Thinking about society

Society Centered Design is not a new idea, far from it, it is the model we’re slowly moving towards. It is the logical evolution of the Human Centered Design approach that redefined our discipline, an approach that actually considered society within its scope but in practice we got a narrower version.

Right now it’s important to discuss it, to put it in the public sphere and build the groundwork before we can even hope to begin adopting it. And as every designer knows, the best way to discuss something is to have a prototype, something tangible to talk about. With this article I aim to draft a proposal of what I believe to be the core of a Society Centered Design mindset.

As I said, I’m not the first one to talk about this idea. I recommend reading IF studio’s Society Centered Design as it provides another perspective on this same issue.

The principles of Society Centered Design

How can a designer approach a project from a society centered perspective? What makes it society centered? Defining some principles helps us better understand a direction.

Above all Society Centered Design is concerned with the common good.

We design actively with the wellbeing of all of society in mind and we put the collective needs over individual interests. This is built upon the idea that what’s good for society is good for all of its members. This is the purpose of Society Centered Design, to fight for the betterment of all of society.

Driving principles

Society Centered Design is Social in nature.

Even though this might seem redundant it is fundamental to be mindful of the fact that our design will operate within a society, defined by a culture that drives behaviours, practices, moral frameworks and that our design will have to respond to the necessities of the whole social system. We are designing for all the people within that system, not just the “final” user.

Society Centered Design is Systemic.

Society is an extremely complex system, full of interdependencies, in constant flux and change that can have unpredictable consequences. Any solution we implement is going to change the original problem condition, creating new issues. Nothing we design is going to be a permanent solution, everything we do is a work in progress and we have to be always looking to understand the interconnectedness of the context and the impacts of our work.

Society Centered Design is, ultimately, Human.

As such it has to take into consideration emotional needs, behaviour and treat individuals with respect and care. Society is not just an abstract entity, so while we might be designing for society we must never forget that society is composed of humans, each of us unique in our own way.

Implications

Society Centered Design is Collaborative.

As designers one of our responsibilities is to make people heard and we do this by incorporating them into our design process. If we are designing for society we can’t do it without the people we are designing for. Society Centered Design is all about democratizing design, designers are no longer the owners, the stars but we are here to help people help themselves. Society Centered Design is something we offer, not something we impose.

Society Centered Design is Political.

Designing is a political act. Our work reflects and has an impact on culture and society, whatever we do has ramifications on how we interact with the world. We’re always expressing an ideology through our work, wherever we want or not, so we have to be conscious and make that act one that benefits society, an act that leaves a positive impact.

Society Centered Design is Responsible.

Since our work touches people’s lives, as it impacts the context in which it operates, we can’t ignore the consequences of its existence in the world. As designers and human beings we have a moral imperative to act ethically and to take responsibility for the things we help create.

“You are responsible for what you put into the world. And you are responsible for the effects those things have upon the world.”

— Victor Papanek

Moving forward

These principles describe a way of looking at our work and discipline that is focused on the common good, that aim to bring visibility to its consequences and thus making us aware of the potential for good and evil. Responsibility is an important word, but I believe it is half of the picture, the other half is also the amazing opportunity for designers to unlock Design’s potential to shape our world for the better, to resignify our role in society as something more than just making things pretty. As designers we are cultural producers and that alone sets us as a force for change in society, we just have to own it.

Entries in the series

• Part 1: Design and society
• Part 2: Design for society
• Part 3: A draft for a society-centred mindset (you are here)

Part 2

The next step

The maturity of design coincides with the growth of Design’s sphere of activity. As our work increases its impact in people’s life and the environment so do our responsibilities and area of influence. This means that slowly but surely we’re becoming more and more involved in matters that are relevant to all of society (and more).

While Design’s ability to rise to these new challenges has coincided mostly with its adoption of a human centered approach it also corresponds to a broader shift from a positivist world-view to a more holistic frame of reference. This means that we’re moving away from a pure rational, quantitative and control focused way of understanding the world to one that takes into account emotion, quality and embraces complexity. Design as a practice is extremely well aligned with this shift making it well suited to take the new and complex challenges of our world.

Defining the scope

It’s relevant to notice that this domain is constantly expanding. It could eventually encompass not only society but also the environment and the whole planet as an ecosystem (and even beyond).

Still, the focus here is in the sphere of activity, it is about what design is concerned with, and while environmental concerns are of utmost importance we’re not yet mature, as a species, to have a planet centered approach, we’re still looking at environmental issues from an anthropocentric worldview, since we basically want to avoid our own extinction. A societal consideration lies at the edge of the anthropocentric frame.

Shifting boundaries is no easy task, it took many years of growth and maturation for design to put people at the center of it’s work and it took even more time for companies, organizations and other institutions to align themselves with designers on this front.

I believe that the current discussions around Design, the talk about ethics, responsibilities, systems thinking and circular economy means that we are getting closer and closer to a new shift, from user to a broader concern: society.

The intermediate step

Some of you might have noticed that there’s an important gap between user and society. Conceptually there is a huge leap between those instances, we go from immediate individual concerns to a massive group of people. A bit more on the practical side the leap is about expanding the notion of where the impact of our work lies. From that lens the middle step is irrelevant. A Society Centered Design should encompass all the lower levels of social hierarchies, from family, communities, States, blocks and the like.

Still, that intermediate step does exist and we could conceive it as a community or organization centered. Why the conceptual jump then? We could talk about two main reasons. Firstly, current design work has a broader impact than just the immediate community it is designed in or for. We are designing global platforms and systems that have consequences on a big part of society.

And the other reason is that an organization centered approach can be mistakenly thought of as what we’ve been doing for about the last 50 years, focusing on the organization and it’s business needs over the people it’s supposed to serve and the people that compose it. This is the antithesis of what a society centered approach aims to achieve: Ethical and social responsibility and working for the collective wellbeing of society and its members.

Design disciplines

We’ve talked about Design as a field, but we also have the design disciplines to think about.

As Design grows it takes on new forms, incorporates more knowledge and new disciplines emerge in order to respond to these new challenges.

This is perfectly captured in Richard Buchanan’s model for the “four orders of design” that he presented in 1992 (almost 30 years ago).

This model presents the spheres of action of the different design disciplines in a scale of growing complexity. From a symbolic to a systemic level.

The value of this model for our purposes is that it allows us to clearly see how Design already operates in broader, more complex spheres and how the different levels interact. Being that the lower levels are actually contained within the superior ones, with the expertise and knowledge of the upper levels trickling down, changing the approach of the lower levels too. Society Centered Design is born out of necessity of the upper levels, a frame of working that they need to operate effectively, but it is still something that can trickle down to the lower levels. Much like Human Centered Design was born out of the needs of the new practices in the 3rd level (interactions) but it now also defines how to approach design for the lower levels (artifacts and signs).

The complexity axis is quite useful to understand the need for a broader approach. If we combine it with our other axis of the expansion of the domain we get a matrix that shows how these approaches are defined.

What this matrix shows is that there is a threshold where one approach is no longer able to cope with the complexity needed to effectively solve the problems involved, leading to the need of a new approach. Traditional design for example, works from a product centered approach and it can be used to design artifacts, but this product centered approach hits a limit when trying to design experiences. In that situation a user centered approach is needed.

As our approach broadens, so does our understanding of the problems, that’s the reason knowledge trickles down, so we can take a broader approach for a simpler problem, like a user centered approach to design artifacts (which is how we mostly work today).

For example, nowadays we have incorporated ethnographic methods of research into our processes, and this also informs how we design tools and other objects, we no longer just execute someone else’s idea (or at least we shouldn’t).

I must clarify that system level issues encompass both a Strategic Design approach and a society centered approach. This is because Strategic Design deals with systems and systemic issues but on a smaller scale than full-blown social issues.

Taking the step

In order to tackle more complex issues in the form of “Wicked problems”¹ designers need to grow out of User Centered Design into a new more holistic approach.

Still I wonder if we are yet ready to develop and adopt this new approach.

This stepped framework of adoption seems logical as it’s based on the assumption that this is an organic process and we will get there eventually, but there’s no structure to press it forward. I guess that I can only do what I’ve been trying to achieve here, to start a discussion around it.

On the next article I would like to explore how a society centered approach could even be described.

¹ This is a type of problem that’s not only ill defined but also largely interconnected to many other issues with lots of relevant stakeholders, often with conflicting interests.

Entries in the series

• Part 1: Design and society
• Part 2: Design for society (you are here)
• Part 3: A draft for a society-centred mindset

Part 1

Design and society

Design’s growth

Design as a discipline has grown a lot over the last few years. For something that was only seen as surface polish it has now earned recognition for the value it brings to organizations on a strategic level. This growth also means that the discipline needs to mature rapidly to fit into its new role and responsibilities.

For the greater part of the last century, Design was mostly concerned with the idea of making beautiful and useful artifacts. For the industry, Design has been something to add at the end of the process, lipstick for the product. For the most part, professional design has conformed to this view and focused on the craft of making.

However, designers have a particular way of looking at problems and as the discipline matured it started to incorporate new perspectives that expanded the possibilities of design.

This meant that design could bring much more to the table than just aesthetics. As designers became conscious of the value they could bring to organizations and society they wanted to become more involved in the decisions, in the ‘why’ behind the things rather than just the ‘how’, the execution of tasks.

The paradigm shift

The paradigm shift happened mostly because of the adoption of a human centered approach to design. Design became about identifying real needs and problems to work on instead of starting from a predefined solution; now it’s part of the designer’s job to identify the underlying problem to be solved.

This was a massive paradigm shift for design that has been happening for the last 20 years (while gestating for even longer) and now it has become mainstream. This journey started with Human Computer Interactions, got massive recognition thanks to IDEO’s push for Design Thinking and it’s now -almost- commonplace. And all thanks to the effectiveness of the process. It turns out that people want products and services designed for them, it turns out that understanding people and having their best interest in mind is actually good business.

By shedding the focus on artifacts, human centeredness opened the doors to a whole new playing field for design. Design now starts with the “why” rather than the “how”.

With this change designers now could challenge the brief, redefine the problem and propose radical new solutions. This also meant that designers needed more say in the decisions and thus have been fighting for “a seat at the table” during the greater part of last decade.

The value of design and the impact the practice has had in organizations has earned the profession recognition, but in the process we lost something. Conceptually Human Centered Design is people focused, including all people involved, but during this transition Human Centered Design became User Centered Design or Consumer Driven Design, not only in name but in practice too, we design for individuals, for an isolated piece of society. That is a subtle but huge difference.

The importance of framing

How we frame problems define how we approach them. Focusing on just users or consumers narrows our approach to problems and solutions, it blinds us to the impact and consequences of our work in the broader social context.

There are many examples of this phenomena. Let’s take Amazon’s free shipping, ease of return and same day delivery. All amazing features from a customer point of view, but no one thought about the impact on traffic, city infrastructure and environment. And what about Uber? The app that redefined how we think about personal transportation. Born out of the best of intentions, it unleashed a system that’s based on a lack of protection for the workers, less security and in many cases terrible working conditions because of unethical practices, in this context workers are just tools to provide an excellent service to their customers and not part of the humans we’re supposed to design for.

As Design grows so does its impact on society and the environment. Our domain is expanding and our responsibilities are lagging behind. We are in dire need of an ethical approach to current issues that takes into account all these consequences. We have to move from a User Centered Design to a Society Centered Design framework in order to act in concordance with the responsibility that our work carries.

This is easier said than done. I’ve been giving this a lot of thought but I have more questions than answers that I want to explore in a series of articles. Some things to ponder:

What tools and knowledge do we need for an approach focused on society?

How can we expand our field of action without increasing complexity to an unmanageable level?

And most importantly. How can we drive adoption of this type of thinking?

Entries in the series

• Part 1: Design and society (you are here)
• Part 2: Design for society
• Part 3: A draft for a society-centred mindset

Designing games is no different than designing experiences or products, but like with any medium there are peculiarities. Through this series, we covered most of the design process but I would like to finish by going over some of the peculiarities I got to experience firsthand during this project of mine and some of the things I learned along the way.

Meaningful choices

Let’s start with one of the core ideas. Board games are all about meaningful choices yet many times the systems we are designing need a certain amount of bookkeeping and minutiae to function. There’s a fine line to consider between a “must-have” activity and one that’s only there because it’s easier for the designer or because of a desire to conform to an idea of “simulation”. I’ll refer to the famous quote by Antoine de Saint Exupéry:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

As a designer one has to be mindful of pruning away these meaningless choices. A way to approach this challenge is to create default settings, so it’s always yes or no instead of having the player choose. Another approach that I like is to condition actions through components. This is doubly useful as it not only removes some meaningless choices but it also removes the mental load of bookkeeping.

The fewer rules there are the better. Having components work in a way that conditions the players into following the system rules organically without them having to remember arbitrary information. For example, in my game, the amount of “shield pips” a system can have is directly related to its damage. It’s complicated to keep track of those fiddly rules in your mind and it’s easy to become confused. That is, unless the physical components use the same slots for both tokens and through that limitation, you have no choice but to respect the system rules. You can see that in the way the damage and shield pips fit into the ship model.

The importance of defining the correct mental model

There are a lot of rules and behaviour attached to a game system. Leaning heavily on the theme of the game can help align the mental models of the designer with those of the player by relying on a set of “unwritten assumptions” or expectations born out of the setting and aesthetics. There are ways a car works that we all understand and the game has to respect that even if it’s in an abstracted way. If done right many of the game rules will be easily understandable and coherent, making them almost intuitive for the players.

Depth and complexity

Depth could be understood as the richness of interactions and possibilities within the system. In that sense other mediums, like videogames can achieve this through a lot of unseen complexity, taking advantage of a computer’s processing power to take track of most of the stuff in the background. In a boardgame this type of complexity would make things more complicated as it leads to a lot of mental load for the player. That doesn’t mean that boardgames are lesser to their video counterparts. That only means that they have to approach depth from another angle. As I see it they are much more dependant on the richness of the interdependences within its elements and mechanics. This involves more design work up front, but ends up with a tighter and more accessible design. Part of my game design philosophy is that it’s better to have fewer parts but have them all interact in interesting ways rather than having many interesting but separate parts.

In order to achieve this, a designer needs a deep understanding of the system and the interdependencies between components and mechanics.

Working to make everything connected is not an easy task but it does bring more depth and more meaningful choices into the game. In my experience, it was all about removing components and integrating their functions together. For example, at one point I had several card decks, one for combat actions and another for special actions, the game changed radically once I found a way to combine them into a single deck, adding another layer of choice. Does the player use this high-value card that can be useful for attacking or is it better to use the special action to get out of a tight spot?

Leveling the playing field

One of the hardest things is to put checks and balances in the system in order to avoid a snowball effect where the winner keeps winning because of the advantages of winning. There need to be many balancing loops keeping the losing player in the race, otherwise it might feel like a futile attempt to keep playing and a bad experience. In order to achieve this there are what are called “Catch-up” mechanics intended to give the losing player a chance to get back into the game negating the mechanical advantages of the winning player. In my game, it’s related to the number of cards available to each player at the start of the round. Players pick up an extra card for every system that has been lost, giving them more choices each turn.

Controlling length

Perhaps one of the most difficult things when designing a game is getting it to an appropriate playing time. Open systems can lead to unpredictable situations, spiraling in an eternal draw, or sudden endings. It’s funny but many of my attempts at controlling length by adding mechanics always ended up in failure. I once tried to add a parallel ending counter, but the mechanics to play against the counter not only meant more stuff to keep track of, but also made the game even longer. What I found to be a more effective approach was to actually remove stuff. Fewer damage points before winning, fewer cards, fewer actions. Every time I removed something the game became leaner and also much more engaging. Right now the most effective way of ending the game I found is to stop once the cards are all used up, it’s an obvious instance of the game, the player doesn’t have to remember or keep track of anything else and adds another tactical layer to the game.

Rulebooks

Rulebooks are probably one of the most important components of a game. Creating a completely intuitive game is almost impossible if we are designing a complex system. The greatest game in the world is worthless if no one understands how to play it. A rulebook is a tool we give players in order to decode the game system, and thus rulebooks have different uses and audiences. Rulebooks have to respond to the different needs of first time players, learning how to play; returning players just wanting to refresh their memories, and players checking the rules during the game. We need different types of content, clear hierarchies, and structures for the information to support these different needs.

A rulebook is also a great design tool. It provides the designer a way to decode and understand the game, writing down a lot of assumptions made during the design process and it helps to organize mechanics in a coherent form.

Randomness and choice

There are two ways to approach randomness, either you include it or you come up with a completely deterministic game. Both are valid strategies but personally, I find randomness to be an important enabler of emergent storytelling in games. If you hear players tell stories about their games you’ll often hear about that creature that was untouchable or the unlucky player that ended up winning the game in the end despite all odds. Randomness is what adds spice to an encounter.

Still, including randomness is not a random choice in itself. What to randomize, how and to what extent are some of the key decisions a designer faces. I really liked how another designer put it:

“It’s better to have your players act in response to random conditions than it is to randomize their outcome after they’ve made their choices”

-Mikey NG

The key concept here is agency. As designers we want players to feel in control, we want them to feel that the game is being defined by their -meaningful- choices, not chance. Randomness can quickly become chaos and unpredictability, giving way to frustration. To avoid that we need to give players clarity of information, making them aware of the possibilities before committing. If we do things right then it becomes a balancing act for the player between risk and reward.

As an example, during the early design phases, I used dice a lot and in order to give agency to the player, I started to incorporate more and more mechanics to mitigate the extreme randomness. This became counter-productive and I ended up solving it by removing dice altogether and using numbered cards. The cards the player gets are random but the player still has a choice on how to use them, so there is room for strategizing around a bad hand or taking full advantage of a good one.

Closing thoughts

What I like about board games is that they are self-contained complex systems. I get to tinker with them without worrying about all the complexity of real-world problems (and their socio-cultural-economic dynamics). There’s a lot of fun to be had tinkering with a system and trying to predict how it’s going to work and thinking about ways to steer the behaviour towards the desired outcome.

It feels like designers, particularly service designers, can learn a lot by trying their hand at board game design. In my experience, it was a great way to explore the design process by experimenting with a small self-contained project.

Much like any design work, it’s all about trust in the process, and that’s why I’ve shared mine here. And much like any design process, it is about understanding, exploring, and testing. And having fun, let’s never forget that.

Entries in the series:

• Part 1: Learn your stuff
• Part 2: Synthesizing information
• Part 3: Defining the game and its scope
• Part 4: A game is a system
• Part 5: Test early, test a lot
• Part 6: Lessons learned (You are here)

A board game design process: Lessons learned was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

We all know the importance of testing our designs, of putting them in front of real users. This is doubly important in board games. There are lots of variables and interdependencies that affect how a game behaves, making it a bit unpredictable once you put it in front of people. One can never know how a player will react, the behaviours that the different rules will produce and how the mechanics will interact with each other.

My best recommendation to game designers is to make a rough prototype as soon as possible and test it sooner than later.

Testing formats

There are different instances and different types of testing, each responding to different needs and phases of the project. I’m going to be talking about:

• Solo playtesting
• Quick playtesting
• Guided playtesting
• Extreme playtesting
• Blind playtesting

Solo playtesting

The simplest and quickest way to test your game is by playing it… by yourself. In this type of playtesting you take the role of every player and try the game.

While this is not going to help you with groundbreaking discoveries since you’re not testing your mental model of the game against someone else’s mental model (mental model differences is where the most disruption occurs) it’s still a useful and quick way to check for glaring issues like text legibility, ergonomics and game-breaking mechanics.

It’s a good practice to test your own game often.

Quick playtesting

You don’t want to wait a long time between playtesting but organizing a fully-fledged playtest might become quite an ordeal. It’s nice to have close friends or family members that are willing to test your game. While the same friends and family members might become familiar with the game and thus limit what you can learn it’s still a useful test to detect issues and to adjust flow and dynamics.

In a quick playtest you have more freedom to freely change the rules mid game, stop the game and start over or even start mid-game in order to test specific conditions or mechanics. You can be less strict overall. This is not recommended for more formal playtests.

Guided playtesting

Once you have something that mostly resembles a game it’s a good idea to put it in front of people in a fully-fledged playtest. While the game it’s still in a design phase, where the game is still in a state of flux, it’s better for the designer to be present and help players by explaining the rules and dispelling any doubts the players have. Regular usability test etiquette still applies. Let players make mistakes, ask for their understanding of the rules and never, ever tell them how to play “the right way”. The designer should set the stage and then move out of the way, only making adjustments and clarifying rules when needed.

Extreme playtesting

Once the game is more or less settled playtesting becomes all about refinement. Extreme playtesting is an important type here, and the idea is to test the game for absurd, out of the box play styles. What we are looking for is ways in which the game can be broken by player interaction and to be prepared for play styles that we never accounted for in the design. Someone monopolising one type of resource stopping the economy for all other players. Someone that constantly runs away instead of facing an opponent. We want to find out ways in which the game becomes unenjoyable because of unexpected behaviour and then design ways to minimize or eliminate the effects of those playstyles.

Blind playtesting

Blind playtesting is usually done near the end of the development phase. We give players the game and the rulebook and we let them figure it out. The designer should only observe how the game develops no matter what. The focus of the test is on the rulebook as the game should be mostly finished by now. We need to get to the point where people understand the game by themselves as we can’t ship a designer with each box.

It’s a good time to see how to make the game more intuitive without resorting to written rules.

What to test

Games don’t have obvious tasks or jobs to be done, so it’s not easy to break them up for testing sessions, games are systems and we need to understand how they operate as a whole. Still, we can aim to test a specific mechanic or the ergonomics of components or any other characteristic, but we have to test them in the context of the whole game.

Since games are systems, small changes can have a huge impact in behaviour. Something like letting players take one action instead of two during their turn can make for two completely different experiences. Boardgame design ends up becoming a game of constantly tweaking and questioning previous design choices.

The first playtest

The first time a designer tests a game is a magical experience. I remember mine, after weeks of working on my first game I was sure I had covered all my bases and that the game was almost complete. We came, we played and we got incredibly bored and confused. We spent an hour barely hitting each other and then we finished by ramming our ships into each other. There was too much randomness, there were too many unconnected mechanics making it hard to keep track of everything and it was too easy to be a defensive player making the game impossible to finish. The experience was revealing.

Most of my recommendations in this series came from all the lessons I got from this playtest. My biggest mistake was to try to test all the mechanics without making sure the core was right, too much clutter and too little interaction between mechanics meant that I had to keep track of several rules that were there just to patch flaws in the system.

It’s interesting that in my rush to solve many of the issues found in the first playtest I went too far in the other direction and then I got a completely boring and soulless game that felt more like filling a spreadsheet than an exciting movie scene.

After these two initial playtests I took time to think about the game and went through a complete overhaul getting it closer to what the game is today.

Test test test

Games are complex systems and thus they can lead to pretty unpredictable behaviour. Testing is the only way to actually make sure that it works as intended.

My game today looks nothing like how it started except for a few components. Mechanically it has changed so much that I could start again from the first playtest and end up with another game altogether. If you’re not sure about the value of iterative design, then you surely have to design a board game in order to really appreciate it.

Entries in the series:

• Part 1: Learn your stuff
• Part 2: Synthesizing information
• Part 3: Defining the game and its scope
• Part 4: A game is a system
• Part 5: Test early, test a lot (You are here)
• Part 6: Lessons learned

A board game design process: Test early, test a lot was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Finally! It’s time to get our hands dirty with some good ol’ conceptualizing. We have passed the planning chasm and now we’ve landed in execution land.

What we’re going to do now is to take all the knowledge, information and ideas that have come up during the planning phase and start to put it together in the shape of a game that other people can experience.

The fundamentals of Board game design

Board games are built upon three core elements: Mechanics, Theme and Components.

Mechanics are the rules and interactions, the inner workings of the game as a system. Theme is how the game is understood, felt and perceived mostly through aesthetics and storytelling, it’s what creates an emotional connection with the player. All of this is manifested through the components, the physical manifestation of the game, cards, dice, boards and everything that comes in the box (and including the box too!).

Designing a board game involves designing these three aspects and their interactions with the players.

Board game design is all about creating interesting choices for the players.

This a fundamental principle in game design. If there’s just one optimal way of playing or if the player is drowned in little bookkeeping activities then the game is going to be absolutely boring. Choices, actions, during the game have to be meaningful.

There are many ways to approach a game design and each designer will have their own philosophy. Personally I like to work with simple rules, a tight core experience but then allow players to bend or even break the rules in different ways.

Actions the player can take vary from game to game but the most common ones are about resource management, positioning, risk mitigation, diplomacy/negotiation, procureing, control and combat.

Conceptualization

At the beginning of the conceptualization phase what we want to do is to take all the thematic elements we’ve identified previously and translate them to mechanics.

The idea is to work through abstraction, we can’t do a 1:1 simulation, not only because it’s a fictional setting but also because it would drive the complexity through the roof and we have limited cognitive capacity and technological support for that.

So we operate on a scale between total abstraction and pure simulation.

Designers operate somewhere in this space, and the choice depends on what the designer intends to do with the game. The closer to pure simulation the more complex the game will become. The closer to pure abstraction the less relationship to the real world it will have.

Since I wanted to lean closer to simplicity my game involved a lot more abstraction than simulation but not so far down that it had no relationship with the subject I was trying to reference.

This abstraction/simulation layer applies to different parts of the game. Aesthetics can vary on its level of abstraction independently of the gameplay abstraction level.

Being aware of this tension is important to maintain coherence in the translation of thematic elements into game mechanics.

From information to game concept

My process involves choosing from the information gathered all the elements that are more relevant to the experience I’m trying to emulate. I picture what the game experience would be, what actions the player should take and how should the players interact between them. This is important because I have a particular outcome in mind: the feeling of commanding a ship in a sci-fi setting.

While I begin with a list of all I want to include in the game I actually start designing the “core” of the experience. The most basic version of the game, an MVP for all intents and purposes.

From the research I identified three basic actions, movement, attack and defense, and while I was interested in including more elements, like fighters, communications and more I had to make sure that a game featuring those three elements was fun before introducing more complexity to the system.

To translate an idea into mechanics it’s important to understand what the idea means and feels like and what elements are in the mechanics toolbox. There are many mechanics list, but the best way to know them is to play lots of games (or at least read about them). Once you are familiar with different mechanics you can see correlations between reality and the mechanical abstraction of rulemaking.

As an example of mechanics translation I knew that I wanted those three elements in the game and a pattern that emerged during research was that energy management was a characteristic element of the genre (The captain screaming for more power to the shields is a staple of science fiction). It made a lot of sense to marry those things together as the foundations of the game.

So I started with the idea of a board with energy as a resource that players could use and assign to perform different actions during their turn.

It’s important to mention that while we’re going to be working on both rules and components, what we are actually designing is a system and thus we are designing behaviour (both of the players and the system). So even the individual rules and actions are the artifacts we are going to design, the most important thing we have to take into account is the interactions and interdependencies between themselves and with the players.

So, for example, the idea about power setup was also tied to the principle of incentivizing strategic thinking. By making players think about the energy first I would put them in a forward thinking mindset (or at least that was the intention, we’ll see how well it turned out in the article covering playtesting).

And the same process of translation goes on for every element of the experience taking great care in how they interact with each other.

Getting it ready

Basically the process is composing an experience out of its characteristic elements, defining the core experience, develop it and then slowly adding new elements whenever appropriate for the experience.

But before incorporating more elements to the design of the core experience we have to make sure that it’s actually working as expected and -more importantly- that it’s actually enjoyable to play.

And that’s why the next article is going to be all about playtesting.

Entries in the series:

• Part 1: Learn your stuff
• Part 2: Synthesizing information
• Part 3: Defining the game and its scope
• Part 4: A game is a system (You are here)
• Part 5: Test early, test a lot
• Part 6: Lessons learned

A board game design process: A game is a system was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I design therefore I am

Can we please, please, please stop berating Design Thinking for “not doing” or “just thinking”. These are phrases that might sound nice but are absolutely meaningless.

I do have my own reservations about Design Thinking (a lot of reservations actually) and I’m well aware about its limitations but doing (or not) is not one of them.

Design Thinking is its name not its scope. It’s a set of tools and methodologies to carry out a design project from start to finish, including the doing. If it’s got thinking in its name it’s because it references the thought process behind the design “doing”.

This is like criticizing “Critical design” for being just critical and not proposing anything. Or saying that since you are a designer and you form thoughts in your head then you are practicing Design Thinking.

Instead of looking at how we are trying to grow as a profession we are shifting the blame to a label. I believe this is blinding us to other possible causes and shortcomings that go beyond a methodology.

So could we please stop using the name of a methodology as an argument and instead steer the debate to more useful areas?

Yes, there is a real problem with designs often being shelved or half-implemented. This happens independently of Design Thinking or any other design approach. The thing is that Design Thinking got popular, got a lot of visibility and thus we are more exposed to projects in that vein. Maybe it is a problem of badly applying the methodology, maybe it’s a problem with the designers themselves or maybe it’s another thing altogether.

As I see it, the main issue with design not doing is actually the incapability of designers to deal with organizational politics. Pushing an idea forward means convincing stakeholders, removing barriers, getting a lot of people out of their comfort zone and actually justifying the impact of the project, making a case and getting the budget for it.

If you want to get things done then you need Design Politics not Design Doing*.

*Or any other catchy name you want to use to belittle Design Thinking.

(Sorry for the catharsis).

We have the information, insights and lots of possible leads into the design of the game. Now it’s time to decide what is actually the game we are going to make. This is about laying the foundations. While we don’t want to constantly go back and forth on design decisions we still want room to explore and this is a difficult task to balance. A solid understanding of the path and a clear goal is paramount for a clear and tight process and helps us create a coherent game.

From what I’ve seen, this is something a lot of designers struggle with. A lot of people, especially beginners, jump straight to the design phase missing this foundational part of the process. Without this, people tend to stumble around, doing and undoing whole segments of their work. Because of its importance this is going to be a bit of a long article.

To start with, we need to understand what kind of game we want to make, for whom and how.

To make it clearer, in this stage we have to define:

• The purpose of the game
• The player
• Our design principles
• Scope of the game
• Our constraints

This is going to provide the basis we need to define the frame of our design. This is not a linear process. We can start from any point (I’d still recommend starting by the purpose) and then move on to others. We might have to revisit the early ones after defining all of them as they’re all related to each other and a change in one might affect the ideas behind another.

The purpose of the game

The purpose might be to sell thousands of copies (mass market appeal) or to educate players in a specific subject or just to have fun with the process, to name a few. In my case it was an experiment to explore design methodologies and see the overlap with product design. My main objective was learning about game design (and design in general). This is important because I can filter game design decisions by sticking to the purpose.

The purpose of the game should actually be stated at the beginning of the project and revised at this stage. This is because understanding what we want to do with the game is going to drive the research and analysis phases of the process. I briefly mentioned in the first article that my design was first and foremost to learn about the game design process. This is still true at this stage.

Design Principles

These are our guidelines. They will shape how we approach the design of the game and help us make design decisions by narrowing the scope of the game. This is the first set of constraints that we self-impose. This is a common part of the design process that might be informed by our previous research or by personal preferences. This design “rules” are statements of intent and have to define a clear strategy. In order to achieve that, a principle has to be clear, actionable and non-obvious. For example, an obvious principle would be “Has to be enjoyable”.

Since my focus was on learning about the design process I focused on simplicity and openness instead of trying to make a huge game with lots and lots of components and rules. These principles reflect part of that approach.

The player

Players come in all sizes and shapes. More often than not they’re defined by their age but this is not enough. Age might give us an approximation of the cognitive capabilities but it doesn’t tell us much about their interests, habits and motivations. What we need to understand is how gaming fits in their lives, what they know about it and what things they feel are important. Sometimes the audience will be defined beforehand by a publisher or market opportunity, other times we will be able to determine who we want to reach. In any case, who we are designing for will be the source of a lot of design constraints and information. If the audience is a requirement and not a decision then we should set the design principles with them in mind.

Scope of the game and other constraints

Understanding the limits we’re going to operate in is important. Starting a design will imply limitations, requirements or constraints of any form. While the design space could be limitless, the realities of the world pushes us in certain directions. The most common set of limits we’re going to find is those of production and costs. A designer might come up with a great ten thousand cards behemoth of a game, now the cost of that game will be quite restrictive and won’t be very profitable. So, components present lots of limits, amount of cards, miniatures, size of the board and that kind of stuff. That’s related to other types of constraints like shipping (game size) and feasibility (being able to actually manufacture the thing).

Another set of constraints we’re going to find is on the mechanics side of the game. Complexity and the cognitive capacity of the players is a big one. Players are squishy human thingies and often have a limited mental capacity. Throwing dozens of mental calculations and forcing them to remember lots and lots of conditions from one turn to the other probably goes against the Geneva convention.

Every decision we’ve made in this section, from the design principles, to the understanding the player, is about the construction of useful constraints for our design.

I want to make a pretty important distinction. We’re going to have two types of limits: requirements and constraints.

Requirements are hard limits, usually externally imposed either by manufacturing capabilities or by a publisher. These are limits we are bound to or have to be contested in order to be changed (usually with long and arduous arguments).

Constraints are the fun, soft limits. As designers we self-impose some limits in our designs in order to be able to focus on certain aspects of the game, as a challenge or to actually enhance creativity.

Constraints limit the exploration space, while this might seem a bad thing it’s actually a pretty important part of the design process as having unlimited options is daunting and blocks creative progress. If you can do anything you want is pretty hard to choose where to begin and where to go next with your design.

The nice thing about constraints is that they’re soft limits, we can create and discard them whenever we find them to be convenient. Let’s say for example that I want to design a card game (constraint nº1), then as a personal challenge I decide to make a game that consists of only 20 cards (constraint nº2). I set out to work and come up with a pretty good game but there’s something I can’t quite solve until I realize that I could use a dice to enhance the interactions. It goes against the two constraints I set out to use, however the dice takes the game from pretty good to amazingly great. Changing the constraints of the game to allow this one dice is actually a no brainer. It’s not that the initial two constraints were wrong, they were there to take me from zero to the point I realized I needed a dice. They’re an integral part of the process.

In my own game I didn’t have any hard requirements (besides those of physics) but I did have many starting constraints in the form of the principles and the kind of experience I wanted to create.

One of my soft constraints was that I wanted, for thematic reasons, to have a board, similar to the tactical planning tables in many military fantasy works.

I knew that it was important for the feeling of the game to have that tactile experience and overview and that’s probably the only thing that remained almost “as is” from the original design.

One of my hard constraints was that I was working on the project alone and my graphic design skills are limited (and not to mention my absolute lack of artistic skills) so I had to find workarounds for that. More on that on future articles.

Defining the game

Like in any creative endeavour a designer probably has lots and lots of ideas for the game at this point, the importance of defining the concept behind the game is that it can help focus and filter ideas into a cohesive whole and provide a strong starting point for the process of designing the concept, mechanics, components and thematic elements of the game.

The end result of all of this work should be a list of constraints and design decisions that we can then reference during the whole design phase of the process.

Entries in the series:

· Part 1: Learn your stuff

· Part 2: Synthesizing information

· Part 3: Defining the game and its scope (You are here)

· Part 4: A game is a system

· Part 5: Test early, test a lot

· Part 6: Lessons learned

A board game design process: Defining the game and its scope was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

After researching our subject, after gathering lots and lots of information both around the theme and other games and their mechanics, after talking with players (if appropriate) we now have lots of data, but data alone is worthless. We need to make sense of it. Synthesis is the process of taking all that data and creating knowledge out of it.

Hopefully you’ve been classifying the data while you were collecting it, otherwise sorting all that information is going to be the first task.

Categorizing

Each game will require its own type of sorting according to what you’re looking to achieve or understand. Some basic categories would be:

Aesthetics

This is how the game should look, what kind of art would be appropriate, how the genre and theme usually looks like and what we would like to achieve. This can be sorted by style, artist, origin (you can put together concept art, stills and props from a movie for example) or you can create a moodboard by gathering everything you think represents your vision for how the game should look.

Thematic elements

What elements define the theme and genre. Not only looks but also situations, characters, emotions and actions. Everything that defines the theme, even if it’s not going to be featured in the game, like music or smells.

For Battlecuirsers I had many different lists. For example one of those was of famous phrases uttered in sci-fi like “Make it so”, “I’m getting my men” or even terms like “jaunting” or “brace for impact”. I also listed key technologies like shields, communications, torpedoes and different types of faster than light travel. By grouping those things together I could find themes and patterns that allowed me to think about what was key for the game and the mechanics.

Mechanics

As mentioned in the research article, collecting mechanics in the form of rulesets or images or even notes. Looking at how other games translated different actions into mechanics is always useful. This can be sorted by looking at types of actions (like movement or attack) or even by type of game, so it can be possible to sort mechanics from simulation to absolute abstraction.

For my game I looked at lots of wargames and stuff with incredibly complex and complete rulesets for everything you could imagine but I also looked at some simple card games with straightforward rules and interactions. It’s important to not only look at games in the same genre or theme. I looked at pirate, racing and card only games. Understanding how other people solved different interactions can inspire your own ideas.

Components

Knowing what’s been done and what could be done is important to understand the possibilities and how some mechanics are actually implemented can be the spark that ignites a creative drive. There’s usually talk about mechanics or theme driven design, but components are also an important part of game design and a possible starting point too.

Synthesis

By grouping stuff together we get to understand their characteristics, how they are defined and their relationships with one another. An interesting exercise is to go one step further and create maps of how things work. For example a narrative arc of a space battle can be mapped in order to understand how it develops. It can then be contrasted with a map of a historical naval battle to understand the differences. The purpose here is to increase our understanding of the subject and how to represent it.

One caveat of this process is that while it’s presented linearly it’s actually a jumbled mess. Synthesis might lead to more questions that could lead to the need for more research. During research, the information found might spur design ideas and you’ll find yourself going back and forth through the process. A clear example of this is what I mentioned during the research article about detecting this pattern of ‘attack-defense-movement’ core of actions. That realization came from a synthesis process.

The most important warning I have at this point is to avoid starting the design too early. If you’re on the research and synthesis part of the process, game design ideas will flow. That’s great and to be expected, but my recommendation is not to jump into a design spree but rather to write this ideas down and put them away for now, at least until the idea and design principles behind the game are clearly defined, which is going to be the subject of the next article.

Entries in the series:

· Lesson 1: Learn your stuff

· Lesson 2: Synthesizing information (You are here)

· Lesson 3: Defining the game and its scope

· Lesson 4: A game is a system

· Lesson 5: Test early, test a lot

· Part 6: Lessons learned

A board game design process: Synthesizing information was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The process of designing a board game is not different from designing any other product. You can approach it as an exercise in problem-solving or as a medium for self-expression and everything in between.

As a hobby, I’ve dabbled a bit in board game design. My first project was an exploration of the design process and how it correlates to boardgames. Since the purpose of the project was about learning rather than developing a great game I’m reluctant to even call mine a decent game but I do believe that the process behind has been quite interesting, enough to merit sharing it. And that’s what I want to do with this series.

I approach boardgames as experiences, so I start by choosing a subject, the idea is to define what the game is going to be about, what the game has to say. So the first thing to do after deciding the subject is understanding it, researching it and breaking it apart in order to see what the key elements of the experience are. These elements are going to be the backbone of the game and they’re going to drive the design of the game forward.

In most boardgame design communities this would be called a Theme driven approach. In most cases theme is just used as a shorthand for aesthetics or story, in my case I do try to focus on theme, on a core idea that drives the whole game forward.

In my case, I wanted to explore the idea of the space Captain. That meant reading, watching and looking at a huge body of work in science fiction in order to see what defined this type of fantasy. This idea of the space Captain covers a pretty broad spectrum of experiences. I identified the main categories: Exploration, leadership, diplomacy, science-technology and strategy. Trying to cover all this ground would be unproductive, and since this is my first game I wanted to keep the scope of the project small. I thought about what would be the simplest category to translate into a board game and in the end I went with big spaceship combat because of the simplicity of the interactions compared to a leadership or diplomacy game, and of course because there’s just much more reference material about combat than any other type of game.

Research resumed on this front, once again looking at the elements of this experience. What I found was that at the most basic level every encounter was dependent on three elements, positioning/movement, attack and defense. Three clear phases that are pretty functional, and provide a great core to expand upon. Still, on their own they lack any sense of character. So it was important to look for the things that were clearly emblematic of the genre. I found the moments of strategic brilliance where a plan came together by an ingenious use of the resources pretty common. In those there was always an element of energy management where power would have to be diverted from one system to another, preferably by shouting at the engineer in charge of the ship (think of poor Geordi LaForge) and of course different systems and technologies involved. Besides that, during research I came across lots of small details that could be referenced or used as inspiration for game mechanics, like asteroids, faster than light travel, drones and other flavour things from the genre. The basics form the core and that’s hugely important, but the details, the little winks and even a few clichés are what finally shape the experience and makes it meaningful and gives the player a strong emotional impact. It’s a bit about aligning the game with the mental model the player has of the genre. Another approach could be about breaking away from what’s expected and bringing a new perspective, but that’s a bit more complicated to pull off.

Another important source of information that has to be reviewed are other games. Exploring rulebooks of games that have approached the same subject or at least something similar enough. For example I looked at the Star Wars: Armada, I tracked down a Leviathan rulebook and looked at some pirate games. Games tells you how other designers approached the same subject and how they translated to their vision of a game. Take note on mechanics, on components, on dynamics on the relationship between players.

We now have seen the movies, read the books and taken notes, downloaded artwork and have lots and lots of data about our subject. The next step is to synthesise it into design guidelines for the game. Synthesis is a fascinating subject and it’s where we make sense of all the information and start to make sense of it in the context of the game. That step is going to be the subject of the next article.

Entries in the series:

· Lesson 1: Learn your stuff (You are here)

· Lesson 2: Synthesizing information

· Lesson 3: Defining the game and its scope

· Lesson 4: A game is a system

· Lesson 5: Test early, test a lot

· Part 6: Lessons learned

A board game design process: Learn your stuff was originally published in UX Collective on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.