Smell – Ideation and prototyping! – Reflective design journal

This week’s design assignment is to modify a game and add a scent dimension to it. The player should use their sense of smell to understand the game, meaningfully integrated.

We started with a brainstorm session, coming up with boardgames that we liked and had played before. Rather quickly we found interest in Domino. Domino is a classical game in which there are bricks (dominoes) with numbers, ranging from 1-6 plus some with no number, that are to be combined with matchin number. Each brick is divided with a line, and each end is marked with a number of spots. The opportunity we saw in this game was that we could easily apply scent instead of the numbers.

The traditional Domino set consist of 28 dominoes, featuring all combinations of numbers ranging from zero to six. The game can be played with 2-4 people and depending on how many players are playing, each player receive a certain amount of dominoes to play with.

Sketch of concept and rules for our modified Domino scent game

We were able to use the same rules as the original Domino game, which was great as it saved us time. Scents are not visible so the challenging part was to come up with a simple system of how to correct the answers. We want the players to be able to fluently play the game by themselves, not having to need a judge. There were some different ideas that came up for this, such as:
– One idea was that the player should put their name or color (every player were assigned a color) on the bricks when they have played it out. However, this would afford cheating, since the answers would be checked afterwards.
– Another idea was that the player should put an abbreviation of the scent on folded post-it notes that were put on the bricks. The problem with the post-it notes was that it was quite easy to see through. An iteration on this idea was to stick the post-it note in under the cardboard circle.

None of these felt good, since the players had to stop and write their answers, breaking the flow of the game and it could be easy to cheat. And just like a flash from clear sky, we came up with the idea of using a UV-pen! This solved our problems, it prevents cheating and the answers can be checked immediately after the player has played out their brick, using the UV-lamp. With the pen, we put the abbreviation of the scents on the bricks, making it easy to immediately check if the answer is correct or not.

We didn’t want the scents to be too similar. We chose to use six different scents that were easy to differentiate from each other, making the game simpler. As seen in the picture, we created abbreviation for the scents that later were put on the bricks. The scents we had chosen were quite intense which made us realize that we could not create our domino bricks in the same size as the original. To prevent possible mix of scents, we chose to make the bricks quite large, so that the player easily could smell each side of it. At the same time, larger bricks require larger space to play the game on which could be problematic in some situations.

In the workshop we divided the work, me and Nefeli cutted the large bricks, Martin and Jesper cutted the cardboard circles and glued them on the bricks. The idea for the cardboard circles was that they would soak up the scents that we would drop on them. The white paper material wouldn’t do that in the same way.

The domino bricks that we used for our game.

To make it easier for us to create the scent combination system, we found a picture showing the original game (Domino) combined the numbers and applied it to our game, which probably saved us a lot of time! Every scent had a number between 1-6. It also felt great to use the same rules and structure as Dominos since Simon asked us to modify a game and add the scent dimension to it. For someone who have played Dominos before, it would be really easy to play our game since our game is about the same, but instead the challenge is to us one’s scent instead of numbers. On every brick, we put a post-it note with the abbreviation on so that we could remember what scent should be put on it.