#55 Toys designed for work

...and a miraculous watering pot 🚰

Design Lobster #55 is here and it’s a playful issue this week. We’re asking what role games have in the workplace and marvelling at a delightful Tudor gardening tool. Let’s make merry! 🃏

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Question: How might we make work more playful?

Workshop Tactics - a card game for design teams.

Designers are often asked to experiment, invent and innovate – types of work that are often closely aligned to play. Working practices, of course, don’t always reflect this. I was very interested therefore to learn about the work of Charles Burdett, who has designed a 54 card game called Workshop Tactics specifically for design and innovation teams. Each card describes an exercise that can be played by a design team for different stages of the design process; from problem definition to deciding which ideas to test.

Lots of the exercises will probably be familiar to you, like Crazy Eights and SWOT Analysis, but there are also lots I haven’t heard of like Reverse Brainstorm and Idea Beetle. 🐞

Workshop Tactics is a nice product and I have to say I really appreciate the physicality of the cards in our ever more screen-based lives. But I’m especially intrigued by the larger questions a game like Workshop Tactics raises about the future of the workplace. Will work processes be organised more like board or video games in the future – complete with campaigns and boss levels? Brave new world!

Design takeaway: How could you make your workplace more playful?

🃏Explore the Workshop Tactics deck in more detail here.

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Object: Thumb Pot

A 16th-17th century thumb pot from the Met archives.

I was delighted to discover this remarkable gardening tool – first created in Tudor England to help with the watering of seedlings and young plants. The so-called ‘thumb pot’ consists of a clay vessel with a single small hole at the top and a perforated base. Once filled with water by being immersed in a bucket, a gardener keeps the water in by covering the top hole with their thumb. By preventing air escaping up top, the water is miraculously prevented from pouring out the bottom thanks to the pressure difference the seal creates.

Whenever the gardener wants to water, they simply have to release their thumb – releasing a cascade of droplets underneath, gentle enough to not damage even the youngest seedling. You can see the effect in the photo below.

When the thumb is released from the hole at the top, water can drip out from the bottom.

I love the way this tool makes witty use of the laws of physics to create such a delightful interaction. I’m putting in a request for more tools that we can control just by raising or lowering our thumbs. 🙏

Design takeaway: Could you use the laws of physics to bring more delight into your design?

▶️ More surprising things that can be done with air pressure.

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Quote: “Just make people better at something they want to be better at.”

– Kathy Sierra, author of Badass: Making Users Awesome

In characteristic pithiness, this quote from Kathy reminds us that designing software is ultimately about giving people powers they never had before. Asking what people want to be better at and how you are helping them do that can be a good sense check when you are deep in a design project.

Whatever you do, keep discovering.

Ben 🦞

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