(Board)erline Personal

As an ode to our personal map, we created Memory Lane, a board game that incorporates the shifts we experienced during our group’s individual journeys to Parsons. Part of our journeys included a certain memory location, which we took note of during a Seminar activity, that impacted each of to become the person we are today, deeming them as an important element to our board game. In creating Memory Lane, we focused on our target audience being people interested in applying to Parsons, which is why the goal of the board game is to collect as many tokens as possible to determine the major each player would pursue. Obviously, the number of tokens you earn does not realistically correlate with one’s desired major. This concept was only intended and created for the board game’s purpose. With this, we strongly encourage those who play it to personally think about what they do intend to major on, and to be open to all the options and possibilities that comes with it.

Role With It

For this Bridge project, I took on a lot of roles, one of them notably being the visualizer of the group. Besides voicing my ideas on where/how I want our project to go about during our brainstorming sessions, I simultaneously took on the task of translating those ideas digitally. Because of my experience in digital art, my job was to illustrate/digitize the whole project, from the board itself to its gamepieces, instructions, and keys. I essentially gave our board game its identity, making sure all its pieces had a strong sense of unity, and that by just one glance, you knew a certain element identified with our game. Due to the amount of things that needed to be designed for the game, the workload was overflowing, so I had certain components done by the rest of my groupmates. Jane helped with illustrating the icons for the memory lanes, memory cards, and gamepieces; Niha created the pop-up cardstock locations, and Calista aided in the wording of the instructions and in the creation of the interest tokens.

The Work

Shift

 

Once again, many shifts occurred throughout the process of this project. However, despite not seeing eye-to-eye with each other at times, we managed to eventually settle on a concept we were all happy with and willing to build upon. Over time, as we put more work into it, we saw the outcome we hoped to achieve more and more.

Throughout the process, as the visualizer of the group, I tried my best to incorporate everyone’s thoughts and personalities into the project, making sure what I came up with was something they would be content with. I made sure to ask for their opinions on the designs I made for certain parts of the board game to ensure we were all on board (literally). With this, I got to learn more about my groupmates and their upbringings.

All in all, this project allowed for me to build connections with my groupmates and to be considerate of their upbringings. Though cohesiveness was a major factor for this project, I learned how important it was to be detail-oriented and precise with certain elements as some of them correlated with each individual on a personal level. I know I would not want something near and dear to my heart to be morphed into something I could not identify with it any more. This mindset allowed me to apply to the others and be empathetic with their cultures. It is times like these that give me perspective on how the really design industry is: being able to relate and communicate with your clients in order to arrive to a conclusion both parties will be happy with.

Nothing Wrong with Being Different

If there is something I would have done differently with Memory Lane, it would be to create the pop-up locations digitally to maintain the board’s identity and cohesiveness. Aside from this, I wish we paid more attention to the game’s box and added just as much personality to it as the game possessed. Also, I wished we initially made the gamepieces sturdier and easier to use.