Fighting pandemic is an origami board game designed for MIT 2.00b Toy Product Design class by Team BionicDL at SUSTech. As an educational collaboration at the SUSTech-MIT Joint Center for Mechanical Education and Research, we gathered a small team at the BionicDL Lab at SUSTech to work with Prof. David Wallace by taking the 2.00b through online lectures. This website aims at sharing our learning outcomes and demonstrating our toy design over the past two weeks for the toy design theme of “my island.”
The design philosophy of Fighting Pandemic is to raise public awareness on strategies that common people may take to fight the ongoing pandemic of COVID-19. It quickly escalated to a global emergency of public health that caused significant loss in modern humanity around the world. While many of us are advised to stay at our “island” of home, many of us faced a great challenge to adjust our daily lifestyle.
We wish, through the design of this game, to offer an interactive, reflective, and open exercise to better prepare our mindset in place of the various roles in such a pandemic. Early Sketch, Toy Mock-up and Rules Design are shown as below.
All you need to get started with this game is to follow a few steps of “print-cut-fold-play-share.” A printable template can be found here.
Feel free to be creative and draw everything by yourself to make the origami game board. Once you have everything in your hands, let’s start cutting and folding. It should be fun to see if you can fold everything by yourself based on the image below.
If you have trouble with our foldable dice, feel free to use your own dice or any virtual dice online. We also have a “smart” dice designed using Arduino. (This is the LEDs we have here, but you can easily modify it using your own.)
Now, assign your roles, and let’s play, and here are some simple rules to follow.
Wait, it’s a pandemic, meaning that the virus will not just accept being killed by the medic easily … so here’s the challenging part of the game.
The simpleast rules are listed as above, but you are always given the choice to modify your rules as long as it is agreed by all players. Now, let’s give it a go.
I’m sure you will have tons of questions during the game … Don’t worry, just like making you thursty is a design feature of the beer. The “loophole” in the game is also a design feature that requires your input and reflection to generate strategies to fight the pandemic.
We actually tested the game quite a few rounds with pilot players. We are happy to share with you that we have collected quite a pool of innovative strategies to fight the pandemic, and of course, to improve the game experience, either it’s for the fun of play, or for the simulation of the real scenario.
The rest is for you to find out, and share with us!
Have Fun Fighting the Pandemic in the Toy Page~~