YOU ARE A PACK OF CARDS
Play Rummy, Win at Life
‘A large part of self-understanding is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives.’
WHAT
This MA Applied Imagination project uses the grounding metaphor YOU ARE A PACK OF CARDS to:
- Help you recognise the many dimensions to your personality that come to light in different situations;
- Allow you to test your direction in life so you can add some steer if you see fit;
- Encourage you to explore your potential selves and future opportunities;
- Instil a more conscious approach to daily life, with greater awareness of your interests, your biases, your natural reactions so that you can maximise your chances of success; and
- Shift mindset from finding the final answer to appraising possibilities.
Step-by-step
- Take a pack of cards;
- Go through them one-by-one writing your answers on using the key below;
- Play a game of Rummy (rules here if you need them); and
- Take a photo of the winning hand
2 Ways to play (informed by user testing):
Personalise and play a pack with a group
Deal pack out between all players and each person fills in their cards one by one
- A fun icebreaker
- Everyone’s invested personal information so it’s a more open environment for sharing
- Quicker to get started as each person takes a portion of the pack
Setup solo, recruit friends for Rummy
Fill in a full 52-pack by yourself and then share with friends
- Personalising process takes longer
- Provokes deeper reflection and longer-lasting insights
“Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.”
— George Bernard Shaw
WHY
A Ready-To-Wear Wardrobe of you
In managerial terms, whether Six Thinking Hats or Ten Faces of Innovation, it’s widely recognised in professional spheres that to be successful we need to canvas between a multitude of roles with their own respective responsibilites, priorities and perspectives.
In personal terms, this skill seems to be recognised less so across the board — whether at work, home or play. When you open the front door in the morning for instance, do you think about which ‘hat’ or ‘face’ to wear when you walk down the street that day?
This project helps you catalogue your hats, faces and any aspect of your personality so you can explore them, get to know them better and make more informed, proactive decisions about which ace to play in any given situation.
In metaphorical terms, the process of personalising and playing Rummy in this way is like trying on the different sides of your personality for size in a changing room. Once you’ve played it through a few times though you’ll have built a ready-to-wear wardrobe of you and will know ‘what to wear’ when you walk into situations — this meeting, that house party, etc.
A well-crafted career compass
Arguably, we now live in ‘an era of abundance […] Freed from the struggle and survival, we have the luxury of devoting more of our lives to the search for meaning.’
Accordingly, the anthology What Should I Do With My Life? shows there are plenty of lost-in-life characters worldwide, unsure of what to do, where to go or even what they’d want to do.
Herminia Ibarra explains that:
‘changing careers means changing our selves. Since we are many selves, changing is not a process of swapping one identity for another but rather a transition process in which we reconfigure the full set of possibilities.’
Thus, this project is designed to be what Ibarra calls a ‘crafting experiment’ – a way to sketch out a wide range of possibilites on a pack of cards — to be used as a guiding compass to navigate that realm of possibilities, a playable personal and professional development plan.
Wake up (on) your wild side
In Pop Culture films like Mr & Mrs Smith and Mrs Doubtfire show us ‘that self-fashioning and styling a repertoire of identity positions goes hand-in-hand with social success’ i.e. being able to flex ‘who you are’ and dress up your personal character can actually be quite handy.
Similarly in literature, Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa used imaginary extensions of his personality to explore different writing styles – embodied with such independence that some of them denied he existed in the first place.
Whilst creating personas that come back to (for)get you might be a bit dramatic, from a therapy perspective “healthy people […] seem able to handle comfortably parts of their personality that more ordinary, mid-range people are scared of, and therefore suppress, keep under tight control, keep the brakes on.” This suggests we shouldn’t shy away from opportunities to explore our more unusual or offbeat interests or ambitions, not just for fun but for our broader mental health.
A healthier identi-diet
If we take cultural cannibalism – the consumption of multiple cultural influences to produce something uniquely Brazilian — and translate it to everyday life, we get the well-known mantra ‘you are what you eat.’
This underlines why playing Rummy with these cards is important — it will help you purposefully taste, digest (and excrete where relevant) the many constituent ingredients of your identity and will encourage you to make more conscious, healthier identi-diet choice in the future.
From a single solution to plural possibilities
Many of us invest a lot of energy fretting over what we should do or just unsure of what we want to do — as if there is only one right answer.
This way of playing cards is designed to physically demonstrate that there are a whole suite of options — of different kinds of you — that you can bring into play if you need, want or care to.
Once these are separated and plotted onto a pack of cards, it’ll allow you to evaluate them as you play Rummy and decide whether or not they deserve a spot in your pack or should be edited out.
HOW
A personalised pack explained
❤ Hearts = Inspirations
<> Diamonds = Aspirations
# Clubs = Phases
∞ Spades = Behaviours
The four suits were chosen to span past, present and future as well as a mixture of concrete experiences and abstract influences that shape who you are.
…in each suit there are various themes too:
- K/Q/J = The public you
- 10/9/8 = The professional you
- 7/6/5 = The adrenaline-seeking you
- 4/3/2 = You when no-ones watching
- A = The lesser-known you
Personal, professional and adrenaline were the first themes to come to mind as they’re sometimes noted as three kinds of comfort zone. With that in mind, this exercise could additionally help you identify where the boundaries to your comfort zone(s) lie so you strike out above and beyond them.
I added the public theme in to reflect how we present ourselves and/or think we are seen by others — something increasingly relevant as social media allows us to edit and consciously craft a public persona as we choose.
The ace is meant to be a surprise and thus looks to uncover the lesser known facts or quirks about you and see how it contrasts with the rest of your pack.
Why Rummy?
Rummy’s recommended because it’s a slower kind of card game where you choose which cards to take a chance on when they come up in open play and then which cards to discard when necessary.
This process mirrors our own life choices, whether in who we model our aspirations on, which behaviours we choose to deploy or even as we commit/withdraw from ambitions we hold dear.
Rummy’s mix of constant reevaluation, risk-taking and sacrificial swapping mean that it’s a perfect fit to help test your personal priorities.
As your cards will remain secret until the winner shows their hand, this format will importantly allow time for you to quietly evaluate the cards as you play before having a chat about what came up afterwards.
IF
You often hear that we should ‘do the best with the cards we’re dealt with’.
This project should help people do better with the cards they’re dealt with and empower them to take control of the pack in their pocket and make their own additions/edits as they choose.
In short:
Personalising a pack once is good.
Tweaking it over time is great.
Repeating with a fresh pack once a year could be even better — to see how your answers change over time.
Once a year around your birthday or New Year for example would be an effective way to record your priorities, ambitions and influences at that time in your life — a travel-ready, pocket-sized time capsule of you.
What to test next?
Other ways to use the cards:
- Card magic (user becomes the audience to be entertained, could test how users make inferences when they’re not in control of the cards)
- Gambling (how would results change when users have to explicitly bet on themselves)
Other use cases/audiences:
- Historical resource / travel-sized time capsule (to capture personal histories)
- Counselling (careers, couples);
- Gamified project management/product development (to facilitate open conversation and reflection among cross-functional teams)
If you have any other ideas and/or would like to help me test any of the above, drop me a message and get in touch!
This is one of 60 MA Applied Imagination projects soon to be showcased in our PerPlexUs Degree Show at Central Saint Martins in December. Follow us @maai2014 and check out our collection on Medium to find out more about the other projects:
If you liked the concept, disagreed with it, don’t get it or anything else— please get in touch, I’d love to hear what you think — good, bad and ugly!
All and any feedback is greatly appreciated to help make this better — comment away in the columns too if you can — thanks in advance! :D
