Designing for Tangible Games revisited

In this class organized by the ID-StudioLab Aadjan van der Helm, students of Design for Interaction are given assignments to design and prototype a tangible game, using Max/MSP and phidgets.

The goal of my lecture is to give the students some ideas, methods and tools to help refine their concepts and ideas to the next stage. To do this, we asked the students to make postcards, explaining their projects visually on the front of the card and using a small area to explain their project in text on the back of the card. This forces the students to make a compact explanation of their project, but it also stimulates the use of plain language.

Last year, I gave a linear presentation about the different concepts, plus what tools, methods and approaches they could use to solidify their ideas. This year the presentation was quite similar, but I used a new tool that allows me to organize, present and annotate images. Instead of a linear presentation, the new presentation format made me group, cluster and draw relationships between the different postcards both for my own thought process and as part of the presentation for the students.

Update: On June 20, 2008 the students presented their prototypes and it was very interesting, with a good vibe and enthusiastic products. I put some photos of that day below:

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