Photography by Geoff Friend, Powerhouse Museum
This Tuesday night (30/11) the Sydney Powerhouse Museum relaunched its Ecologic exhibition after almost ten years on continuous display. At the heart of this fantastic and valuable exhibition is something we are very proud of… our WaterWorx game for school children (and big kids too) running across eight iPads. This is the culmination of around 4 months’ work since we were commissioned by the Powerhouse and Sydney Water to develop an interactive installation to raise awareness of the significant challenge of managing Sydney’s water supply.
If you know Digital Eskimo, then you’ll know this is the sort of stuff we get excited about. This is the first installation of its kind in Australia. It is proving hugely popular, but most importantly, it is having an effect.
Game faces on – co-design time
We kicked off the Immersion phase of the project with a co-design workshop in our custom built facility in Surry Hills.
In one co-design exercise, the participants from the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney Water, and the Department of Education and Training were asked to design a game that communicated the key aspects of the project. This wasn’t to design ‘the game’ (at this stage we didn’t even know if a game was appropriate), but we wanted to use game design to tease out insights into the requirements and priorities for the installation. Ideas ranged from an adventure game that explored the hazards and obstacles an ocean-destined droplet must go through to an annual water related fun run/swim event in Sydney.
The exercise provided a range of insights into project issues and concepts but in the end the workshop’s game design activity also reinforced that a game would be the ideal way to reach our school child audience and achieve the project’s objectives.
Lots and lots of prototyping
We used a bunch of prototyping techniques throughout the project from concept creation to implementation, enabling us to constantly explore and test ideas quickly and cheaply. That’s nothing new for us, although watching our Creative Director, David Gravina, and chief game tester Fionn Neeme O’Hare (8 years old) prototyping an imaginary game experience with Play-Doh was an amusing (and very insightful) first for us.
Early paper prototypes were generated for several game concepts and played through in multiplayer and single player scenarios. One of these explored how the game could work on a large multi-touch table.
Creating an entire playable paper version of a multi-touch table game exposed a range of interaction and design challenges that fed into the design process before we began to push pixels around the screen.
User testing, anywhere, anytime
The continuous testing of the game with our target audience of 7-12 year olds was gratifying and effective. There was a good balance between structured, ‘formal’ sessions in the studio and ad-hoc, spontaneous, Sunday morning testing sessions in noisy cafes filmed with an iPhone. It all counts!
Every session taught us a lesson in how to refine, tweak, and, importantly, simplify the game for the better. And because we take an iterative approach to our work we could continuously make these improvements while focusing on ensuring we got the ‘feel’ of the game right; crucial in game design.
A win for collaboration and consideration
The success of this project is very much a product of our Considered Design process and the collaboration it engendered across an excellent team from Digital Eskimo, the Powerhouse Museum and our new friends at Bonobo Labs.
We knew we were working on something special when, in one collaborative design session, a user story was created to specify the behaviour of the game characters which read “as a person, I can have complex toilet behaviours”!
Most importantly, the game is exceeding almost all of the objectives we set out to achieve. A teacher visiting recently from Sydney’s Barker College sent PHM this great feedback: “… the WaterWorx game made (the kids) realise how hard it is to manage the water supply – mission accomplished! It was a big favourite.”
Given that one of the priority communication goals for the project was to “Help the visitor understand their role within, and contribution to, the managed water cycle”, it looks like we have a win.
Check out Ecologic and the WaterWorx iPad game at the Powerhouse Museum and keep an eye out for further mobile and iOS work coming out of Digital Eskimo in the near future.
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[...] Play After the discussion we were invited to to ‘play’ with various tools and games in the DE space. In one room people were playing Waterworx, iPad game that DE designed and developed for the Powerhouse Museum as a way to teach children of difficulty of managing a public water system. I spoke with DE’s Anthony Ditton about the valuable lessons learned through the participatory design process they employed during the project. You can read more about that here. [...]