A few weeks ago I went to a lecture with Jon Kolko – the latest entrepreneur in residence at Medea. He is associate creative director at Frog Design and director for the Austin Center for Design. He talked about the role of Design in society today. His view was that since there is lot of turbulence (financial crisis etc.) right now, there is also lot of opportunity to rethink things. What kind of objects and services we surround ourselves with, and what we want out of the life we live. He talked about the importance of having empathy with the people you design things for. Prototyping, testing and involving the users are important aspects of the design process. Social innovation are buzzwords in the design community right now. Personally I’m hoping it will stay that way.
Something that came to my mind during his talk was the “designer attitude” that he expressed. For the last couple of years there has been an ongoing discussion about the pros and cons of cross media (transmedia or what ever you like to call it) and the difficulty of making different media producers meet and create together. People from the film industry don’t talk to game producers and so on. I was invited to be part of a panel debate on this topic during Nordic Game Conference in late April. Everyone seems to think it’s difficult to think outside of his or her own medium of expertise.
For Bobbi and me this has always seemed a bit odd. Using and mixing different media has always come natural to us. But there are very few game companies like us out there. What I realized was that it’s our designer attitude that makes us different. We design experiences for people. We use ideas, methods and frameworks from games to do so. This might seem obvious but I never fully realized how being a designer makes you see the world a bit differently. Our focus is not a specific medium but how each medium make you feel, think and act. We can be storytellers too, but the tools we use are based on what kind of experience we like to give to people.
By the way check out this blog if you want to learn more about transmedia: http://www.yousuckattransmedia.com/
Guys in Hermodsdal testing a Urblove game.
