Method for Design Materialization

The Method for Design Materialization (MDM) is a methodological approach to design practice documentation that connects design reasoning and materials, in order to make design processes traceable. The approach can be adapted for use by design practitioners of any discipline, but has been developed with game design research in mind.

Why would I need MDM?

Have you noticed the following quirk of most practice-based game design research:

Its chains of evidence are hard to follow.

Yes¹, chains of evidence along with the implied tenet explaining why we scrutinize them: we trust evidence on the basis of its integrity.

There are many moments in game design research where confidence in implied chains of evidence are under threat. Farthest away from the moment of the design practice are the perennial technical obstacles:

• The game(s) was not archived on the public record and cannot be sourced
• The technology containers for the games have been discontinued
• The games rely on hardware/software/human facilitation setups that exist only in certain space-time coordinates.

Closer to the source of the design practice – the designer – different issues related to break in the chain emerge:

• Claims about earlier versions of the game(s) cannot be challenged, unless the designer also placed those versions on the public record
• A designer’s knowledge is amassed through practice and experience, but short of them committing to externalising it, their knowledge remains largely inaccessible
• Design reasoning and problem solving happen in embodied contexts and in conversation with design materials: if I claim my redesigned controller now fits perfectly in my hand, you are owed an explanation not just of the controller but also of my hand
• Design reasoning and problem solving lack an agreed upon notation, grammar, and semantics

If a judge (naturally from Law & Order: SVU) were to look at design research’s evidence, they would determine most of it to be inadmissible due to break in the chain.

Rude.

Perhaps². The way design researchers found a foothold in the academy was by emulating research standards from other disciplines. Unfortunately, these are not the easiest fit. Emulating some (and not other) standards makes design research come off all the weirder:

“We tested our redesigned controller with three people”

Just three? Surely even by accident more people than that tried it and said, it ok?

Does MDM prevent break in the chain?

Real talk: MDM can’t prevent break in the chain. The most robust method in the world will only work if it is put into practice. The designer must first commit to ongoing practice of MDM.

Which is convenient because MDM practices equip designers with design practice routines that minimise break in the chain.

How do I do MDM?

MDM leverages the temporal affordances of git to capture in-vivo reflection and design decision-making. Every commit is an opportunity for the designer to describe what they did and why they did this (why this, why not that, what else could they have done, and where to next, for instance) alongside the current state of their project.

The designer maintains a journal.md file where they reflect at distance, and they constantly reflect in the commits as they push their work.

Needless to say, given the current set of tools, MDM designed with digital games in mind i.e. something that can be tracked with git. You may however adapt the practice to a different set of tools.