Tu/explore - A quest game for new students at the tu/e
April 16th, 2024
In the first semester of ID, we were tasked to make a digital-physical hybrid game emphasizing the User and Society, and Creativity and Aesthetics. My team created TU/explore, an educational hybrid game to help new students learn about the school’s resources. The game is set in a briefcase-like box featuring an interactive 3D campus map, a trinket box, and customizable wall panels. It's designed for first-year students during orientation week, with scavenger hunts and task-based activities tailored to their needs. With the framing of this project being intentionally vague, such that we were encouraged to develop the reflective transformative design process, I viewed it as an opportunity to develop and reflect upon methodological approaches to design. Given the large timeframe and teamwork aspects of the project, my focus was on quality and organization.
These initial frameworks resulted in an iterative approach. When brainstorming our first idea, we planned to create the first draft of a functioning game quite quickly, through delegating roles and responsibilities to each teammate. However, through trying to define how the tasks would work, for example, creative thinking and user research would be necessary to refine the broad idea we had brainstormed into relevant learning points for new students. Furthermore, it became difficult to define the structural logic behind the game’s code without a proper sense of how the tasks would be played. Thus, we shifted our focus to being adaptive to new requirements as they appeared, such as implementing a physical box for the game to give users a tangible sense of progression and sentimentality in the game. This approach of modifying the concept regularly upon reflection of the current one allowed the project to develop depth and relevance to the requirements more than if we had stuck rigidly on executing our first idea. As a very planning-oriented designer, I often follow the guide to “measure twice and cut once,” where I research and premeditate predominantly before creating my designs. However, active care to reflect actively on work as it develops, meet with teammates to communicate and setting of small achievable goals have shown to be fruitful approaches to design. Moreover, they provide the framework to handle the the various kinds of challenges that arise throughout any design process.
When problem-solving, the user experience we wanted to create, prototyping methods and aesthetic choices influenced each other and the direction of the project heavily. For example, when I built the physical box for our prototype, I considered durability and functionality of the box, and what I was capable of doing- which then limited the aesthetic choices I was able to make. The user experience is very important to me as a designer, and set the foundations of the initial ideas used for the box- such as the idea that it be comfortable and customizable. Conducting user research led to the introduction of a trinket box and other sentimental-focused designs in the box. Then, what followed was an aesthetic interpretation of the sensory experience I attributed to the “Tu/e” experience supported by investigation into the school’s aesthetic and focus group research on how students imagined this Tu/explore game being meaningful to them. This continuous process of initializing requirements based on one area of expertise, and then reflecting on their compatibility with another shows to me how ideas can be refined and developed be considerate of all aspects of design. I feel that, through each “switch” to a different area of expertise, I was able to deepen my control over that approach to design, while also setting boundaries for the others.
I left this project with a set of discernible skills: woodworking, sketching, leadership + team management, use of focus groups and questionnaires, and brainstorming. Moving forward, it will be imperative that I use them to my advantage in further projects; and by focusing on perfecting them, I will be able to direct my work in complement of that which I have strong control over. I found this project to anchor me in the iterative design process, but insightful on how to use existing skills or apparent requirements to direct next steps and choices.
