen van Mas­tright. As research for the work­shop I looked to find dilem­mas in games and had a hard­er time than I at first would have thought. This scene from the Walk­ing Dead is a clas­sic exam­ple but many oth­er large scale games are some­what dilem­ma free.

For KLM Kars pre­pared copy and sent the work by Hedge­field to the client for feedback.

I talked with Sebas­t­ian Quack about the Play­ful Com­mons project. I also met Güven Çatak of the BUG Game Lab at Istan­bul Bahçeşe­hir Uni­ver­si­ty.

Kars wrote this high­ly nec­es­sary post of what it exact­ly is that we mean when we say “play­ful design” and why that is an impor­tant way of look­ing at design.

We had very stim­u­lat­ing update calls with our asso­ciates Sebas­t­ian and Ianus as well this week.

Today's office

Because we are in between offices in Berlin I am now tem­porar­i­ly resid­ing in the Rain­mak­ing Loft. It’s a fun and inter­est­ing change of scene though I haven’t found a place in the area yet where I want to have lunch a sec­ond time.

We’re explor­ing sep­a­rat­ing ship­ping costs from Bycatch’s cur­rent price so we can recoup the mon­ey we lose on inter­na­tion­al ship­ping (so get it now while it still includes ship­ping!). We’re also going to repack­age the game to fix a minor print­ing error.

Bycatch on display in Vechtclub XL

You can now see the game on dis­play at the Vecht­club XL.

I demon­strat­ed Bycatch at the table­top game design­ers meet­up here in Berlin’s Spiel­wiese game cafe and left behind a copy there for inter­est­ed peo­ple to try out. I gave an inter­view for the Dutch Design mag­a­zine dude about my career in design with a heavy focus on Bycatch.

On Fri­day evening I met Mar­cus Richter and Den­nis Kogel of Super­lev­el to record a pod­cast about Bycatch where I talked about the game, explained it and played it with my co-hosts in Ger­man. I look for­ward to lis­ten­ing to the result.

Next Tues­day I will be talk­ing at IXD­S’s pre-work talks about design­ing for Bycatch and privacy.

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An Outline of Playful Design

By Kars | Published: February 4, 2015

In the sum­mer of last year we announced a new direc­tion for the stu­dio, which boils down to us no longer fram­ing our work as game design, but as play­ful design. We are inter­est­ed in design­ing a wide range of play­things, and we are also inter­est­ed in design­ing things that aren’t pri­mar­i­ly meant for play but which still ben­e­fit from allow­ing for it.

In recent talks I have been point­ing to sev­er­al ideas that I think togeth­er out­line part of what we con­sid­er play­ful design. I thought I’d write them up here.

1. Community

I have referred to The Well-Played Game by Bernie De Koven, to empha­sise the social con­text with­in which play hap­pens, and the impor­tance of enabling groups to adapt play­things to their needs. One exam­ple of how to do this is by not encod­ing all of a sys­tem’s rules into soft­ware but in stead let­ting peo­ple social­ly nego­ti­ate those rules. Johann Sebas­t­ian Joust does this, and so does our Beesten­bende.

2. Flux

I also think David Kana­ga’s idea of flux dog­ma is very impor­tant: “allow all con­stants to become vari­ables.” By doing this, a play­thing can become like an instru­ment, an expres­sive tool that can be put to many (unex­pect­ed) uses. David’s own Pro­teus is a great exam­ple of this, and we were think­ing a lot about flux dog­ma when we were mak­ing Cam­parc.

3. Invention

And final­ly, when it comes to how we frame design itself, Jack Schulze’s provo­ca­tion “design is about cul­tur­al inven­tion”, oppos­ing it to design as prob­lem solv­ing, has always made a lot of sense to me. Think­ing about design in this way allows us to go beyond the instru­men­tal, even when we are design­ing things with a pur­pose. The work done at BERG often had a whim­si­cal char­ac­ter, pos­si­bly best exem­pli­fied by Lit­tle Print­er. Our own Stand­ing is an attempt to do some­thing that is both use­ful or even seri­ous but makes fun of itself at the same time.

…

So those are three ideas that tak­en togeth­er give a sense of how we approach play­ful design: 1. Under­stand and design for social groups and let them adapt things to their own needs. 2. Make fixed aspects of a thing vari­able, and put them under peo­ple’s con­trol. 3. Con­ceive of design as a dis­ci­pline that cre­ates things that are not “just” use­ful, but that open up new unex­pect­ed possibilities.

Of course, these ideas don’t sit apart from each oth­er. When sup­port­ing a play com­mu­ni­ty, one applies flux to a thing, and is nat­u­ral­ly prac­tic­ing design as inven­tion. A vari­a­tion on this state­ment can be made start­ing from the per­spec­tive of flux, or invention.

A play­ful design dis­ci­pline like this can lead to bet­ter play­things, but per­haps more impor­tant­ly, it also leads to pur­pose­ful things that are more plea­sur­able to use because they allow peo­ple to make them their own, to express them­selves while using them, while being more present in the here and now, because they can weave them into their own social and phys­i­cal contexts.

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