Pivot!
Robert Vinluan
PIVOT! is a board game for 3–4 players who take on the role of creative entrepreneurs and work cooperatively (and competitively) to conceptualize and create a mobile app or website. Through the course of the game, they’ll make decisions about how the product works, who to market it to, and what it looks like, all while facing some headaches with clients, focus groups, and user tests along the way. While they each compete with each other, they must compromise on their decisions because if they don’t ship the product in time, the project is a failure for everyone! Digital product design encompasses the deliberate decisions behind research, user experience, visual design, and engineering, as well as other fields. As such, it functions as a system of considerations, choices and consequences. Since games are very good tools for simulations of systems and fostering collaboration, a board game is the ideal medium for transmitting an experience related to the field of digital product design. In today’s world, design is becoming more and more important. As technology adoption soars, the people who create the technology become the ones who hold massive amounts of power. There are many outlets for learning the hard skills required to become a technological maker, like programming and testing, but not many teach a solid thought process behind the decision making. This is where design thinking comes in: as a powerful tool for encouraging thoughtful creation. Pivot! aims to be an introduction to design and design thinking for people with no previous knowledge on the subject, within a context they are already familiar with, as they become the next generation of digital creators.