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This edition of the newsletter comes a couple days later than usual, but for a wonderful reason—I spent 5 days last week playing board games with my friends at BGG Con. 🎲 🤩 Next issue will resume the normal Sunday schedule! 🥸Reminder: If you're participating in the Create A
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📍In case you missed it… Throughout November, I’m hosting another Creative Challenge: Create A Real Life Character Sheet. About 15 people have signed up so far, and there’s space for a few more folks—you should join us! Pebble Talk Here’s a way to avoid awkward small
Welcome, new readers. From time to time, I organize “Creative Challenges,” that fit with the whole “playful things to think with” theme. Previously, there was a One Card Serious Game Challenge, followed by the Make a Zine Challenge. I hadn’t planned on doing another Creative Challenge until next year
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✉️Look for 2 extra special emails heading your way, later this week! 1/ The promised print-and-play Zombie Leadership cards. 2/ An announcement about our next Creative Challenge… Scientific Papers as Comic Strips Yes! Comics as things to think with. Here’s an interview with Kanaka Rajan, who uses “narrative illustrations
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Designing for Magical Gatherings So, interesting sidenote: I was in a webinar earlier this week where I was asked to reflect on especially memorable or meaningful gatherings I’ve been a part of. The common themes for me were things like adventure, discovery, challenge, fantasy, immersion, and so on. On
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Competency Ladders Here’s a ‘framework to think with’ specific to product teams… Context: The lovely thing about ‘horizontal’ software tools (such as MURAL, AirTable, or Notion) is how people are free to create their own—often unpredictable—ways of using that thing. The challenge of these tools is onboarding
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WCAG card deck (and more!) Apparently, this is the week for things to think with related to the WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines)… First, I had this deck of WCAG 2.2 cards (LinkedIn post leading to a Figma file) lined up and ready to share: Then, I stumbled across
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Branching Scenarios and eLearning In 2020, I did a deep dive into how narrative games could be used for learning purposes, which left me with a deep appreciation for (and small collection of) CYOA books, gamebooks, interactive fiction, solo RPGs, and similar experiences with branching paths. Anyway, this post on
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Two amazing data visualizations from the Olympics I love stumbling across novel, or at least uncommon, ways to represent information. These visualizations from dataviz designer Krisztina Szűcs are 🧑🍳🤌💋: First, a multi-tiered cake chart representing the Women's Pole Vault Finals: 0:00 /0:39 1× Then, this fencing (🤺) visualization:
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Eco-ing Seattle I’ve been enjoying this series reimagining an 18-block space Northgate, a Seattle neighborhood. Essentially, this a bit of speculative urban planning, based on ecological ideas from Edencity (a different project imagining “an eden-like city” with “economic + ecological abundance”). What struck me is this: It’s one thing
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[Video] Beyond the Hero’s Journey One of my many side interests is how stories work. To that end, this talk on character arcs has been playing over in my head for a few weeks now. It feels like a great way to think about narratives, in a way that’
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Low Carbon Lifestyle Cards I’m wary of climate action strategies that try to shift the burden to individuals, when so much of the cause is systemic, economic, power structures (See “What we are up against”). But, that doesn’t mean there aren’t actions that we—as individuals—can