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Northern Star & Exit: A board game design process : Ett examensarbete inom Teknisk Design

This report describes an independent design-project with the purpose of designing a board game design process and as a result a re-design of anindependently developed board game named Northern Star, which under-gone development for three years prior to the project as a hobby-project (and may be subject to a Kickstarter at a later date).Northern Star was initially based on a competitive, strategic, card- and dice-based elements which evolved into a thematic, narrative and semi-cooperative game as a result of the project. Initially this game was developed outside the project in two prior courses (D0046A: Usability and D0051A: Context & Analysis) in which all results can be found in appendix 1). The target-group of the project were groups consisting of social circles with relatively long experience in regards to (mainly thematic) board games. The process used were mainly an agile project plan and weekly design sprints based around an iterative design process (much alike IDEOS (2015) three linear phases of inspiration, ideation and prototyping). However it was used in a non-linear way where the designer freely choose of which of the three phases that was to be used. During the inspiration-phase substantial amounts of data were recorded in a pre-study (see appendix 1) as well as user-needs (see appendix 2) were a benchmark led the designer to a design-specification (which also resulted in a new method in regards to board game design processes) were the projects core-values were defined guiding further development of Northern Star. This was followed by a cyclic process in which a concept were generated for Northern Star which led to rapid prototyping and the realization of a physical product, tested duringworkshops. Here the participants gave feedback in the form of discussions, surveys and video-footage for later analysis which added for additional inspiration in which the cyclic process began anew.This process lead to a re-design of Northern Star (briefly mentioned above) were an interactive board game box allowed for an organic game-play system evolving over time with a lot of focus given on player-interaction, meaningful choice, few components as well as immersion in the form of a graphically rich representation of the theme.A new design-process were developed and given the name: Exit: A board game design process in which a lot of focus was given human-centered and participatory design (supported by the theoretical framework and the project-results). This was realizedas a board game where the designers goal is to get from the beginning step - start (inspiration phase) to exit (end of the implementation phase) in which the designer was given choice of free movement between different phases through a field given the name “warp”. Lastly two questions were answered:•How can participatory and human-centered design (also in regard to research) as well as relevant theory contribute to a redesign for Northern Star as well as a better design-process for those involved in similar fields? •How can norms be identified and used in regards to making a more competitively successful product? Answers revolved around how human-centered design have a lot of similarities to board game design supported by exploration of different perspectivesand gave rise to opportunities for normative design(decreasing stigmatization around board games and resulting in unique solutions).

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:ltu-74854
Date January 2019
CreatorsTagesson, Pär
PublisherLuleå tekniska universitet, Institutionen för ekonomi, teknik och samhälle
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageSwedish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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