I thought of a game for this called “Functionality Telephone”
So you divide people into pairs, and in each pair one person is the Manager, and the other person is the Designer. The Manager recieves a card with some sort of functionality pritned on it, like “Can hold a gram of water without leaking”, or “Can have pebbles thrown at it and remain standing”, or some other easily testable function. It will also have some taboo words, like (for the water example above) water, waterproof, spill, leak, etc. The Designer will have a bunch of legos or some such.
The game, as you may have guessed, is that the Manager has to give the Designer verbal instructions, without using any of the taboo words, to build something with the legos which will fulfill the functionality. Then the Manager will leave the room, and the Designer has to try to build something which follows the manager’s instructions. When the Designers are done, the Managers return to the room and reveal their functionality cards, and then they and the Designer get to watch as their “product” is tested. Fun times are had by all.
The idea here is that the Manager is forced to describe their functionality further down the abstraction ladder than the form they recieve it in, in a lucid and detailed way.
I thought of a game for this called “Functionality Telephone”
So you divide people into pairs, and in each pair one person is the Manager, and the other person is the Designer. The Manager recieves a card with some sort of functionality pritned on it, like “Can hold a gram of water without leaking”, or “Can have pebbles thrown at it and remain standing”, or some other easily testable function. It will also have some taboo words, like (for the water example above) water, waterproof, spill, leak, etc. The Designer will have a bunch of legos or some such.
The game, as you may have guessed, is that the Manager has to give the Designer verbal instructions, without using any of the taboo words, to build something with the legos which will fulfill the functionality. Then the Manager will leave the room, and the Designer has to try to build something which follows the manager’s instructions. When the Designers are done, the Managers return to the room and reveal their functionality cards, and then they and the Designer get to watch as their “product” is tested. Fun times are had by all.
The idea here is that the Manager is forced to describe their functionality further down the abstraction ladder than the form they recieve it in, in a lucid and detailed way.