Developing a Tabletop Game that Stimulates Creativity through Design Thinking and Design Ethnography

Abstract

Science and technological advancement in the automation era called the 4th Industrial Revolution requires human to adapt in terms of skill set, particularly creativity, lest they are replaced by the machines. Creativity enables collaboration with the machine, providing opportunity rather than viewing it as a threat. As a country with demographical advantage in 2030, Indonesia’s creativity rate is counterintuitive to the fact, thus it has to be improved considering the rise of creativity demand from 10th top skill to the 3rd top skill in 2020. Therefore, this study aims to develop a tabletop game as a learning tool to stimulate creativity by using qualitative ethnographic approach based on Design Thinking and Design Ethnography. Semi-structured interviews with 32 youths aged 17-35 in Tangerang Regency and Tangerang Selatan City were conducted as data collection method. Merged with the ethnographic observation result and literature review, the researchers found out that their needs for a tabletop game are: “fast-paced”, “interesting in content and visual”, “ergonomics packaging and components”, “improved quality of material”, “fun”, “educative”, and “interactive”, as well as indirectly delivering moral messages in accordance to the missing values from the millennials. Through ideation, prototyping, and testing stages, tabletop game ideas were being generated, enhanced, and examined in order to meet the needs. The result is Animazzle, an animal characters puzzle-card game of which the features can address the issues. This study concludes that aligning with the process, empathy is the utmost importance of the process because it enables the problem to be properly defined and shapes an urge of continuous development to produce a sound solution.