Beyond the Edge: Gamifying Design History Through Interactive Prototyping
The Irish & Women’s History Card Prototype
Role
Designer
Project Type
Interactive Design
Client
Everyone
Deliverables
A point-and-click game
Prologue
Problems
AIGA Boston promotes diversity, equity, and inclusion as a part of their mission statement.
I pitched to them the idea of celebrating Women's History Month and Irish-American Heritage for the month of March.
Objectives
Raising awareness about underrepresented designers and celebrating their contributions for the month of March.
Sadly, if you're not white, male, or straight, your contributions tend to get left out of the history books.
This project is honoring the contributions of both groups without overshadowing each other.
Goals
Raising awareness and celebrating the contributions in design history for the month of March.
If I'm going to talk about design history, I need to show that I can design something visually. So, I made a game.
I got tired of hearing people complain about the cultural months because they didn't know the history behind them.
“Every March, companies pick either Women’s History Month or Irish-American Heritage Month but never both. I’ve always found that very strange? These things happen at the same time. Women can be Irish-Americans. Irish-Americans can be women. Why does everyone act like they can’t walk and chew gum?”
Define
Research
Create
Test
Define
1
The goal was simple; to highlight designers from both groups that people have never heard of.
I started writing this as an essay and realized that an essay doesn't show anyone what you can do as a designer.
2
I wanted to make learning about them feel like play, not homework.
I wanted to show everyone that these two communities aren't separate conversations. They overlap and they intersect.
3
They have made contributions to graphic design and they deserve to be known.
I made a point-and-click game I built in Figma. It’s trading cards with the designer’s work on the front and facts on the back.
SPIDER MAP AND ROUGH SKETCH OF PROTOTYPE
Research
4
Then, I went looking through the archives for Irish designers and forgotten women in design history.
I ended up featuring six designers including men and women across both communities.
5
These stories needed to be told and I combined them together into one interactive experience.
The gist was to make something that was fun to engage with and teach people something they don't know.
6
I started writing this as an article but, realized that this wouldn’t work at all because it couldn’t fit with the AIGA Newsletter.
My ideas on representing design history was inspired by trading cards from baseball, Yugioh, tarot, Pokemon, and Snapple bottle caps.
DIAGRAM OF TRADING CARDS AND TAROT CARDS
Create
7
The game opens with a series of moving graphics and text that tells players what they're about to experience.
Then they click through to the cards to play the game.
8
Each card has the designer’s artwork on the front and facts about them on the back.
You flip the cards over to learn about the person.
9
Lot of symbolism here. A shamrock for Irish designers, a Venus symbol for women designers, and both symbols together for designers who are both.
SCREENSHOT OF THE GAME
Test
10
The game was finished after March 2025 ended so, it never got its public debut.
My plan is to debut it for March 2027 with AIGA Boston on their newsletter.
11
Between this year and 2027, I will be adding more designers to showcase like Söre Popitz.
I didn't even know there was a female graphic design member of the Bauhaus movement. Finding out about her felt like discovering something that should have been common knowledge and wasn't.
12
I wanted to include her and more Irish designers in the project but, I ran out of time.
The project isn't done. It's just waiting for its moment to shine.