Design Games for In-Situ Design

The mobile culture has spawned a host of context-based products, like location-based and tag-based applications. This presents a new challenge for the designer. There is a need of design methods that acknowledge the context and allows it to influence the design ideas. This article focuses on a design problem where an in-situ design practice may further the early design process: the case of designing a pervasive game. Pervasive games are computer games, played using the city as a game board and often using mobile phones with GPS. Some contextual design methods exist, but we propose an approach that calls for the designer to conceptualise and perform ideas in-situ, that is on the site, where the game is supposed to be played. The problem was to design a creativity method that incorporated in-situ design work and which generated game concepts for pervasive games. The proposed design method, called sitestorming, is based on a game using Situationistic individual exploration of the site and different types of game cards, followed by a joint evaluation of the generated ideas. A series of evaluations showed that the designers found the method enjoyable to use, that the method motivated idea generation, and that using in-situ design influenced their design ideas.