IDECARDS

Here is the first presentation of IDECARDS companied with thoughts of Annakaisa Kultima on ideas and idea play:

IDECARDS is a set of playing cards designed to enhance creative thinking and design. The deck contains cards that can be used to come up with new ideas or change perspectives. There are several ways to use the cards and several games to play with them. You can also make your own cards and play them together with the basic set of IDECARDS.

How to play?

The basic deck of IDECARDS fits to any kind of ideating. There are four different kinds of cards in the basic deck: stimuli cards, structure cards, extra cards, rule cards and game cards. Stimuli cards provide something to react to. With structure and extra cards you can guide the ideas into certain form, depth or domain. Game cards provide you examples of games that you can play. Rule cards give you guidelines to create your own idea games.

How to use ideas?

Ideas produced in IDECARD session can be recorded and used as such or you can try to identify the most interesting parts of ideas and combine them into new thoughts. IDECARDS sessions help you to open up your thinking and give you inspiration to further ideas.

How to choose ideas?

Choosing ideas is neither a scientific operation nor a democratic venue. If there is an idea that is inspiring a large group of people, it may tell that this idea has something. However, ideas work best as a starting point for something more elaborate. Let ideas mix, let them grow and be iterative. As soon as you have something concrete, you can make better judgements. Choose the ones that inspires you.

Ideal group size

Ideal size of an IDECARD playing session is 2-5 people. The more people you have, the longer the turns take and people are not working efficiently. Instead of having large group of people playing the same game, have smaller groups playing simultaneously and mix people every now and then.

Make your own cards

New ideas are always related to something existing. Making your ideas or design better, you also need something familiar. Pick your subject and atomize it into pieces. Try to keep the stimuli or structure of the play session abstract enough; references to similar products may make you stick with the old idea instead of getting inspired of it. Don’t build a too small box for your thinking. However, too abstract ideas will not evoke anything interesting. There is a sweet spot, go and try to find it!

Acknowledgements

IDECARDS was developed in the GaIn (Games and Innovation) research project at the University of Tampere 2009-2011. GaIn was funded by Tekes, University of Tampere, University of Jyväskylä, Nokia, Veikkaus, Digital Chocolate, Universomo, Mr.Goodliving, Kuuasema, Moido Games, Ixonos, IGIOS and Sauma Technologies.

For further inquires: Annakaisa.Kultima@uta.fi or gamelab@uta.fi