Feb 7 – 13

And so it had arrived. The time had come to make perhaps the most critical decision of the entire semester – the ominous task of choosing a direction for the project. But how do you evaluate design, particularly design with transformational intent, objectively without a proof of concept for each idea. What lens and tools do we rely on for making this decision? The answer was to come through an ETC process, placed at the perfect time and moment – Quarters!

Quarters is a two stage process. In the first phase, faculty visit our project room in groups of 2 and spend fifteen minutes listening to the progress we have made thus far. In the second phase, two faculty members spend 30 minutes providing detailed feedback on our designs and overall direction. The general feedback we got was that our ideas were too detailed for this stage, and we needed a lot more of them. The faculty wanted us to pull back rather than focus too much on any one idea, which was a major bummer for us.

Our phase 2 meeting with HCI professor and transformational games scholar Jessica Hammer, proved to be invaluable. She agreed that we needed many more ideas, and taught us how to objectively measure each idea’s potential for transformation without having to come up with too many details. This process would evaluate the ideas and help us choose what to work on for the rest of the semester.

The evaluation process essentially asks the design to be expressed through a template with the following components :

1. What transformation does the design elicit?
2. How is the transformation executed?

Once the design is represented as such, it must hold true to the following critical observations :

1. Is the what for your idea really valuable?
2. Does the how lead to the what?
3. Does the design lead to the how?
4. Does the game have transfer? How does your game lead the player from state A to state B? State A should be as close to the audience’s state of mind at the point where the game starts, and should lead to state B i.e. the transformed state.

In the end, we decided to hold off the evaluation till the next week when our main designer was back (she was out of town for an interview). This would be a critical point in our project and we wanted the entire team, especially her, to be present.