participatory design

Card sorting Level 1 cont.

Scenario

You have been invited to join a game of "reGossip" by someone you know.

This person is the "host" of the game you’ve been asked to participate in. The host has chosen people who he or she thinks are great storytellers who will make the game interesting and fun with their gossip.

When you first logon you will have a list of five people to whom you can send gossip. The game may involve many more people, but for now you only know of these five.

Your Objectives;

  1. To establish contact with as many players as possible.
  2. To participate in gossip chains by; receiving and generating gossip, rating the gossip of others, and choosing whether or not to pass gossip on. The length of the gossip chain determines the quality of your connection to it. The longer a piece of gossip has been in circulation the higher its connection quality.

Since this is a game you may want to achieve the highest score. Another motivation might be to participate in interesting chains of gossip, or find out about as many players as possible.

Once the participant is introduced to the basic concept of the game without any reference to context or interface they are asked to arrange the cards on a table. The participant is given minimal suggestions as to how this should be done. They are only asked to order the cards according to their own logic or ‘what would makes sense to them’. Then they are asked to explain the choices they’ve made and ‘walk through’ their process. At this point the cards represent conceptual elements of the game.

Once this card sorting process has been performed by each individual participant and recorded the card sortings are compared with one another. Observations and data are extracted and a consensus sorting is established by the re:gossip team. This consensus is brought to the participants as a group, discussed, and modified.

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Ron Wakkary
Associate Professor,
Technical University of British Columbia
Suite 301 152A Street
Surrey, BC V3R 7P8, Canada
+1 604 586 5281
wakkary@techbc.ca

Kristina Andersen
Senior HCI Engineer
HouseInTheSky
3 Lockhart Street London E3 4BL,UK kristina@houseinthesky.co.uk

Jussi Holopainen
Reseach Engineer
Nokia Research Center
Tampere, Finland
jussi.holopainen@nokia.com