Christian Crumlish — Designing for play | Web Directions

• In: Resources
• By:Guy Leech
• July 19, 2010

Web Directions @media 2010, Southbank Centre London, June 10 10.45am.

• Audio record­ing of session
• Presentation slides
• Session descrip­tion
• Designing social inter­faces — the book
• About Christian Crumlish

Presentation slides

Session descrip­tion

Taking ideas from game design, musi­cal instru­ment design, and play-​​acting tech­niques includ­ing improv and bodys­torm­ing, Christian will address the role of play in dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences and how we can design to fos­ter and encour­age play rather than squeeze all the joy out of life one pixel at a time.

In game design, you cre­ate an arena for play. You estab­lish bound­aries and rules and you work to tune game dynam­ics that yield fun expe­ri­ences rather than bor­ing, mechan­i­cal, or point­less drudgery. Within those bound­aries and rules the play­ers cre­ate their own unique expe­ri­ence, col­lab­o­ra­tively, every time. Again the mar­riage of strict pur­pose­ful con­straints with open space and room for human vari­a­tion cre­ates the best game experiences.

Can an enter­prise app, maybe one that looks like a spread­sheet and reports to HR ever actu­ally be fun? That’s a stretch but you can absolutely intro­duce ele­ments of play into the most buttoned-​​down con­text. Consider one prim­i­tive ges­ture from games: col­lect­ing. Many games offer some form of gather, arrang­ing, and dis­play­ing objects. Just so, even an HR por­tal may offer some oppor­tu­nity to incor­po­rate a col­lect­ing “game” into the workflow.

Christian will share tech­niques for intro­duc­ing a sense of play into the expe­ri­ences we’re design­ing and will exhort the assem­bled crowd to make life more fun for our users and to thrive while doing so.

About Christian Crumlish

Christian Crumlish has been participating in, analyzing, designing, and drawing social interactive spaces online since 1994. These days he is the curator of Yahoo!’s pattern library, a design evangelist with the Yahoo! Developer Network, and a member of Yahoo!'s Design Council. He is the author of the bestselling The Internet for Busy People, and The Power of Many, and is currently working on an upcoming book, Designing Social Interfaces, with Erin Malone. He has spoken about social patterns at BarCamp Block, BayCHI, South by Southwest, the IA Summit, Ignite, and Web 2.0 Expo. Christian has a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Princeton. He lives in Oakland with his wife Briggs, his cat Fraidy, and his electric ukulele, Evangeline.

Follow Christian on Twitter: @mediajunkie

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