On February 24th 2017, I was a panelist at VERGE NYC, a conference hosted by the Transdisciplinary Design MFA program at Parsons. I was invited to talk about the relationship between design, transdisciplinarity, and politics, with fellow alumni from the program now working at IDEO and Parsons itself.
Out of the 3 invited panelists, I decided to reflect on the skills and tools that design has (or lacks) when dealing with activism and social change causes. These musings come as a direct result of my work with the Office of Social Change Initiatives at ThoughtWorks, during the past 8 months.
Upcoming documentary byĀ Anne Ferrero explores the current independent gaming scene in Japan:
The Japanese video game industry lead the world in creativity and innovation from the 1980ās to the mid-2000ās, but in recent years, Japanese studios had been unable to keep up with advancements in technology, and many have shifted focus away from risky projects and unique gaming experiences.
All around the world, many players long to play games like those that inspired and excited them in their childhood. For industry veterans and young talents who aspire to the pursuit of originality and creative freedom, going independent is the answer.
Japan has a history of independent creators building lively communities, even within industries where large media companies rule. Comic Market, and events like it attract more than 1 million attendees yearly.
For the last several years, the Japanese game industry has begun to recognize the power of independent creators and the momentum of the fledgling scene, and in 2013, the Tokyo Game Show created a pavilion to feature indie creators for the first time in its history.
But is the Japanese game industry really changing? What is the price of creative independence? Why is there no funding or support from the Japanese government? These are just some of the questions we examine, to understand not only this unique scene, but its roots in culture. The answers tell a story of a struggle, not only for creative expression, but for survival as well.
Students at the Parsons School of Design offer fantastical solutions to urban travel problems with āMobility Speculations.ā
My work at Parsons' Transdisciplinary Design MFA just got published in The Atlantic's City Lab. We developed design speculations for Ford. CheckĀ āem out!
Do we really need an app that lets us brew our coffee from anywhere?
āWe are overloaded daily with new discoveries, patents and inventions all promising a better life, but that better life has not been forthcoming for most. In fact, the bulk of the above list targets a very specific (and tiny!) slice of the population. As one colleague in tech explained it to me recently, for most people working on such projects, the goal is basically to provide for themselves everything that their mothers no longer do.ā
Finalists will receive funds and assistance to hone their ideas, and in September KaBOOM! will award $1 million in prize money to enable 50 winners to bring their ideas to life.
Very happy to announce that Corey Chao (also from Transdisciplinary Design MFA at Parsons)Ā and I got selected as finalists for the KaBOOM! Play Everywhere Challenge.Ā
Design Strategy at the Game Developers Conference 2016
Many people were surprised when I told them that I got selected as an IGDA Scholar to attend the Game Developers Conference fully funded. They were not surprised at the fact that I got the scholarship *itself*, but rather at the fact that I had applied to begin with. Why did I want to go to this week-long, expensive, multitudinous, games conference? Many professors at Parsonsā MFA in Transdisciplinary Design asked me this question repeatedly: really, why, Andy?
I like to think that this reaction has to do directly with my hybrid status as a designer; I seem to float in-between the areas of design strategy and game design. Itās almost like I canāt quite be placed on one side or the other. To design strategists, Iām one of them, with a sometimes rather *odd* fascination with play. On the other side of the field, to game designers, Iām one of them too, with the slight difference that my design process, inexplicably, does not necessarily lead to games.
So why *did* I go to GDC? Why did I apply to be a Scholar at all?
My journey to this moment started in 2014. Arriving at Parsons quickly taught me that my systems thinking skills, which I attribute to my fascination with games old and new like āSimCityāand āPapers, Pleaseā, were applicable to the job of a design strategist. After all, most of our conversations at Parsons seemed to me like a game, one where scaling up and down, finding connections and consequences, and designing ārulesā, were the norm. I instinctively knew how to do that, because I had been training for it all my life, night after night after night of playing with and in game systems.Ā
But I also quickly realized at Parsons that playing games was not enough for the change that I wanted to see in the world. Through my work at the MFA Iāve realized that coming into a problem defining a game as a prescribed solution does not work most of the times. In my studies Iāve come to see design as a way of materializing preferable futures. And these āpreferableā futures arise from a personal desire of wanting to shape the world for the better, to contribute something back beyond a single experience. This means that designers themselves have to be able to see these futures, to frame themselves as the correct people to enact change.
Being a Scholar this year was a way of exploring if I could bring that sensibility of design strategy to GDC. To go beyond the act of designing a game, and to start thinking about the human issues that the games industry deals with.Ā
I went to GDC this year with the sole intent of finding out what spaces existed to better design our industry. I talked to more than 20 amazingly talented game developers during my week in San Francisco. I met long-time heroes like Don Daglow and Tim Schafer, mentors like Stone Librande, colleagues from countries close and far, and friends that I hadnāt seen since GDC 2015.
I visited big studios like Zynga, and was pleasantly surprised by the way they use UX and design to address their players, and went to not-so-big studios like DoubleFine, were I learned that sometimes our design strategy ways can be too structured for the lean processes of design that game studios have to apply.Ā
I attended over 20 talks during the expanse of a week. I visited all the companies that I had been dreaming of since I was a child, like Valve, Blizzard, Microsoft, Nintendo. I went to the oh-so-well-known parties hosted by huge brands. I was inspired, I was challenged, I hugged, I danced, I laughed, I rushed, I screamed.
But, overall, I learned one main thing: this industry needs design strategy, badly.Ā
It needs new ways of addressing its ācrunch cultureā (where people in game companies can work 80 hours a week or more for months), it needs new ways of generating revenue for digital sales (game prices keep plummeting downward to the point were people only pay pennies for a game), it needs new ways of prototyping in lean ways before making digital builds, it needs new financing structures for crowdsourcing, it needs new co-creation funnels to bring players into the design space, it needs new revenue models for mobile games, it needs clearer paths to revenue in the upcoming craze for Virtual Reality.
All of those design problems excite me. Designers can tackle them, they can fix them. The key is, precisely, what game designers are most know for: systems thinking.
So why did I apply to be a GDC Scholar? Simply put, because going was the embodiment of Transdisciplinary Design in action. And I want to be the person that helps push forward the industry towards looking at itself more honestly and acting towards preferable, humane and sustainable, futures.
**Iāll be attending Consensus 2016: Making Blockchain Real on May 2-4 in New York City, thanks to the MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative!**
Last year when I went to Consensus, one of the biggest Bitcoin and blockchain currencies conferences in the world, thanks to a scholarship sponsored by MIT. Iām happy to say I got in again this year!
In 1991, Cuba's economy began to implode. "The Special Period in the Time of Peace" was the government's euphemism for what was a culmination of 30 years worth of isolation. It began in the 60s, with engineers leaving Cuba for America. Ernesto Oroza, a designer and artist, studied the innovations created during this period. He found that the general population had created homespun, Frankenstein-like machines for their survival, made from everyday objects. Oroza began to collect these machines, and would later contextualize it as "art" in a movement he dubbed "Technological Disobedience."
Verge, the 2.5 day free design event created by the MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons, is starting in 1/2 hour. I'm the leader on a conversation on Financial Inclusion vs. Financial Intrusion in the context of elasticity. More info over at www.verge.nyc
I was the moderator of this panel on game development in the Spanish-speaking world, over at Indiecade in Los Angeles, and the video just got released. We touched upon several interesting and controversial topics like learning how to become a game dev through piracy, the affordances of markets and clients in Latin America, co-creating games with indigenous populations, and language barriers in education and marketing. It was a great time and I feel like we got to cover many taboo topics with openness and a critical mind.
