Tag Archives: design

Holding us “accountable” – jargon board introduction

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A reader just asked about our post from nearly a year ago that suggested we’ll start a “jargon board” to define terms that we discuss here on the blog. Where is it?, the reader wanted to know. Well, like many big ideas, sometimes they get dropped in the everyday what’s in front of our faces fire to put out. But astute readers hold us accountable, and for that, we thank you.

So, let’s start that board as a series of posts with the Category: Jargon. With that, let me start with accountability, then. Often, we hear about “being accountable to stakeholders.” Setting aside stakeholders for the moment, what does it mean to “be held accountable”? It can come in various forms,  but most often seems to be providing proof of some sort that you did what you said you would do. TA few weeks ago, for example, a reader asked for the location of the board that we said we would start, and it turns out, we couldn’t provide it (until now). For other times, it may be paying a bill (think of the looming U.S. debt ceiling crisis, in which we are being held accountable for paying bills), or it may be simply providing something (a “deliverable”) on schedule, as when I have to submit my defended and corrected thesis by a particular date in order to graduate this spring, or when you have to turn in a paper to a professor by a certain time in order to get full credit.

In the research world, we are often asked to provide progress reports on a yearly basis to our funders.  Those people or groups to whom we are beholden are one form of stakeholders. They could be the ones holding the purse strings or the ones we’ve committed to delivering an exhibit or evaluation report to as a contractor, making our client the stakeholder. This blog, actually, is the outreach we told the National Science Foundation we’d do to other stakeholders: students, and outreach and research professionals, and serves also as the proof of such outreach. In this case, those stakeholders don’t have any financial interest, but they do want to know what it is we find out, and how we find it out, so we are held accountable via this blog for those two purposes.

All too often accountability is only seen in terms of the consequences of failing to provide proof.

But, I feel like that’s really just scratching the surface of who we’re accountable to, though it gets a lot more murky just how we prove ourselves to those other stakeholders. In fact, even identifying stakeholders thoroughly and completely is a form of proof that often, stakeholders don’t hold us to unless we make a grievous error. As a research assistant, I have obligations to complete the tasks I’m assigned, making me accountable to the project, which is in turn accountable to the funder, which is in turn, accountable to the taxpayers, of which I am one. As part of OSU, we have obligations to perform professionally, and as part of the HMSC Visitor Center, we have obligations to our audience. The network becomes well-entangled very quickly, in fact. Or maybe it’s more like a cross between a Venn diagram and the Russian nesting dolls? In any case, pretty hard to get a handle on. How do you account for your stakeholders, in order to hold yourself or be held accountable? And what other jargon would you like to see discussed here?

Bits and Pieces

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-A simple hex map

-A bag of small rocks

-Two dozen tiny plastic dinosaurs

-Two 20-sided dice

-Nine six-sided dice

-100 poker chips

Deme‘s trial form is just about ready to emerge—marsupial-like—to finish its gestation outside the warm pouch of my imagination. Since its dramatic overhaul last year, the core concept has been consistent: a hex-grid tactical strategy game based on species interactions instead of the more traditional trappings of medieval fantasy and/or giant robot warfare.

The items listed above are the physical components for the game. Why tiny plastic dinosaurs? Because dinosaurs were the tiny plastic things Fred Meyer had on sale. At this early phase, it would be great to have a range of custom figurines to give the game any aesthetic properties I want, but ain’t nobody got time for that.*

This is prototyping, and if dinosaurs I have, dinosaurs I will use. The game, mind you, is not necessarily about dinosaurs. As a game, it is not necessarily about anything. I will tell people that a roll of the dice is a charge by a predator and a poker chip of a certain color is energy derived from food or an abstract representation of health. The dice roll could just as easily be a cavalry charge and the poker chips rubies, maps or small dogs. The elements that are most arbitrary are, in this case, perhaps the most important.

I’ll give you a personal example. When World War II first-person shooter games first became “a thing” with franchises like Call of Duty and Medal of Honor, I was a little put off. Making a game out of a real and recent conflict that caused so much lasting destruction and pain seemed crass… until I played a few titles. In most cases, the subject matter was handled with a level of respect and honesty I hadn’t expected, and much of that honesty was the recognition that this game is not like what happened, and no game ever could be. A game need not be instructive or technically realistic to spark interest and facilitate learning.

In basic mechanical terms, a historical shooter is very similar to a gonzo sci-fi shooter like Doom. The difference is in presentation—what we’ve decided the game is about. Doom, while challenging and entertaining, never left me thinking about anything of great human significance afterward. The Call of Duty franchise left me thinking of the reality behind its narrative.

The games were not meant to recreate the experience of war, but to let us talk about it. The cliché health packs and other FPS conventions, rather than appearing cheap and “unrealistic,” served as reminders that this was play—a safe, interactive diorama of something significant and terrible worth remembering. I found myself researching the Battle of Stalingrad and the human consequences of war for weeks after playing. I’d call that a free-choice learning outcome, and from a big-budget “recreational” game at that.

 

*Speaking naturally in front of a camera, especially following a stressful situation, takes a lot of courage. I think the funny thing about this video is not how Sweet Brown talks—though it’s often presented that way—but the fact that she nonchalantly lays bare and discards our unspoken expectations about how one speaks to a news crew, just by acting like a regular person. I have a huge amount of respect for that.

More prototyping at the wave tanks…it’s lego-tastic!

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This past week at HMSC, we have been getting back to my old favorite – exhibit design and prototyping. Katie and I have been planning the prototype of the video booth that will go in to the new wave tank area, which is intended to capture visitor reflections when they test out their wave-resilient lego structures in the large tsunami tank.

 

 

 

The idea behind the booth is visitors will build and test their lego structures in the tank, and then have the chance to review footage of their “crash” via an overhead camera above the tsunami tank. The video booth will encourage visitors to reflect on their footage and video record their response. Eventually, the reflections we capture will be used to research how visitors reflect on design and test activities in an ocean engineering context.

Depending on the application interface that is being designed for us to run the video review and record capabilities, the prototype will start simple with a touchscreen device behind a curtained booth. We are hoping that “curtaining” the booth will give it an element of mystery for visitors, and hence a hook to use the exhibit – inspired by our lab group’s visit to the Science Factory last summer, where we played for a long time in a darkened booth that allowed us to explore photosensitive materials.

With the help of Becca and Susan’s interpretive expertise, myself and Allison are also in the process of working on some signage to help visitors explore how different construction materials will affect their lego structure wave-resilience. Mark had the idea to weaken different color legos to represent different materials resistant to wave impact, an idea which Harrison began experimenting with last spring. In this way, the weakened legos are models of different construction materials and, in essence, are weakened using a drilling tool so they have less “cling” to the base plate their fixed to during tank testing. Some are heavily weakened to represent wood, some only moderately to represent concrete, and some not at all to represent steel. The idea is to encourage visitors to experiment with differing “materials” and to generate hypotheses about material effect on design as they build and test their structures.

I love exhibit prototyping, so these tasks have been very enjoyable for me so far! I’ll post some pictures once these get out on the floor.

 

Exhibit or research platform?

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Our climate change “exhibit” is rapidly losing its primacy as an exhibit on which we do research to instead becoming a  research platform that we set up as an exhibit. The original plan was to design an exhibit on a multitouch table around climate change and research, among other things, how users interact and what stories they choose to tell as related to their “6 Americas” identity about climate change.

After Mark attended the ASTC conference, in talking with Ideum folks and others, we’ve decided what we really need to build is a research platform on the table, with exhibit content just as the vehicle for doing that research. That means instead of designing content and asking research questions about it, we’re taking the approach of proposing the research questions, then finding content to put on that allows us to investigate those questions. The good news is that a lot of content already exists.

So, with that in mind, we’re taking the tack now of identifying the research questions we’re interested in in order to build the appropriate tools for answering those questions. For example,

-How do people respond to the table, and what kinds of tools do we need to build so that they will respond, especially by creating their own narratives about the content?

-How can we extend the museum’s reach beyond the building itself, for example, by integrating the multitouch exhibit and handheld tools? What is the shelf life of interactions in the museum?

-What are the differences between the ways groups and individuals use the table, or the differences between the horizontal interactions of the table-based exhibit vs. the more traditional “vertical” interactions provided by other exhibits (did you play Ms. Pac Man differently when it was in the table version vs. the stand-up kiosk?)

-How can we help facilitate visualization understanding through simulations on the table where visitors can build comparisons and manipulate factors in the data to create their own images and animations?

What other questions with the multitouch table should we build research tools to answer?

 

 

 

 

 

“Board games by the numbers” (From The PA Report)

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As I gear up for Deme‘s first play tests, I find it useful (if intimidating) to look past the initial design phase to what its future might hold. If I choose to publish Deme as a boxed-and-ready board game, I’ll have in mind Ben Kuchera’s recent piece for the Penny Arcade Report. Kuchera interviewed James Mathe of Minion Games about the realities of using Kickstarter to fund a board game.

“Mathe said that his fulfillment company stated that out of 80 new products in 2012, only 22 of them sold over 500 units at retail. That’s a sobering look at the reality of the board game business, and it’s a business with a heavy cost in terms of production and shipping. In contrast, Mathe gets production quotes assuming runs of 1,500 to 2,000 copies of each game. ‘You’re not going to sell more then [sic] that on Kickstarter and through distribution unless you have a real hit of a game,’ he explained. ‘Which is rare, though everyone thinks their game is great.'”

Publication and distribution issues are still a way off for me. Still, they will be waiting as soon as I feel that Deme is ready for release. Should I go digital? Should I release Deme strictly as a rule set? Should I maintain a stock of pre-fab game sets for demos? The sooner I get people around the table, the sooner I’ll know.

 

With their shovels slung behind them

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We spent this morning doing renovations on the NOAA tank. We deep cleaned, rearranged rocks and inserted a crab pot to prepare for the introduction of some tagged Dungeness crabs. NOAA used to be a deep-water display tank with sablefish and other offshore benthic and epibenthic species, but it has lost some of its thematic cohesion recently. Live animal exhibits bring unique interpretive complications.

All in-tank elements must meet the needs and observable preferences of the animals. This is an area where we cannot compromise, so preparations can take more time and effort than one might expect. For example, our display crab pot had to be sealed to prevent corrosion of the chicken wire. This would not be an issue in the open ocean, but we have to consider the potential effects of the metal on the invertebrates in our system.

Likewise, animals that may share an ecosystem in the ocean might seem like natural tankmates, but often they are not. One species may prey on the other, or the size and design of the tank may bring the animals into conflict. For example, we have a kelp greenling in our Bird’s Eye tank who “owns” the lower 36 inches of the tank. If the tank were not deep enough, she would not be able to comfortably coexist with other fish.

We’re returning the NOAA tank to a deep-water theme based on species and some simple design elements. An illusion of depth can be accomplished by hiding the water’s surface and using minimal lighting. The Japanese spider crab exhibit next door at Oregon Coast Aquarium also makes good use of these principles. When this is done right, visitors can get an intuitive sense of the animals’ natural depth range—regardless of the actual depth of the tank—before they even read the interpretive text.

We’re also using a new resident to help us clean up. The resident in question is a Velcro star (Stylasterias spp.) that was donated a couple of months back. It is only about eight inches across, but the species can grow quite large. Velcro stars are extremely aggressive, and will even attack snails and the fearsome sunflower stars (Pycnopodia helianthoides) that visitors know from our octopus tank. Our Velcro star will, we hope, cull the population of tiny marine snails that have taken over the NOAA tank’s front window in recent months.

Colleen has been very proactive in taking on major exhibit projects like this, and she has recruited a small army of husbandry volunteers—to whom I’ll refer hereafter as Newberg’s Fusiliers—to see them through. Big things are happening on all fronts, and with uncommon speed.