2Assignment brief: Interaction

OVERVIEW Working in groups of five, you will design and construct a game that can be played by four (or more) people, and can be played in under ten minutes. Your game must be challeng-ing, fun and must engage human senses other than (just) the visual. The point of the game will be to work as a platform to prompt players to reflect on dilemmas inherent to profes-sional work and strategies for handling them.

Due date Monday 22 April at 12:00 (noon).

Learning objectives assessed: 1, 2, 3, 4 & 61 Apply specific thinking techniques and design methods to develop unique designs2 Employ basic research and observational skills to recognise and critique design opportunities3 Communicate design concepts effectively and aesthetically using visual and discursive media4 Understand and apply the basic elements of event-driven design: participation, generation, prototyping, evaluation and iteration5 Demonstrate the ability to plan, organise and carry out a design proc-ess within a team6 Develop appropriate strategies for addressing potential conflicts and problems that can occur when working in groups

BACKGROUND For this project, consider your team to be a small design con-sultancy that has been invited to devise a game that will be played at a multidisciplinary professional development re-treat. The point of professional development retreats is to give practitioners a chance to get away from the work that they do, interact with other professionals, and critically re-flect on the challenges, stresses, possibilities, potentials, con-straints and interpersonal skills that are inherent to their pro-fessional work. Professional retreats are intended to revive and energise professionals, sending them back to work with new ideas for their practice and new strategies for doing their jobs well.

PRODUCT BRIEFStarting from the diverse portfolio of professional contexts and dilemmas that your team members bring from project 1, you will design a game that can trigger players to reflect on professional dilemmas and strategies for dealing with them. The game you submit must meet the following requirements:

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DECO1100/7110 Semester 1 2013

Coordinator: Ben Matthews

Be a good game: it should be fun, challenging and enable skill development (i.e. players can get better at it, try new strategies, obtain different results).Engage non-visual senses: you are NOT being asked to develop a game especially for visually impaired people. How-ever, the game you do develop must engage our bodies and senses other than just sight. Games that primarily depend on our visual senses and fine motor skills (e.g. Blackjack or Mo-nopoly) will not work well in this context.Provoke reflection: the game must relate to professional dilemmas in some way (this relation can be abstract and/or indirect), and it must be possible to use the game as a plat-form to get players to reflect on some general aspects of pro-fessional practice (examples might be issues and strategies for things like conflict management, compromise, profession-alism, ambition, collaboration etc.). Be self-sufficient and self-explanatory: each game must be complete and explain itself—games are fully inclusive of their packaging, title, intent, set up instructions, rules for play, and game equipment (game pieces, boards, dice etc. if necessary). Be original: your game must be new and your own.Be physical and reproducible: the game must be submitted as a physical game, in packaging you have designed and constructed, as it would appear on a store shelf for instance. You must submit two identical physical copies as evidence that your game could be produced on a larger scale.

PRODUCT DELIVERABLETwo copies of your game: in packaging, with instructions, rules and all necessary equipment to play. Names, student numbers and blog address must also be on the package and contents. Games must be submitted physically through the Faculty of EAIT (Hawken Building 50) assignment chute and require an assignment cover sheet available from https://student.eait.uq.edu.au/coversheets/.

PROCESS DELIVERABLESAs before, each team must also document their develop-ment process and generate the following set of process deliv-erables alongside creating their physical game. Process deliv-erables will be submitted electronically through Blackboard. Choose a standard referencing system to use (e.g. Harvard, APA etc.) and ensure you are aware of the university’s pol-icy regarding plagiarism.

Project blog: the research and group work you have done must be documented on a project blog. Your blog will report things like the minutes of your group meetings, the division of responsibilities among group members, the evolution of your ideas and prototypes, summaries of your research, the feedback you have received from trial runs, demonstrations and user tests, and details of any additional work and feed-back events you have organised (representative of 200 per-son hours per group).Title page: Give your game/project an appropriate title, list your group members and student numbers, give the address of your project blog, and write a few paragraphs that intro-duce readers to the project, this document, its purpose and its interest for readers (approx. 2 pages).Concept maps: Develop and submit at least three concept maps of the design space you have explored. Concept maps will be created (initially) from existing games, but must also be used to map your group’s portfolio of concepts. Each con-cept map should have an explanatory paragraph or set of annotations explaining the dimensions/categories of the map (min. 3 large concept map canvases, as pdf files).Concept portfolio: Create and submit a portfolio of at least 20 distinct game design concepts. Each concept must have a name, a thumbnail sketch or picture, and a back-of-the-box description that is detailed enough to convey the con-cept and differentiate it from the others. This portfolio should be submitted as a set of concept cards (A5 size) in a com-mon template (20 pages).Criteria evaluation framework: Develop and submit a framework of criteria for evaluating (and choosing between) your different concepts. Show the results of an analysis of at least five of your concepts (including your final concept) against those criteria. Introduce the evaluation framework with a paragraph that explains the criteria and how the evaluation was conducted (approx. 2 pages).User evaluation report: Write up the series of events you conducted to obtain user feedback on your project, specify-ing the actual feedback you received and explaining how that was (or wasn’t) incorporated into your final product (ap-prox. 3 pages).

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