Story and photo: Wesa Aapro

Demola, the shrine of rapid development has been up and running for a few months now. Surprisingly many of the Demola projects have encountered the same problem: we (students, company personnel and university teaches) tend to approach the project development way too conservatively, not with the Demola ideology. It is much easier to preach "fun and agile" than to practice it!


For this, we asked Teemu Haila and Antti Salomaa from Score, our own game development club, to show what can we do with rapid paper prototyping. The young guys are way ahead of understanding how things get done in the future, because of their game development background.

Games are all about user experience, the fun gameplay. Slowly we start to understand that EVERYTHING is about user experience, from filling out governmental forms to shopping groceries.

Teemu and Antti asked a group of 15 to develop a board game about Facebook in three hours. Three teams of people, who didn't know each other in advance, created three different games. I was involved in one of the teams. Our game was a Illuminati like card game called 6-to-Mark. It was fun, I had fun and I believe so did the other participants.

There's a lot we can do in just a few hours. A goal of playable game requires us to "dive into" the user experience straight away, encounter a lot of bad ideas and replace them with good ones. It saves a lot of time to find out the working ideas in early stages and not mistakingly believe that the good experience can be added afterwards.

Demola

Photo (form left): Vilja Heinonen, Maiju Suutari ja Matti Särkikoski

Demola is an open innovation environment for university students and ICT and media companies operating in the Tampere Region. It is a service provided jointly by TAMK University of Applied Sciences, Tampere University of Technology, Tampere University and Technology Centre Hermia Ltd.

Demola provides students with business relevant and challenging topics for project courses. For the execution of the projects students are encouraged to team up on a multi-disciplinary basis. World class couching for the teams is provided by partners of the Demola community.

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