Design Box
Design Box
Design box sessions are a used in game design for digital health games and apps. It is an interative, pedagogical approach to idea pitching which allows for participation by stakeholders of all types. It consists of 4 walls: the audience, the technology, the aesthetic, and question prior to pitching designs. It has been published across multiple journals and is a hallmark approach to software development in the game and app space.
What
The Design Box is an inductive design tool built around the notion that good design solves a problem. It focuses on ideation and iteration. It can be used to develop a pitch or to design features.
How
The Design Box asks teams to brainstorm the four walls of the box audience, technology, aesthetic, and question before pitching designs. It also uses the terms as general categories. It is useful to think of the categories as families of related requirements.
Design Box Walls
Audience
The audience is defined as the end user, the client, the vendor, the retailer, marketing; anyone who is a stakeholder and should be considered in the design.
Technology/Techstack
The technology or "techstack" is defined as the delivery platform, peripherals, available development hardware, software, and team skills, accessibility requirements considered in the design.
Aesthetic
The aesthetic is defined as what should the user feel as a result of the content? Art, sound, writing style, anything that affects the tone, mood, etc.
Question
The play or theoretical question is defined as the game mechanic, theory, or core question the end product, must answer.
Process
Using any brainstorming technique, the group should fill out all four walls, bulleted lists recommended. Some walls will be more ‘solid’ than others. When a team stalls it should move on to the next wall. As teams fill out walls they may realize there are design constraints they forgot to put on a previous wall. Teams are encouraged to go back to any wall. Once theoretical saturation occurs, that is the team has no more ideas to put on the wall it should move on to pitching designs.
Using the brainstorming technique the team prefers, members should pitch designs inside of the box. That is that each pitch should address all four walls before it is written inside the box. If a pitch doesn’t fit inside of the box then it should be talked about before including.
After filling the Design Box with pitches, stop. Before evaluating any of the pitches, see if any of them provide more clarity or indicate problems with the four walls. Refine the walls based on the pitches. Finally, erase the pitches and start the process all over again.
Eventually, the walls will become more “solid” and the box will become “smaller.” The pitches that work within the revised walls will be the ones that best solve the problem. This process can be repeated as many times as necessary to arrive at a clear pitch that the team supports. It may be useful to revisit the Design Box as a tool later to clarify a feature of the product or to review if the pitch still makes sense.
Note: Not all software will need to employ a design box session, but it will drastically help with scoping a project and allowing budget and timeline to follow as well.
Figure 1. Design box walls for initial game/app design
References
1. Altizer, Roger & Zagal, Jose & Johnson, Erin & Wong, Bob & Anderson, Rebecca & Botkin, Jeffrey & Rothwell, Erin. (2017). Design Box Case Study: Facilitating Interdisciplinary Collaboration and Participatory Design in Game Developm. 405-412. 10.1145/3130859.3131333.
2. Desselle, Mathilde, Holland, Lucy, McKittrick, Andrea, Altizer Jr, Roger, Gray, Paul, & Brown, Jason (2020) Augmenting the design box: Virtual reality pain relief for Australian burns survivors case study. In SeGAH 2020 : IEEE 8th International Conference on Serious Games and Applications for Health, 2020-08-12 - 2020-08-14, Fully Online Conference