DTW 11: Fun and Engagement
An image of an exhibit at the Cleveland Metroparks zoo where a giant climbable plant was in the middle of a bear exhibit
Design in the World is a series of interesting moments and reflections on how design has an impact on making the world easier or harder to navigate.
Discovering Fun
Fun contributes to making experiences memorable and stickier than competition. To quote John Hopson- “fun us whatever the user and designer agree is fun” One of my favorite quotes around fun comes from Gabe Newell- “it’s the degree to which the game recognizes and responds to the players choices and actions.” Fun is not realism, but reinforcement. (source) Not every experience needs or even should to be “fun” per say. Applications like Turbo Tax do their best to make the experience of doing Taxes easy, engaging, and satisfying- but at the end of the day they want to ensure accurate tax information. Some experiences such as medical devices or operating vehicles need to be extremely predictable.
We love the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. It’s a great well-maintained zoo that has about five unique biomes each with animals from different ecosystems. Between the different exhibits are various interactive activities for kids that make coming to the zoo more like visiting a theme park than an exhibit. One space in particular that my daughter loves is a large fake plant near the bear exhibit with large leaves stacked atop one another that can be scaled to the top. It’s empowering and reinforces the experience of going to the zoo. Sure, plants like these aren’t real, they don’t exist in the real world like animal wildlife, but to a child they open up an opportunity to engage in an interactive experience that is simply fun for them- so much so that we’ll scale this plant about 10 times in a row during a visit.
One of my favorite features of the exhibit is that there is durable netting around the plant to protect anyone from falling off while scaling its many leaves. The leaves are oriented in a way that it would require some effort to tumble down the entire exhibit. As a designer, it’s a reminder that with whatever systems or products we’re placing into the world for people to have fun with, we need to consider what constraints we might need to implement to let pariticipants stay immersed have fun safely.
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