The More-Than Research Game

When working as a design researcher, it’s all too easy to slip into familiar patterns of work: semi-structured interviews, observing activity, mapping affinities.

The More-Than Research Game was developed by myself and Chris Marmo in the early days of Paper Giant as a way to explore alternative approaches to research.

We developed the More-Than Research Game to help ourselves, and others, consider other more creative approaches to observation, data collection, and analysis.

The ‘game’ is a set of cards that are used to generate random sentence-link ‘prompts’, to help spark new research ideas:

• Perspective cards to provide you with a ‘point of view’ for your research ‐ the person, thing or organisation your project will look from
• Material cards that describe the format of the data collection
• Scale cards that speak to the scope of some aspect of the research
• Rhythm cards that bring time and frequency into the prompt
• Subject cards that provide you with a ‘topic’ of study – where you project will look to

The interpretation of a prompt is up to the people playing – for example, the above prompt could be read as “repeated, minute-long audio pieces, that take a machine perspective of landscape”. You can then consider things like:

• What kinds of research activity does the prompt suggest?
• What kinds of data could be collected?
• How might you carry out research according to the prompt?

We have found that the simple active of prompting and questioning quickly opens up new ways to think about research practices and programs.

The game was originally prototyped by us as part of the award winning Being Wiradjuri Together project at RMIT University.

After the success on that project, we decided to build out and share the game more widely to provide students, researchers and designers with a way of thinking differently about their research, their methodologies and their data.