Pivot!

Pivot! is a board game for 3–4 players who take on the role of creative entrepreneurs and work cooperatively (and competitively) to conceptualize and create a mobile app or website. I designed it as my Senior Thesis at Parsons. Throughout the course of the game, players make decisions about how the product works, who to market it to, and what it looks like, all while facing some headaches with clients, focus groups, and user tests along the way. While individually they compete for personal satisfaction points, they must compromise on their decisions because if they don’t ship the product in time, the project is a failure for everyone!

In today’s world, as technology adoption soars, the people who create the technology become the ones who hold massive amounts of power. There are many outlets for learning the hard skills required to become a technological maker, like programming and visual design, but not many teach a solid thought process behind the decision making. This is where design thinking comes in: as a powerful tool for encouraging thoughtful creation. Pivot! aims to be an introduction to design and design thinking for people with no previous knowledge on the subject, within a context they are already familiar with, as they become the next generation of digital creators.