Board games teach information architecture basics

Photo by Dennis Burnett
Industrial design students (from left) Max Younger, Chris Crafardini and Katherine Miner play “Logistics,” a student-designed board game, in professor Jon Kolko’s Information Architecture class March 14.

By: Emily Green

Published: Friday, March 30, 2007

Information architecture sounds hi-tech, and many times it is. However, when Savannah College of Art and Design industrial design professor Jon Kolko assigned his class to develop a way for various ages to understand things like supply chain management, data encryption and nanotechnology, the students resorted to a classic form of entertainment to interpret the complicated subject matter: board games.

Information architects are often the ones called in at the beginning of a corporate design problem. For instance, when the business, manufacturing and marketing departments all say different things, information architects become mediators, making sense of all the information given by each group and then making recommendations for a solution.

The need for information architects is apparent across many industries, even in homes. The human brain, which holds the computing power of 20,000,000,000,000,000 —that’s 20 million billion — calculations per second, is suffering from information overload, which in turn causes information anxiety. Architect and author Richard Saul Wurman defined information architecture as “the emerging 21st-century occupation addressing the needs of the age focused upon clarity, human understanding and the science of the organization of information.”

On March 14, students in Kolko’s Information Architecture class kicked back and relaxed while playing the games they’d spent the entire winter quarter researching and developing.

One team’s study of data encryption — the process of taking a set of data and coding it several times in order to protect an original piece of information — resulted in the game “Operatives.” Kelly Bignell, Alex Kim and Andre Jolivette created a multi-level game using a hexagonal board with removable panels that comes in a metal briefcase. Players are divided into two teams, the corporation and the spies, with the objective being to either protect the corporation’s five-word message or to steal and decode it in order to win. Players have the option of making more complex versions of the game by combining two or more game boards, creating a potentially lengthy battle.

“It was hard because we had to create tangible objects out of things that happen mainly in cyberspace,” explained Bignell. “It’s hard to track what you tangibly can’t have. Encoding gets so complicated that humans can’t break the codes. For example, with your credit card number, encryption could jumble the numbers up or send it in different parts, or jumble up the numbers and encrypt it again, depending on how secure the data needs to be.”

Another team was challenged not by the endless realm of cyberspace, but by the equally complex world of nanotechnology. Players of “Nano,” created by Max Younger and Kat Miner, build a mock molecule, which holds a description and graphic of some sort of nanotechnology, such as the polymer that is used in stain-resistant clothing.

“Nanotechnology is measured on the scale of one billionth of a meter,” Younger said. “It’s a lot of chemical reactions that take place to design a desired result, things like plastic that bruises or super-strong polymer for ultra-light airplane wings. Those kinds of things can be developed on the nano scale.”

“Nano” is meant to take no more than 15 minutes, which is key when trying to keep the attention of 9- to 14-year-old children. Each player chooses a molecule card, and as they travel around the board, they collect steel beads, or “atoms,” and plastic “atomic bonds.” Players add or lose bonds depending on where they land and receive points based on whether or not the atoms are the correct color. The player with a finished molecule or with the most coordinating pieces wins.

Perhaps the most recognizable topic was that of supply-chain management, or “the balance of getting demand and supply,” said Aaron Moulton. “It’s about forecasting demand so that your company can order enough supply to meet that future demand.”

Moulton and teammates Matt Franks and Jordan Peak created “Logistics,” in which players compete to buy the most manufacturers to produce product and retailers to sell it. Using cleverly named corporations like “Starducks” and “Bullseye,” players get a chance to understand the competitive and risky nature of supply chain management. Players could possibly end up with more manufacturers than retailers, based on the luck of the die, and then run the risk of getting fined for not having a place to sell their product. The goal of the game is to sell 10 products. Designed for high-school-aged students, the game takes approximately 35 minutes to complete, making it a potentially useful addition to economics courses.

 “The idea is to put [the students] in a situation where the amount of things they have to learn is wildly more complicated than what they’re used to,” said Kolko. “They become proficient at learning only the things that are necessary and then making connections very quickly that otherwise are hidden.”



Green is a publications editor.