03/25 Blockbusting & working session
🔷 Before class reading — Blockbusting
As preparation for class, we read Chapter 7 different kinds of Blockbusters by Adams. Blockbusters are “techniques to force thoughts that would otherwise not occur”. I think our learning experience is actually about teaching our learners some of these methods. For example, CLA or STEEP analysis could be seen as a type of list-making, and/or a way to check if you are working on the right problem (see image below of an example exercise that Adams provides on pg. 132, looks a lot like a wicked problem map to me). Besides the before stated, the main takeaways for our project from that reading are:
- Encouraging people to ask questions, have a questioning attitude, is a way to train problem-sensitivity — helping people be able to see needs and problems. This leads us to ask: How might we encourage our students to continually ask questions?
- Secondly, Adam talks about Fluency and Flexibility. Fluency is the ability to come up with many ideas quickly while flexibility is the ability of your mind to cross-connect different ideas and domains. Listing of attributes, and forcing connections through morphological charts are methods for practicing those skills that Adams proposes. For our project, I think that means we need to think of a clever answer to how might we encourage and enable students to document their progress?
- Working together and crossing disciplines is also vital to blockbusting. How might we ensure collaboration and exchange of ideas through our design?
Final random thought: Adams writes “people like showing off their brilliance in solving your problems (low risk compared to solving your own)”. Possibly we could use the framing in our game: We’re stuck & we need your help!
🔷 During class work session
In class, we got time to work in breakout rooms on our projects. We used that time by walking in more detail through the steps of our game that we had identified over the weekend. Using the example scenario “imagine that you live in a future where single-use plastics no longer exist. How did we get there?” we started gathering content related to it and started refining the different steps. That was really helpful in the sense that it made our thinking more concrete, but also made us question: are we really designing a game??
If we are being truthful, our design is more of a workshop or design challenge currently than a game. It is very open-ended, asking a lot of user input. Making it difficult to relate it to traditional gameplay, which usually has a more controlled environment. This is something we need to choose and possibly challenge moving forward.
During our discussion, we also kept pulling from existing examples of designs. Below a short list of the products and platforms we looked at and what we liked about the approaches these initiatives took.
Open Ideo:
Open Ideo is a platform that writes out design challenges in collaboration with partners. These challenges are open for anybody to submit ideas to, the result is a large database with hundreds of ideas and interventions from over the world.
What we like from this idea is how they create a feeling of contributing to something relevant. We could use a similar approach in motivating people to use our platform.
Polar steps:
An interesting way to keep track of progress / an interactive blog. We could see us using a similar idea to track the progress of our students when tackling the different scenarios.
Choose your own adventure books:
We talked about this as a way of possibly structuring our scenarios — and control the learning environment a little more. Additionally, what is great about these books is that it motivates users to keep coming back to the same scenario, curious about a different ending.
Six Thinking Hats:
Six thinking hats is a facilitation method. We keep coming back to it as a way to structure and guide our learners to take different perspectives throughout the game. Additionally, we are playing with the idea to have a game facilitator (the royal hat) to guide the game.
🔷 Blockbusting activity
[added after class on Tuesday 03/30]
- Circle back to different stakeholders and their perspectives
- Are these features essential, or are they just common? Could we design a certain functionality in a different way or not use it at all?
- What information are we assuming is easy to recall — but is actually not?
- How might we be able to leverage multiple senses? (touch, smell, taste, sound)
