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
📍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
✉️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
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
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
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
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
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:
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
[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’
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
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GenAI Card Deck If you must bring Generative AI into your work, here’s a card game that’ll quickly get everyone up to speed on core concepts while exploring what Gen AI can do. While this is fundamentally a structured brainstorming tool, with cards for kind of input, output,
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Queueing strategies Thanks to this interactive study of queueing strategies from Sam Rose, I now understand the programming concept of queueing. The post uses a series of highly interactive visuals and micro-challenges that demystify why HTTP requests sometimes fail—and different queuing strategies to help prevent these failures. This is
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MANIFESTO! MANIFESTO! is a card game “for stimulating and supporting manifesto authoring.” I’m intrigued! And as it happens… 🥁 Julian Hanna—one of the co-creators of the MANIFESTO!—will be presenting at the next Cardstock meetup on May 24th. If this sounds fascinating, then in addition to the card deck
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Hexi™ for Scrum Why is that hexagon-based toolkits (and games!) are so darn appealing?! There’s a good explanation buried in this video introduction to the newest Hexi™ for Scrum kit from the Cynefin Company. Hexi™ is a new approach using physical artifacts designed to consolidate methods, approaches, tools and
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Ace of Aces A few months ago, I shared a video about Edge-notched cards, a kind of queryable database...made of paper! Keeping with the theme of a paper computer, here’s a brilliant analysis of Ace of Aces, a “Choose Your Own Adventure first-person shooter from 1980… [that] involves
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Models All The Way Down Stop what you’re doing. Set aside 15 minutes (maybe more?) and “read” through all of this bit of investigative journalism. Models All The Way Down is THE clearest explanation I’ve come across to explain what happens behind the scenes with AI models used
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Diary of a CEO Conversation Cards So… another deck of conversation starters. What’s the twist that makes this card deck interesting? The questions in Diary of a CEO Conversation Cards were born out of The Diary of a CEO podcast, where host Steven Bartlett has “each guest answer a
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📣One last reminder… It's not too late to join in the “Make A Zine!” Challenge (hint, you should!). If the word zine stops you, then think about it this way—this is a great exercise to: * Force clarity on a complex topic * Beta test a book concept * Geek
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This week’s roundup of ‘playful✨ things to think with’ all have an oddly homegrown analog quality to them… After the first two ‘finds’ kind of locked into place, I decided to run with this quasi-craftsy theme! 📣It's not too late to join in the “Make A Zine!
Challenges
Ready for another Creative Challenge? This time, the challenge is to… 🥁 ✨Make A Zine!✨ ✨If that's all the convincing you needed, yay! Here are the details on how to participate. Otherwise, read on… I'll try my best to convince you this is a brilliant idea you
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Dreams and Disruptions Card Deck Lately, it feels like I’m seeing more of these futurist card decks. But, none of the other scenario-building activities include a zombie apocalypse or jurassic resurgence! 🤪 Dreams and Disruptions looks like it dials up the imagination up to 11. Build scenarios with a twist
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Reading QR Codes Learn how to read QR codes without a computer?! I love this interactive, visual explanation of QR codes. ‘Possibility-first’ pitches I’m drawn to nuanced language choices that help us dial in our thinking with a bit more clarity. For example, ages ago, I stopped talking about