Gamestorming – Practicing Solution-Making

Gamestorming is an activity used to practice some of the methodologies and thought process used within design. It attempts to stimulate the progression of free thinking and allowing ideas to come freely without judgement. A lot of the creative block people face comes from the perfectionism innate and the activity promotes the acceptance of ideas that are not perfect. In fact, it idolizes ideas that may not be good in practice at all. For one of the activities, my group was tasked with creating a better version of Facebook. To do so, we decided to create one that actually focused on connecting people, in real life, and not simply digitally. We decided that the major pitfall of the current version is it’s inability to effect positive change and instead encourages users to spend more time on its platform. This makes sense given their advertising monetization and their natural incentive to want users to spend more time on the site, however, we felt that this was unhealthy and contributed to the detriment of society. It has been proven that spending time on social media is linked with depression along with a slew of other mental health issues affecting self-esteem. This is partially due to the negative images caused by seeing picture perfect and often edited images that promote impossible stereotypes for body image. Furthermore, by spending so much time staring at a screen, users are subjected to the addicting cycle of a reward system, enticing people to do anything it takes to get more likes on their pictures. In summary, our objective was to create an app that encourages users to spend more time actually connecting with people they met and have it be real, instead of a digital interaction that is heavily influenced by edited pictures and thoughts. Welcome to Facebook 2.0!