Portfolio piece--Bizzaro Olympics
Concept
Childhood obesity, type 2 diabetes, usually referred to as "adult-onset" diabetes, is showing up in 12 year olds and teenagers. Cardiac events, some of which the lay person would call a heart attack are happening to people in their twenties. We're too fat, and we're out of shape. For our purposes, the root cause of this complex problem comes down to one simple concept: metabolic management. One must be aware that how many calories you expend and how many you take in must be in balance. Of course what kinds of calories you take in is important too, and we aimed to teach both of these ideas along with other principles for healthy living. This "serious" subject was to be tackled by a game, and we KNEW it MUST be FUN. We became known as team fun, and team fun won.
The idea was that we could create a place where tweens, and probably a lot of others as well, would WANT to go. It had to be cool, surreal, and interesting. There had to be different kinds of activities to appeal to different kids. We pitched this as a Wii Sports goes to the surreal Olympics. Because this game is to be played on the Nintendo Wii, and possibly other platforms, when players play, they burn calories, they learn, and they have fun doing it. Building on the success they see in the game, and experience in their bodies, they can take the concepts they learn into other parts of their lives.
While working on this project we worked directly with an MD, Dr. Matt Burton, who served as our subject matter expert, and we certainly couldn't have done it without his help and that of Sonny & Jamie Kirkley.
This game is near and dear to my heart, but I will stop and those that are interested can read the entire storyboard.
Process
While the time constraints of the project precluded us from involving users heavily in the process we did conduct copious research both on the subject matter, as well as ethnographic research. We looked directly at a number of use contexts and user types. We developed personas and conducted interviews. We came up with several concepts and developed them in parallel, until time constrained us to choose just one. After this concept was chosen over the others, my teammate modeled parts of our vision in clay, photographed it, then textured the pictures in photoshop and the result is the pictures you see on this page.
Lessons Learned
Parallel idea development and always being willing to try new ideas can really pay off. I would say that our MOST interesting idea didn't make the cut, due to it's controversial nature. Cool new ways of prototyping things are possible. If someone has an idea, roll with it, it may just be pure genius.
