Have you grown tired of my endless stream of reviews of various design cards? Of course you haven’t, loyal reader, because you love reading everything that I write! However, let’s assume that you are indeed completely sick of design cards and ready to move on to something else. With that in mind, what could be better than design-aiding artifacts? That’s right, design-aiding artifacts created by me! But before we get into that, let’s step back for a bit and discuss artifacts that aren’t cards.
As you already know, not all design artifacts are “Creative Whack Pack” derivatives. They can be quite a variety of things, including pre-patterns, storyboards, and scenarios. More specifically, one could perhaps define the term “artifact” (in the sense of design) as “an object, either physical or conceptual, that is used either to influence the design process, or as part of the design itself”. Come to think of it, that wasn’t very specific at all. However, if this class has taught me anything, it’s that there seems to be very little agreement as to what the term “artifact” actually refers to in design. Of the various papers dealing with design “artifacts”, none seem to share quite the same meaning. As previously mentioned, the textbook Interaction Design: Beyond Human Computer Interaction defines artifacts as things that “mediate” one’s interaction with the world, and can serve as a communication language. In the paper about pre-patterns, the authors hope that their pre-patterns will serve as a “communication language” between designers. In the paper Artifact as Theory-Nexus, the authors discuss artifacts as embodying “psychological claims”. After this, the list goes on. With that in mind, there is plenty of potential for differing ideas of what artifacts should be.
That said, the notion of artifacts that aid the design process remains, perhaps, the one that strikes me as the most interesting. However, what hasn’t been done yet? Certainly, the idea of design cards has been done many times before. Web-based collections of information also exist, such as Virginia Tech’s own LINK-UP, a textual database of information accessed via a web browser interface? So, what’s left?
A screenshot from Zork 1.
Have you ever play one of those text-adventure games? (They were big in the 1980s, but they still make new ones to this day.) Some popular ones included the Zork series (see picture) and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (based on the book of the same name). If you’re unfamiliar with such games, they’re basically like choose your own adventure books on steroids — using commands like “walk north” and “kick mailbox”, you can navigate the story, which will eventually result in some kind of ending, or in your character dying (usually the latter). However, I was thinking: what if this sort of presentation were applied to some of the concepts of artifacts from class? And that, ladies and gentlemen, brings us to…
Design Quest 3000: The Tentative TitleMy idea is both simple and perhaps overly vague, but it basically goes like this: create a text-adventure game (or “interactive fiction” as they are sometimes called) to aid design. The game would draw from existing scenarios, designed to put you, the designer, into the shoes of potential users in such a way that might cause you to rethink your problem entirely. Basically, the idea is to combine the generically inspiring anecdotes of the Creative Whack Pack with the more-relevant design ideas of the IDEO cards, and create an experience more immersive (and, hopefully, more fun and memorable) than what you’d simply get by playing with cards. To this end, the game would be geared at quite a wide swath of people, from seasoned designers looking for generic inspiration to novices looking to learn more about design processes.
From this game, I hope that we could learn a bit more about what exactly makes design artifacts worthwhile. Can they be worthwhile at all? My hope is that, by making the experience a “game” rather than a deck of cards, people could have fun with it even when they’re not trying to solve a specific design problem, and consequently wouldn’t have to deal (as much) with the “this feels contrived” feeling I got during all the card-test design sessions done earlier.
No comments:
Post a Comment