The next technique I'll turn to is about prototyping. Say you rethought your project as a space, for the values that you found demand for. You'll still need to test the spaces you come up with. And that's what I'll cover in this last section of the talk.
Now, most designers will sketch or prototype on paper or using a tool like Figma, and then put it in front of one user at a time.
This is a useful thing to do! But we found that jumping straight into paper or Figma leads people to miss social possibilities and consequences.
So we encourage designers to put down the paper, step back from their laptop and start somewhere else.
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Once you're happy with how your activity works between you and your friend, you might want to know how it works for a broader array of people over a longer amount of time—people who have different strategies for approaching the activity, people who pressure one another to get their way, creating new social norms.
To find this out, you still don't need Figma or paper. Instead, we recommend that you make a kind of role-play that can take place in a room amongst many players.
The role-play should create the same kind of container you hope to create and encourage the same kinds of relationship-building. When you try it, you quickly discover a whole bunch of social considerations. Because it's all occurring in a room you can watch social norms evolve, watch different people play differently, and see if the game continues to support the value among players with different strategies and skills.