Design is a game

September 2008

The first project at the Umeå Institute of Design was done in collaboration with the IT Programme at the University of Southern Denmark. Together we created different board games for corporate environments to improve the communication and collaboration.

Our starting dilemma was "communication problems between people in different departments", and from there we recreated the common scenarios and its causes in a playful way so the players would reflect on how they could do things better at work.

—
Tamim Hussain, George Paravantes
and Jordi Parra

Design process

During the first week we interviewed different people at their workplaces to know more about the conflicts they usually have at work.

After gathering all the information we joined the IT guys in Denmark and started working on the board game. Several user tests were done during the process. We ended up with four copies of the same board game that were intensively tested both in Denmark and Sweden.

A lot of feedback was collected after the gameplays and everybody could identify and reflect on the problems challenged in the game relating them to every day situations they live at work.

How to play

The marbles are randomly placed on the unstable board and the goal is to remove them all without toppling the surface. The player in turn can't look at the board and the rest give instructions.

Each player will use the dices to know how many marbles has to remove, the color and the type of instructions he can get from the other players: verbal, gestural or via physical contact.

Thanks

To all the staff and students at the University of Southern Denmark that got involved. Everybody was really helpful and the user tests would had never been possible without the time and effort of all of them and all the people that came down to Denmark with us.