It is pretty unbelievable that it’s week six already. I feel a bit anxious about how quickly time is passing but I know that I am on track with my project timeline. I’m actually glad to have these blogs to reflect back on my weekly work because they are evidence of the effort I have put in. Without these blogs, I feel like it would be very easy for me to underestimate and overlook how much work I’ve done.

This week I continued my never ending search for physical and tangible tools to include in my toolkit. This week, I focused my research on card games. Card games are often used as a co-design activity to facilitate conversation. They promote discussion, structure thinking and spark ideas (Issue Cards, n.d.). But, I wanted to capture the gamification element so I looked into general card games and what makes them “playful”. That’s when I came across a card game called So Cards (So Cards, 2022). It’s a set of cards with conversation starter prompts and 8 suggested game modes. What initially drew me to So Cards was the different game modes it had. I saw it as an easy way to gamify something without changing the actual content, just the play style. I had a geeze on the website and I actually ended up watching the creator’s Ted Talk about “What makes a question flop?” (Luis, 2019). He shared his thoughts about how to frame a question in a way that sparks meaningful conversation. It was really helpful and inspired me to write my own food-related questions in a considered and meaningful way.

At first, I just started brain-dumping different food system-related questions. (kermit meme) But, I then realised that there was no structure to it. It felt messy while I was writing the questions, and it would probably in turn translate into messy gameplay. I was also conscious of the fact that perhaps not all of the questions would be applicable to a given group of stakeholders at a given time. For example, perhaps for a particular workshop the participants might want to focus on how to improve access to healthy food. I thought about how I could give my questions more structure and that’s when I thought about the Mana Kai Initiative that I had come across in my initial research. The Mana Kai Initiative sets out the purpose and values of Aotearoa New Zealand’s food system (The Aotearoa Circle, 2022). It takes on a Te Ao Māori led approach and aims to align people’s vision for a better food system. In its consultation process, it consulted a diverse group of people, persons and organisations. It has three main purposes each with three specific values. The three overarching purposes are: Mana Kai - sustenance from food, Mana O Te Taiao/Whenua - life force of the natural environment and Mana o te Tangata - harvesting and fair distribution of food (The Aotearoa Circle, 2022).

This was absolutely perfect for giving more structure to my questions. Not only that, but it meant that my questions would have validity because they would be based on a thoroughly researched set of values. Furthermore, if I colour coded the cards, the users could easily pick out cards from the category they wanted to focus on for the day. WOW! Legitimately patted myself on the back for this one. Every time I have a eureka moment like this it makes me feel so cool and awesome and swag. I’m definitely going to still have to test, rewrite and test my questions, but it is so good to have a general structure to guide me.

In this process, I also had a revelation about broadening the scope of my HMW from food sovereignty to our general food system. Design often requires systemic thinking because design problems and challenges are often, if not always, rooted in systems. As demonstrated by the Mana Kai Initiative, there are many things to consider in our food system. Nothing can be addressed without considering in isolation. If the users of my toolkit want to understand the issue of food sovereignty, they will need to understand the system it operates in, such as the three Mana Kai categories. I don’t think broadening my scope from food sovereignty to our general food system would make my job harder. If anything, it would make it easier because it allows me to include a broader range of topics in my tools.  

In the mid-semester break, I plan to keep ideating and developing my tools. One additional thing I want to do in the break is go to a board game cafe and play lots of different collaborative games. I feel that I could take a lot of analogous inspiration from these games and apply them to the tools I include. The HCD methodology also encourages doing this with their “Analogous Inspiration” tool (IDEO (Firm), 2015, 53).

REFERENCES

IDEO (Firm). (2015). The Field Guide to Human-centered Design: Design Kit. IDEO.
Issue Cards. (n.d.). Service Design Tools. Retrieved August 27, 2023, from https://servicedesigntools.org/tools/issue-cards
Luis, M. [TEDx Talks]. 2019, May 23). What makes a question flop? | Miguel Luis | TEDxAUCollege [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0URprTjAFE0.
So Cards. (2022). So Cards – a collection of questions for deeper conversation. Retrieved August 27, 2023, from https://www.socards.org/
The Aotearoa Circle (2022). The Mana Kai Initiative - Purposes and values of Aotearoa New Zealand's food system. https://www.theaotearoacircle.nz/mana-kai-initiative

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