LIGHTS OUT

Research & Development

This home kit was inspired by an event that recently occurred to me while I was thinking up ideas for the home kit. My house suddenly had a power outage one night and I thought, while in the dark, why not make a kit for helping people not get bored when they have nothing to do but sit in the dark and wait for electricity to come back? I tried to make being in the sudden darkness not as scary or boring and make it a bit more fun.

 

At first, I thought of a kit filled with some necessities anyone would need during a power outage. All the common stuff like torch lights, glow sticks, and a few others. I realized there was nothing interesting to that and it took me a while but I later changed the idea to making the kit into a game.

The first game I had thought of was to make an amorphous shadow game, one where people play with shadows and kind of be creative and decorate the shadow they made and drew. That was a bit too common and thought of so I changed it again to a board game. I was inspired by another game called “Shadows in the Forest”, a game played in the dark.

With that, I thought, maybe I could make a maze that could be played in the dark. It took me many trials and errors to modify the maze right. It may look simple but it wasn’t simple at all. Creating the maze itself took more time than I expected. I researched on different types of mazes and tried to twist and turn the routes. Only after quite a while I was able to stick to one style of maze and create the other 2 mazes consisted in the kit.

 

The design of the maze made me confused and took me a long time too. Though it looks simple, I actually did not think of the design being that way as I had initially thought and tried to put illustrations below the maze or in between the routes. The design was inspired by those subway tracks or train maps at first. I found the simple designs of the maps interesting and maze-like, so after I tried imitating the way it looks, I thought that the maze routes look like electric circuits and it looked neat and not too messy. And thus, I decided to go on with that design as it was in a way related to the concept of the game: doing something fun while waiting for the electricity to come back on.

 

­­Relevant designers & practitioner

I was a bit inspired by the designer and architect Mark Major. In an article, he stated that light would always with its counterpart, darkness. He also said in the article that in the natural world, it is almost impossible to experience absolute darkness as there will always be some sort of light source somewhere, no matter how small. I know there are people who are afraid of the darkness and I tried to think of a way to make it less scary being in the dark. So I thought of a game that could be played in the dark and have some sort of light element in it which are the chess pieces that could light up and show you the way.

 

Design rationale, idea and concept of final outcome

The idea of this kit is to find the fun things to do in the dark, or to try incorporating being in the dark into a game, showing that the dark isn’t boring or scary, but it could also be fun too.

 

The concept of the game is to do something fun while waiting for the electricity to come back on. I made it in the way that the story behind this game is kind of related to my surroundings and incidents that has happened to me or around me. I made it relate to my everyday life and incorporated a few elements into the illustrations on the cards. As in most of the illustrations on the cards are illustrations of something I have at home in real life.

 

The diamond-shaped “Avatar” chess pieces were inspired by a small element in the game “The Sims”. In that game, the character the player is controlling will have this green diamond-shaped thing above their heads. I thought that was interesting and I incorporated it into a part of the maze game. The chess pieces are used by players to indicate which is who and where they are on the maze. It also acts as a light source or a lamp that players could travel around with along the maze.

 

Reflection

I thought that I did good on the angles of the boxes. Angles and perspectives are something I had struggled with quite a bit and this was a good practice for it, though I could see some slightly weird angles in the final mock-up which bothers me a bit but overall, I thought it was a good try. I think that I could try to practice more with using the shear tool as that was one of the toughest tools I tried to control. Making the shadows using the Gaussian blur was quite interesting and fun for me. I know its not perfect but it was nice learning about it and playing around with it. I also need to practice using the gradient tool because I faced a few issues with it while making the mock-ups. The shadows really made a big difference to make the mock-ups more realistic and it was really fun making those.

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Mark, M. (2011, September 22). Designing in the Dark.

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