Officially this section is called ‘ideation’ but that is a step too far from English for my comfort. It is interesting that some word contractions seem to work and some just seem to jar. I guess the key is clarity – it takes me longer to work out that ideation means creation of ideas than to use the longer phrase!
The design patterns and principles exercise was useful – distilling the key learning messages out of the case studies and theories which would be relevant to our design. This then fed into storyboarding which again showed the diverse (but not divergent) strengths of our team. We approached it from our experience – I created a flowchart for the game process and an event map and Gordon then fleshed out the flowchart into a more professional systems diagram. Christine fed from this into a much more visual mindmap style of process flow with each level subdivided into what will become separate page elements of the game. Floriane took the user’s point of view, taking a couple of personas through the process to see how well it met their needs and preferences. Altogether a great combination of relevant skills to get a useful and usable result. Much quicker than duplicating and debating each process!
We are now approaching the convergence phase – producing a coherent product. Some nervousness but equally complete confidence that our pragmatic approach will produce a competent product. Tom Peters has just produced a great paper – ‘Systems have their place; SECOND place’! He points out that human values, organisational culture and instinct for what is appropriate – the soft stuff – supported by hard systems can produce great results. Systems on their own can create conceptually perfect but practically disastrous results. I think our team has concentrated well on trusting our judgement, interpreting the ‘rules’ to produce a good product in the time available.
Peters, T. (2013) Systems have their place; SECOND place [Online]. Available from http://www.tompeters.com/docs/SystemsSecondPlace021113_final.pdf (accessed 07 June 2013).