The Process and Challenges

Last year I built an escape room. This year the assignment was bigger. From February until June I have been working with my project team, Sijb, Hylke, Marijn and Lorenzo, on a project for the Municipality of Leeuwarden. The brief was to design a digital escape room prototype aimed at children, built around energy saving and sustainability. The idea was not just to inform kids but to give them something to bring home, to actually get them talking to their parents about it.

That is a specific and slightly tricky brief to design for. A game that teaches without feeling like it is teaching, aimed at an age group that will immediately check out if something feels like homework. Getting that balance right meant a lot of the early conversations were less about tools and more about what we actually wanted a kid to feel while playing it.

Working as a team of five on a real client project is also just a different thing from working alone. Decisions take longer, people have different ideas, and someone has to keep track of where everything is and what still needs doing. I ended up taking on a lot of the organisational side alongside the creative work, communicating with stakeholders, managing the workflow, making sure things were moving. That was not something I had done much of before and it was harder than I expected.

What I Learned

The main thing this project taught me is that designing for someone specific is completely different from designing for yourself. Every choice had to be justified against the brief and against what actually works for the age group we were designing for. That forced a kind of clarity about decision making that I do not naturally default to.

I also learned a lot about what it takes to keep a team project moving. It is easy to assume the work will organise itself when everyone is motivated. It does not. Someone has to hold the overview and push things forward and I found that I was quite naturally doing that, which told me something about how I work.

Next Steps

The prototype is done but the project made me more interested in design that has a real purpose behind it. Making something that is supposed to entertain is one thing. Making something that is supposed to change how a kid thinks about turning the lights off when they leave a room is a different kind of problem and I want to keep working on that kind of thing.