Translating affordance — Tangle Master Board Game
For this week’s assignment, we are going to work on translating digital affordance to a tangible and physical prototype. This really got me thinking about all things that add tangible when I was younger got translated into something digital nowadays, wallet, for example. Back in the days when people had to take their wallets to go out for grocery shopping and “don’t forget your wallet” is still a thing, people now just have to bring their phone and have their credit cards and all information preloaded on their mobile phone — the digitalization of affordance really changes the way people interact with money and commerce.
It took me a while to think about it backward — how can I make something that is already digitalized into something tangible? What are the pros and cons of this tangible product and how is that different from digital products?
Something that got me this aha moment is actually a scene from a super popular Netflix drama recently called Squid Game. It tells a story of a survival game where 456 players, drawn from different walks of life but each deeply in debt, play a set of children’s games with deadly consequences for losing for a chance to win a ₩45.6 billion prize. The second game in the drama is to take out a stamped shape from the honeycomb candy (dalgona) without breaking a piece. Most of the participants use the needle that was given, while the main character Ki Hun chose to remove the shape by licking the sugar candy (so the sugar melts). I was certainly impressed by his strategies and also how the fact that this game is physical and tangible so people can choose their unique ways to interact with the object — if it is digital, there is no way to lick to melt the dalgona candy.
The emerge of my idea
The fact of a tool or a product being digital or tangible does change how people interact with it — this is what affordance is for. This aha moment leads me to this game “Triangle Master 3D” that was pretty popular a couple ago. The purpose of the game is to untangle strings to the point where they aren’t overlapping anymore.
I think it would be an interesting and different experience in terms of how people can physically interact with the ropes, especially for someone who might be weaker in spatial visualization (like me). My idea is to change this game into a tangible board game that the players customize the difficulty levels with their friends, which can be played by a wider range of players from children to adults.
Sketches
My first step was to get a basic sketch to see how this game is created visually and logically as my reference to see what materials do I need to create this tangible experience.
I started with an initial sketch using the Amazon package as the base to build the game on, but this doesn’t really serve the purpose of being “portable” as the mobile game that people can carry and play anywhere and anytime. This made me think of what is the “affordance” of the game application that I can translate into my tangible prototype. Here is a table of what and how I can translate the digital affordance:
Portability then becomes a problem if I build as my initial sketch suggests — the game won’t close, and it’s very hard to carry around or store all the gears (yarns, stickies, etc). I found out this pizza-box-like weight scale box might be a really good start to build the board game, therefore I did my second sketch of what it should be.
The set-ups
I gathered some recycles, cotton yards, stickies, watercolor, and some tools as shown. Learned from last assignment, I decided to gather as many materials as I can and to try out before gluing.
My idea is to dye the cotton yarns with watercolor, and create the colored and uncolored buttons like the application shows to add some variety for the users to play around with as a board game set.
The process
The actual building process was actually pretty straightforward, but I did struggle a little bit in how to set up the logistics.
I use the foams that came along with the weight scale as the base to have the push pins stick in. It is a perfect tool for the push pins to stick and be taken out as needed without destroying the materials. Under the push pins, I cut out circles and have them colored with the colors I dyed my ropes and white: when the color circles are displayed, players should need to match the color of the color button and the rope and have the rope untangled without overlapping while the white ones don’t have this specific rule of matching colors — any color can work unless they are untangled without overlapping.
My initial idea is to have hooks at the end of the ropes so that the players can hook the rope to the push pins. However, I found that it is hard to calculate the length of the ropes because they can go to any one of the seven push pins at the bottom: the rope with hooks are either too long and loose or too short that it doesn’t hook onto the push pins. Instead, I have the side that has hooks on the top bar and make sure they are stable. Even though this doesn’t create the rolling effect of the original mobile game, the ropes are adjustable to different buttons at the bottom bar and very stable to pull left and right.
I added some decoration and rules to the set to make it more like a legit board game set. I was a bit hesitant about writing down rules, for the fact that I would like to make this game more like an all-age-friendly game. I ended up having the general rule to be on the cover of the board game set, and leaving the freedom for the players to have fun with.
Showcase
Here is a quick demo and a short presentation that walks through my design thinking process.
Takeaways
Just like the previous assignment of this class, this is not an easy assignment for me. The fact that we are in a comfort zone of digitalizing almost everything in our lives, has made it very challenging to brainstorm ideas that go backward.
I knew the concept of affordance a long time ago, but with this the help of this assignment, I really understand its definition and importance as a designer. This is a fun experience to actually sit down and really think about the meaning of affordance, and how it changes the way people interact with the object. Together with affordance, the notion of signifier is also extremely important in order to make the product more intuitive and accessible to users as many as possible. The translation of affordance across interfaces is extremely valuable and important in terms of developing the best products for the targeted users.
As usual, this is challenging but also very meaningful for designers to understand the affordance.
