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[co-creation-by-designfreaks]

Board Game Nerds

DRAFTY 01.

Problem statement - The current socio-political and environmental state worldwide is a reflection of  our lack of  involvement and understanding in crucial humanitarian and environmental problems. In order to engage more young people in the anthropocene and sustainability a new way should be accommodated. The current information sources sound boring and unrelatable to younger people. Although there is enough accessible information, it is many times not communicated in a relatable way. Most sources are fact-based. Society needs less criticism and more inspiration. In order to affect people and cause change in behavior, information should be delivered in a fun and motivating manner that triggers action. The concept of sustainability can sometimes sound vague and complicated. This results in a passive understanding, but no real application.

How to make the anthropocene more engaging and trigger action in everyday life?

Board games are interactive and involve collaborative thinking. By delivering important environmental information and everyday lifestyle advises to act on, players could get more interested in the changes they can make. Games involving more than one person enhance creativity and imagination that could lead to sustainable solutions personally tailored for the player. What is more, by engaging players in physical action, the game enhances the brain activity and stimulates the hormones for happiness and satisfaction.

Target Audience

- Young people in their 20s,

- People interested in playing board games

- Curious and naturally interested people

Persona 1

Name: Katherina

Age:22

Work:Student at University of Salzburg(Physiotherapy)

Family: single child;

Location: Salzburg

Character: Katherina is ambitious and determined, self-aware and independent, opinionated, messy but trustworthy. Socially proactive

Personality: Emphatetic, helpful, caring, responsible, tolerant, open-minded,

Goals: She wants to be a true professional in her job and assist people to recover from heavy injuries. She takes a lot of effort to become better every day at what she is doing. She knows that our modern lifestyles go hand by hand with a lot of health problems and would love to promote healthcare education. For her people should be fully held responsible for the care they take for their bodies and their surroundings. Her goal is to live in unison with her surrounding environment and inspire similar behaviour in the people around her.

Frustrations: Katherina is frustrated with the carelessness that people around her show and their lack of responsibility towards themselves.

Bio:Katherina has Ukranian descendants. She finds satisfaction in helping relieve people's pain since she was in primary school. She started studying in Salzburg, because of the opportunity. She has an ongoing curiosity for healthy eating and environmental sciences.

Motivations: Katherina is keen on playing boardgames with her colleagues. This is a newfound hobby for her, but she enjoys it fully and wants to try different types of games. For her games help for her creative and intellectual development.

Preferred: games:Cathan, Smallworld

Persona 2

Name: Michael

Age:25

Work:Master student in Interaction Design

Family: girlfriend; has a younger sister

Location: Gratz

Character: open-minded, peaceful, but determined, focused, fast-paced work, quality over quantity

Personality:active, extrovert, ambitious, creative, righteous

Goals:He loves games in their various ways: roleplay, board, video, life action. He likes the concept of becoming someone different and changing your perspective during the play. For him this triggers the imagination and leaves space for relaxation and ideation.

Frustrations: What he doesn’t like is when people use games to relieve their aggression. He thinks of this as a form of brutality and doesn’t want to get involved with such players.

Bio: Michael comes from Munich, but studies at the Fh Johanneum in Gratz. He likes his environment in Gratz. People there are driven, open-minded, artistic and orientated towards change. He likes this, because he comes from a rather conservative family that accepts new and different things rather hard. This is the reason why as a young boy, he found escape in playing games. From all the types of games, he likes the most board games and roleplaying, because it provides an easy way to socialize and to come to new ideas.  

Motivations: In his studies Michael tries to develop new and innovative strategies for games and VR. He decided to choose this program, because of a childhood passion for board games. He is interested how he can make games that are more educational and ethical. He want to learn how games can cause positive impact on the players and inspire players to get involved with certain social or environmental topics.

Preferred: games: Dixit, Munchkin,

[co-creation-by-designfreaks]

Kill your darlings

Our last meeting was scheduled in order to start narrowing down our ideas. How did we manage to do that? Through a couple of design analysis methods that are supposed to assist us in narrowing down our concepts.  To begin with, we used the Harris profile, which consists of a scale from ‘-2′ to ‘+2′. This design method is usually used to help us assess each idea based on the requirements made prior in the Design Brief. For now ours look like a messy Excel Sheet with a lot of overwhelming info in it.

After putting it into order and deriving qualitative results from it we will hopefully have a better orientation towards what concept should be developed further and what should be left out. With the ideas that are left we plan or applying the SWOT analysis that will provide us with more insights on what the pros and contras of the concepts are.  

[co-creation-by-designfreaks]

The roles

We started off this project having lots of fun and somewhere on the way we got carried away and forgot to write down who is good at what and which skills can we use to our advantage. Of course it would be way to boring to separate all tasks, so we decided to keep working together even if individual work is needed. To make info share easier we made a google doc, containing all the research data and findings we will need to move on with the project.

Soo, who are we???

Dominika

Josh

Muhammed

Danny;

shortly: DJMD / sounds a bit like a 90′s band/

What are we good at?

Dominika: Industrial Designer, good at almost everything related to 3d modelling and prototyping, which is great because I’m definitely not so skilled at it, even though our studies sound the same.  

Josh: studies Visual Communication back home and is pretty much our graphic design buddy; he’s pretty good at logos and branding and would be a great help when scoping down the value and mood of our ‘brand’.

Muhammed: ITS geek; he is pretty new to design, but this is at our advantage as he will be less opiniated about ideas and will be a breath of fresh air...also I do think he will be a great asset if we go with one of our ideas..which i leave a secret for now.

Danny: Industrial Design Engineer..that’s me; I’m pretty broad at what i do, but I could say I have experience in working in groups for projects, and i now a bunch of stuff about conducting research and design approaches. I am also average at designing itself, but not as confident for now; I guess I am still experimenting

[co-creation-by-designfreaks]

Starting is weird...

We’ve been slowly building up our team spirit and  trying to not go completely lost with designing…

What we came to was this design brief draft. More insights on our work and progress will follow up soon. Go team…! Oh well still no name