One of the fun things in my lockdown life right now is Cardstock.
Not only for the joy the pun brings me every month, but because although it’s ostensibly about practitioners who use cards it invariably strays into a multitude of interesting tributaries. These tributaries both leech out from the original conversation starter and feed into the overall theme of practitioners who use cards.
Today’s meet-up was different in that we had a proper guest, Charles Burdett, who was coming to chat to us about his card deck, Workshop Tactics. Here are my notes, hastily written up. There are a number of threads I hope to pick up and think about over the next weeks – or I hope others much smarter than I will write about, or point me towards things already written.
Anyway, here you go:
Initially, talk began around the idea of cards being prosthetics – that is, an extensible part of ourselves. This is an idea I’ve often considered, although Levi Bryant, in his book, Onto-Cartography (which John introduced me to recently) would regard cards as a participant and not a prosthetic, but this wasn’t – and isn’t – the place to discuss the details of that concept, interesting as it is.
This shifted to thinking about cards as the screen we can share – albeit on a physical domain. This was something we would come back to later, too, in a different sense. As I said, conversations meander and loop back on themselves often at Cardstock.
Welcome Charles
After introductions and these early back and forth conversations, we got to hear from Charles.
A UX designer, he works on products for Co-Op which are, more often than not, in the digital domain. Of course, experience doesn’t sit within the digital realm, it just is: user experience is still experience, so the practice can be lifted and applied to anything that you could reasonably describe as an experience.
Again, a conversation for another time!
Charles made a point about how the physicality of cards helps them to be taken more seriously. Charlotte, another attendee, had similar things to add about play and work and how they share fundamentals yet if you create a physical thing like a card it is accepted in ways that some other forms of play are not.
What Charles hit upon as he talked us through the process of making a deck of cards that is designed to help make meetings more productive and “more like workshops” is that understanding where the value lies is useful. For digital cards (or things like cards) it’s often the content as much as it is how you use them from an ontological perspective. There is another conversation to be had around ontologies that are pre-created (categorisation by, say, suits) and that which is co-created (vocabulary) and I hope to think more deeply about that later.
The other difference between physical and digital is how long the feedback loop is with your customer/user. Physical is long because you need to ship, find a good opportunity to use them, think about what worked and what didn’t, whereas digital can be more immediate.
We talked a bit about authenticity of digital tools, and the superficiality of our consideration of tools – do they look okay rather than do they work. Charles mentioned the commitment a physical product has compared to a digital version (not always, I’ll add, but in the context of our chat) and that loops from designing and printing through shipping, using and feedback.
I pondered: is it the use, or experience, of a tool that enables in-depth feedback – no matter if this is digital or physical. Digital tools can often be used for free, so there is little effort or engagement beyond “does it work?” to be had, compared to physical tools. Aside: what of conceptual tools, then?
So much to unpack. Worth recognising we were maybe 25 minutes into our group conversation.
Authenticity
Matt took the thread and ran with it in the direction of being authentic. For a tool to feel authentic, is needs some immersive aspect to it. People don’t like to share their screen in Zoom calls, is something Matt had noticed. There is a lot of watching and describing only. There was a lot about immersive experiences being batted to and fro here. I talked about how video games don’t need to be all-singing, all-dancing graphically to be immersive – in fact, some early games were incredibly naïve in that respect, yet they could keep me occupied and thinking, problem solving and experimenting, for hours at a time. Why isn’t Zoom (or Teams, or whatever) a space to do this?
How do you put usefulness and an immersive experience into tools – digital or otherwise? As John has often pointed out, the mechanics of cards have this built in, through the ability to shuffle them and move them around. This builds in a level of asynchronicity that many digital tools do not have – they are about structure and rules. “Where is the mess?” asked Matt.
Newer tools like Miro are beginning to embrace this non-conformity that physical products and that can only be a good thing. Ben and Abi, and John, made the same point: this mix of synchronous and asynchronous is what frees us from the constraint of time as well as place. Especially if we think about meetings as workshops.
I’ll end these notes with something I dropped into the chat box as I was listening to everyone else chatting. Is the future of work actually the future of meetings?
I’ll pull together some thoughts on why that might be true for a later blog post. I hope that Matt and others will do the same.
If you’re interested in a rambling conversation loosely about cards and the practice of using them in your work or play, why not drop in to the next Cardstock in July. It’s free and you’d be most welcome.