Fiasco, that tabletop game that plays more like a collaborative improvisational storytelling exercise than anything, has always been one of my favorite games. The company that publishes it, Bully Pulpit Games, carries a range of similarly story-driven titles, and it just so happens that some of these miraculously fulfill two criteria:
They’re designed for a single player.
They’re free.
The Plant is one of these games, and I took some time out today to play through it.
How the Game Works
The Plant is “a solitaire roleplaying game,” and appropriately enough, you do play it like a game of solitaire.
The premise is simple enough: You are looking for your daughter in a plant.
The game’s engine consists of two types of cards, which you’ll make out of index cards (or whatever you have on hand):
Plant cards: These carry a number from 1-10 and have the letters A-B written on the edges. You explore the plant by drawing these cards and chaining them together to determine your next scenario or destination.
Detail cards: These can be anything from a person to an object to an emotion. You create these cards following some guidelines from the rulebook, and you’ll occasionally be prompted to draw these over the course of your journey.
The rulebook carries scenarios that you will basically weave through according to the cards you’ve drawn. And that’s it!
The Plant is a Story-Building Exercise
There are no points to rack up or objectives to pursue. The Plant is a game in the vein of Gone Home: an exploratory journey, where the game’s twists and turns lead you to pieces of story that you cobble together as you go.
What’s interesting here is that you create the game cards, and chance — you shuffle the cards and draw them to play — works with you to shape the game. The nature of the story you end up with is entirely up to you.
Setting Up My Game
I used some extra notepaper I had lying around. Here are the decks I gave myself for the game:
One deck of 10 Plant cards: three Down cards and seven numbered ones (3, 8, 9, 6, 5, 1, 7)
One deck of 10 Detail cards:
Threadbare jacket
Glimpse of your daughter in the distance
Somber corporate person
Feeling of regret on the skin
Forgotten letter to your daughter
Brand new wrench
Your daughter’s voice whispering, “Come back.”
Tattered astronomy book
Taste of warm blood
Smell of burnt toast
In the following posts, I’ll document how the story played out for me.
Lately, there’s been some buzz about reviving the practice of blogging. Warren Ellis has posted about it, as has Chuck Wendig, and a bunch of other people, I’m sure. There seems to be a growing collective awareness of how ephemeral social media can be, and how devastating that can be when these social media platforms are already so ubiquitous.
Or, in short, everyone seems to be asking: When we look back x years from now, what will we find? And that’s a question social media encourages us to avoid, if not resist altogether.
But as Chuck Wendig points out, we don’t own any of these social media platforms. Our tweets and Facebook posts are released into the ether, and if we wanted to leaf through them later on, maybe trawl for persistent threads in our thinking — we couldn’t. If we wanted to leave a platform, we’d decouple ourselves from everything we might’ve published there, too.1 I know: you can download copies of your data. But the downloaded data isn’t immediately available to anyone else, and migrating it to a new, publicly accessible home takes time.
X years from now, none of us might be on the same platforms we’re using today–and even if we were, the trails we would’ve made would be so muddled and inchoate, they might as well be mush. The findings in that Slate article I linked up there cut both ways: our future selves might be strangers to us now, but so will we be to them x years from now, if we’re not careful.
And so: blogging, a more lasting record of the people we are from day to day in the mad swirl of information that is the internet. Categories, tags, and other such systems assure us that we can make sense of whatever publications we accrue over time, but that kind of meta-organization is secondary. 2Consider the “log-like blogging” that Venkatesh Rao wrote about recently, which seems naturally resistant to most of these systems, at least in so much as these systems come to approximate the effects of naming.
The point is that all of it is owned, in a space that you build and control–a space that you can return to and make sense of, time and again. However you choose to order that space is icing.
My best Sundays so far have all featured good music. There’s nothing like a quiet afternoon in, hot tea in your hands and an album setting the vibe.
Today, that album was This Is It by The Greeting Committee. I found this Kansas City-based band through Spotify: one of my Discover Weekly playlists included their track, “You’ve Got Me.” Being a sucker for saxophones and indie pop, I fell hard. The best part? The rest of the album didn’t let me down.
Here’s a live session they played at KJHK earlier this year, featuring four great tracks from This Is It. The audio mix isn’t the best, but this is a band that shines live, and this is the best set of tracks I’ve found from the recordings on YouTube.
Cherry on top: “You’ve Got Me” kicks off the show.
Last week, I tuned in to General Assembly’s Intro to UX Design livestream for Asia-Pacific audiences. Technical hiccups aside, it was a good overview of what UX design is and what the work of a UX designer entails.
SidebaR
General Assembly (GA) is an education network that offers technical courses / bootcamps for fields like data science, product management, digital marketing, and UX design. It started in 2011 and has since grown to over 20 campuses worldwide.
Most of these campuses are in North America, but there’s one in Singapore as well, which is how I came to hear of them.
The talk addressed key questions like:
What is UX design?
What does a UX designer do?
How can someone get started in UX design?
Here are my main takeaways from the session and the Q&A session that followed.
What is UX design?
UX design is the practice of crafting and enriching a user’s journey through a product, service, event, etc.
Differentiating UX from UI can be challenging at first. The trick is to look at the scope:
UI: user interface, focuses on the visual and functional elements of a product or service
UX: user experience, focuses on how users interact and engage with a product or service
UX tackles a broader range of concerns, most of which have to do with the “post-launch” life and everyday use of a product or service. UX design will usually involve digital touchpoints that audiences encounter as they use a product or service.
The General Assembly talk went a step further to distinguish UX from usability and service design as well.
Usability is goal-oriented; it answers the question, “Did the user accomplish what they needed to do?” By contrast, UX design goes beyond “Yes” or “No” here and looks into the quality of the process behind that accomplishment.
Service design is the broadest concept of all these. It covers the whole user journey, from internal team organisation, to operational processes, to the physical and digital touchpoints that audiences engage with.
What do we mean when we say delight?
Delight is central to UX design, and it’s a concept that pops up a lot in conversations within the field. For most UX designers, the ultimate goal is to give audiences a delightful experience.
But “delight” can be a nebulous term, especially when individual experiences and reactions can be so subjective. How do UX designers know what criteria they should hit, and how can they gauge if they’re crafting something truly delightful?
Venturing out into the universe of UX design discussions a bit, Jared Spool’s blog post helped crystallize a simple but useful definition of delight in the context of UX design practice:
Delight measures the fulfillment of user expectations.
Of course, this is still tricky territory. Every user has different expectations, and a product or service can’t possibly fulfill them all. At the same time, there are situations where “delight” doesn’t seem to be the most appropriate aim (Spool uses life insurance and funeral arrangements as examples).
This is where the thought-provoking discussions sparked by John Saito’s post on the “dangers” of delightful design come in. As many respondents pointed out, it can be easy to conflate delight with cute or twee — superficial details that try to be clever or amusing, but rarely do much for the core user experience.
However, delight in the UX design sense runs much deeper. It’s the satisfaction that comes from a painless, well-executed solution.
Delight and the UX honeycomb
Just as there is no one-size-fits-all solution to every problem, there’s no universal list of user expectations. Instead, a UX designer must identify the intersection of:
Developed by Peter Morville, the UX honeycomb framework illustrates various key elements of a user experience. These facets serve as buckets for sorting the customer needs and expectations that matter. With the UX honeycomb, designers can clarify project priorities and better navigate the decisions and trade-offs that come up throughout the design process.
The weight of each facet will vary with each project. To successfully craft a delightful user experience, UX designers must take care to assign values to each facet based on careful research and data analysis.
Delight is the product of an elegant alignment of business goals and relevant user expectations.
What does a UX designer do?
All this implies that a UX designer’s job involves more than just visual design. To craft a delightful user experience, UX practitioners carry out tasks like:
Audience research
Data collection and analysis
Product requirement documentation
Prototyping
Usability testing
Taxonomy creation
Interface design
Copywriting
In bigger organisations, these functions may be assigned to different members of a UX team. For example, there could be dedicated UX researchers who work in collaboration with content strategists and interface designers. In some cases, however, all these functions might be rolled into one role, and the UX designer will need to wear multiple hats throughout a project.
All these clocks, like the whole information industry today, run the risk of no longer communicating anything because they tell too much. But they also possess another characteristic of the information industry: they no longer speak of anything except themselves and their internal functioning.
Eco, Umberto. “How Not to Know the Time.” How to Travel with a Salmon and other essays. Vintage: Random House, pp. 47-50.
You can never know your cat. In fact, you can never know anyone as completely as you want.
But that’s okay, love is better.
Paul, Caroline & MacNaughton, Wendy. Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology. Bloomsbury USA, 2013. By way of Maria Popova’s Brainpickings post.
Ask good questions. Good questions save time. Bad questions waste time. Bad questions create unnecessary back-and-forth conversations, which create frustration and conflict. People who ask bad questions get frustrated because they can’t get help, and people who are trying to help get frustrated because answering bad questions is so damn frustrating.
Zhu, Gordon. “How to be good at asking coding questions.” Medium,https://medium.com/@gordon_zhu/how-to-be-great-at-asking-questions-e37be04d0603. Accessed 24 January 2019.
Here began his fantastic attachment to his friends, especially the humbler ones. The lonely boy found affection among strangers and, in sheer gratitude, he gave them his pocket money, his toys, even the clothes off his back. His friends became his family: his home became every street, every street corner, every house however humble where he had known kindness, where he had been received as one of the group, where he had been given refuge as a “stowaway.”
Joaquin, Nick. “The Short, Unhappy Life of Boy Vergel.” Reportage on crime:Thirteen horror happenings that hit the headlines, Anvil Publishing, 2017, p. 128.
The fatalism of the Filipino is usually passive, expressed in the classic proverb about our fortune coming to us though we seek it not. But the more complex form of that fatalism sees a man as being steered in a certain direction by one circumstance after another until he finally reaches a point when, though he acts voluntarily — or thinks he acts voluntarily — he is actually being pushed by the circumstances that brought him to the point of action. The fatalist, as he looks back before he acts, sees everything as having conspired to make him perform that particular act, and therefore sees it as inevitable, as “fate.” This is the amok mentality. Afterwards, what others regard as an act of will, the fatalist regards quite sincerely as a product of circumstances.
Joaquin, Nick. “Four and ‘Fate.’” Reportage on crime:Thirteen horror happenings that hit the headlines, Anvil Publishing, 2017, p. 163.
Listened to an illuminating episode of the Global Dispatches podcast recently. The featured guest was Dr. Angela Chang, who discussed a groundbreaking study on the links between vaccines and poverty prevention.
This is the first study that looks closely at the non-health impact of vaccines. It’s impressive: the research uses statistical modeling and analysis to highlight important connections between development and medicine. More importantly, it yields results that can directly inform public health policies.
To measure the non-health impact of vaccines, Dr. Chang’s team looked at two main figures:
averted deaths
averted cases of medical impoverishment (brought on by lost income, treatment expenses, etc.)
One key takeaway is that vaccinations have a markedly larger impact on death and medical impoverishment figures from poorer sectors. This makes sense: poorer households are more vulnerable to disease and the financial risks of treatment. As the paper itself states:
Although the poorest quintiles experienced the lowest vaccine coverage rates, they enjoyed the most health benefits in terms of absolute number of averted deaths: The poorest quintile accounted for the largest share of deaths averted by all vaccines (23–34 percent), and the poorest two quintiles accounted for over half of the deaths averted by most vaccines.
[…]
The number of medical impoverishment cases decreased greatly with increasing wealth (exhibit 2). As expected, the vast majority of averted impoverishment cases occurred in the poorest quintiles, and fewer than 20,000 cases were averted in the richest quintile. For many vaccines … more than 40 percent of the averted cases occurred in the poorest quintile. Overall, the results suggest that vaccination would lead to an important reduction in medical impoverishment cases in the poorer quintiles.
Chang, Angela et. al. “The Equity Impact Vaccines May Have On Averting Deaths And Medical Impoverishment In Developing Countries.” Health Affairs, vol. 37, no. 2, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2017.0861.
Distributional impact is another important point, as Mark Leon Goldberg highlighted in the interview as well. The impact of vaccines varies — some bring greater benefits to the poor than others. As the paper points out, viewing vaccination programs through this lens can help policymakers prioritize initiatives with a bigger projected impact on the poor.
In other words, the paper is a big step towards learning how we can better wield health policies to achieve social equity.
The study has major limitations, mostly because global data is scarce. For example, estimates of incurred costs for specific diseases are spotty at best, and certainly difficult to find the more countries you want to examine. Still, it’s a great first step, and I’m glad to have heard about it from the podcast.
You can listen to the episode here. The full paper is available online (thank you, open access). It’s not too technical a read, and it should take no more than 30 minutes to go through. Please read it when you can.
