Quantum Alpaca. A play-based method to reframe design problems.
Notes about a speculative design workshop lead by Gabriele Ferri (Amsterdam University of Applied Science) and Giovanni Caruso (Speculative Futures Milan) at Push Conference 2019.
Full disclaimer. This article has been on hold for a while. What better chance than the current national lockdown to bring back to life this old piece?
Last October Gabriele Ferri and I brought a speculative design workshop at Push Conference 2019 (Munich, DE). The workshop was organized as part of the Speculative Futures Milan meetup.
For the occasion, we joined forces with our friends at Dotventi to design Quantum Alpaca — a board game used as a generative design tool for speculation and design fiction.
What follows is a summary of the two play sessions — enriched by some open thoughts and influenced by some research we have done in the meanwhile.
The challenge
We sought out to tackle some very specific challenges with our participants:
- using playfulness and generative design as key elements of the sessions;
- evaluating games as a tool for speculation;
- testing the resilience of existing games by changing their context and purpose;
- creating something easily replicable in day-by-day practice for the participants.
Gabriele — co-coordinator of the M.Sc. Digital Design (HvA) where he teaches Design Ethics and Futures Design — has adapted several existing games to stimulate his students’ design superpowers. Quantum Alpaca was inspired by one of those games he used to play in his classroom.
What could go wrong mixing board games and speculative design at a professional design conference? If a game could be intended as the expression of a free movement — “play” indeed — within a safe space of shared rules and negotiated meanings, how easy would it be to restrain players from going wild with speculations — UFOs, teleport, killer robots, and flying cars anyone?
With these questions in mind, we packed our bags and alpacas and we flew to Munich for a two days stress test.
The game
Quantum Alpaca is a straight forward board game with a knack for the fallacy of interpretation and negotiated ambiguity. Players use semantic clues and signals to generate fictional objects. It is inspired by the great Concept quiz board game created by Alain Rivollet and Gaëtan Beaujannot in 2014. According to Boardgamegeek:
In Concept, your goal is to guess words through the association of icons. A team of two players — neighbours at the table — choose a word or phrase that the other players need to guess. Acting together, this team places pieces judiciously on the available icons on the game board.
To get others to guess “milk”, for example, the team might place the question mark icon (which signifies the main concept) on the liquid icon, then cubes of this color on the icons for “food/drink” and “white”. For a more complicated concept, such as “Leonardo DiCaprio”, the team can use the main concept and its matching cubes to clue players into the hidden phrase being an actor or director, while then using sub-concept icons and their matching cubes to gives clues to particular movies in which DiCaprio starred, such as Titanic or Inception.
The first player to discover the word or phrase receives 2 victory points, the team receives points as well, and the player who ends up with the most points wins.
Concept vs Quantum Alpaca
Two major differences between the games. 1) Unlike Concept, Quantum Alpaca is not a competitive game — guessing the right concept is not important at all. 2) The original concept deck is replaced by a simple set of “signals”. Signals act as triggers for objects generation. For the workshop, we carefully selected those signals around the topic of Data surveillance. Below a sample:
- Security camera
- Private cops
- The sticker in front of your webcam
- Anti-spam filter
- Jailbreak
- Password manager
- A password on a post-it note next to your screen
- Neighborhood watch
- Malware
- Scrambler suit
- Paint on the face to cheat facial recognition
Playing Quantum Alpaca
0. Setup
We run one session per day with 50 attendees each. We divided attendees into 10 groups of 5 players. Each group had a game master in charge of disseminating clues on the board. Every team received one custom game board, some Lego bricks to be used as game markers, pencils and post-its to write ideas.
1. A primer on Speculative Design
The first 15min were used to cover the basics — speculative futures, design fiction, and design ethics. Due to time constraints, we had to simplify a lot but we tried to keep the focus light on the core concepts.
2. Object creation
At the beginning of each play session, we secretly shared one of the signals on our list with game masters. We asked to team to try guessing the object with 2025 as near-future time set.
For each session, we played two rounds:
- First round: the first round was used as a dry run to let participants familiarising themselves with the game. It played nice and easy. Players intuitively generated a lot of divergent objects.
- Second round: the objects created during the second play session were used to generate scenarios. Players were tasked with situating their objects by detailing usages. Dystopia was the future trajectory to comply with.
3. Backcasting and ethical review
“What politics — in terms of power, beliefs, and knowledge — these objects and scenarios will support?”, “What are their undesirable traits and risks?”, “ What would happen if we will apply them to the present?”, “What would be the traits of a more favorable trajectory for today’s society?”, “What rhetorics and behaviors we would like to foster instead?”. These were frameworks we used to wave together backcasting and ethical review at the end of the game.
Takeaways
It is a process. No, it is a mindset. No, it is…
Attending a conference with a lot of focus on product design, innovation, tools, and methods, we felt the need to make some adjustments to our initial idea. On the second day, we decided to invest some extra time supporting the idea of speculative design as a mindset rather than a process, a way of seeing the world (society, etc.) rather than a set of steps or a codified approach.
The present through the lense(s) of the future(s)
We had some issues explaining why futures must be grounded to the present. Speculation is not about sci-fi, dystopia or utopia per se. Nonetheless, to the eyes of untrained futures strollers, 2025 and 2100 looked the same. If that holds, signals and trends mean nothing when you can play with hacked cybernetics artificial limbs or flying cars. Speculative design is about “We are here to make you worry” — one of Gabriele’s catchphrases — as much “We are here to make you think”. It is about futures as much as alternate / desirable realities.
The role of diegetic props
Due to time constraints, we had to sacrifice the creation of diegetic prototypes. Some players asked why bothering with imagining “objects” instead of jumping straight into the scenario. Having diegetic objects to relate with would have greatly increased critical thinking at those tables by letting people experiencing the hurdles of fictional things in a suspension of disbelief.
The politics of speculative design or sparking conversations through the design
The last doubt we still have is about our ability to properly communicate the purpose of the whole session. Besides the game, the weird futurist objects, and all the fun, we were not interested in solutions. As Frederik Pohl said “A good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam.”, we can claim the success of a speculative inquiry only “through the conversations objects and scenarios will spark” (Nicolas Nova). And those conversations must target the politics the design expresses, not the design itself.
Quantum Alpaca evolved
What’s next for Quantum Alpaca? Things we are considering are:
- extending the length of the workshop to make room for props creation;
- dismissing the signals to use semantic clues as part of the random generative engine (see Noessel);
- adding a field testing session with real users to enrich the ethical review.
Stay tuned. Quantum Alpaca will be around again soon.
🚀 Find out more about Speculative Future meetup global community.
🎲 Don’t forget to buy Concept.
About the facilitators
Gabriele Ferri
Gabriele Ferri is senior researcher at Play and Civic Media, as well as hoofddocent (senior lecturer) at Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences leading the learning community in Urban Interaction Design
Play & Civic Media | Twitter | LinkedIn
Giovanni Caruso
Giovanni Caruso is an interaction designer. He is co-founder of Speculative Futures Milan.
Dotventi
Dotventi is a game design and game research collective based in Italy. Dotventi designs urban games, serious/applied games, and playful experiences in general. The collective’s philosophy is that play is a way to enhance communication, creativity, and empathy among individuals.
Resources
Chandak, Mahima, Designing games as research tools: Enabling women in rural India to speculate preferred futures through snakes and ladders (2019). https://medium.com/@mahimachandak/designing-games-as-research-tools-enabling-women-in-rural-india-to-speculate-preferred-futures-8308ae5f809
Dunne, Anthony, Raby, Fiona, Dunne & Raby: Designers need to recognize their limitations and work with them (2019). https://speculativeedu.eu/interview-dunne-raby/
Gaëtan Beaujannot, Alain Rivollet, Concept, Repos Production, 2014
Gaver, William & Beaver, Jake & Benford, Steve. (2003). Ambiguity as a Resource for Design. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2903668_Ambiguity_as_a_Resource_for_Design
Mitrovic, Ivica. (2015). Introduction to Speculative Design Practice — Eutropia, a Case Study. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/276917770_Introduction_to_Speculative_Design_Practice_-_Eutropia_a_Case_Study
Near Future Laboratory, Map of Geneva for Autonomous Vehicles, https://nearfuturelaboratory.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/self-driving-geneva
Noessel, Chris, “Semantic Noodling and Meaning Machines”, UXLx — User Experience Lisbon 2017, https://youtu.be/x8n74greYFE
Nova Nicholas, Design Fiction, Service Design Masterclasses, Poli.design, Milan (Italy), November 21, 2019.
Tharp, Bruce M., Tharp, Stephanie M., Discursive Design: Critical, Speculative, and Alternative Things, MIT Press, 2019.
Zimmerman, Eric, Salen, Katie, Rules of Play, MIT Press, 2003.
”Western Melancholy“ / How to Imagine Different Futures in the ”Real World“? (2018), http://interakcije.net/en/2018/08/27/western-melancholy-how-to-imagine-different-futures-in-the-real-world/
