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Entries in interaction (2)

Wednesday
Nov252009

New Project

it's about data visualization, for a control room environment. We paid a visit 2 weeks ago to one of the biggest paper mill in europe, down in Sundsvall. It was quite an experience to see how they manage to monitor so many things at the same time.

Now 5 and half weeks left, a big list of things to do. Some books I'm gonna read:

Visualizing Data by Ben Fry

 

Learning.ActionScript.3.0.A.Beginners.Guide

 

Wednesday
Sep162009

Design is a game D9

well we were told that we should keep an diary during these 4 weeks, but not until now did i recall it... 

 

the goal of this project/course is to design a board game, based on a dilemma, which is gonna be found through interviews with some small companies. During last week, we interviewed a small company here in umea. In the end, we define our choice of dilemma as, the growing of a company( or any group) and the closeness between its members. Since we found that although they have a will to grow their business and market share, they're reluctant about losing the "family feeling". We think it might be interesting to make some games with that principle embedded.

 

 So today, we've regrouped and started to try some ideas out. Some thoughts today:

1, the game has to be fun to play with. no matter how "educating" it'll be, if it's boring, no one plays it.

2, we like to have simpler rules. the more rules you introduce, the more chances they'll contradict each other. and people have to learn the rules harder as well.

3, it'll be better if we take some real world experience as reference, so the rules would become more natural and self explanatory. 

4, tweaking the balance is the most tricky part...I guess we'll end up spending most of the time fine tuning. We tried some ideas first, and as we play, we find problems, so we modify existing rules or introduce more rules. Then something that went well before would go wrong...it's a very complex process indeed.

5, now it's still quite a abstract idea.(just some blocks moving around...) maybe it could make a nice game itself. but if we can map it to some real world scenario, that might be more interesting? 

 

well, let's see what happens in tomorrow's testing.