Day by Day

A long time ago I designed a board game.  I was taking a class in my graduate program entitled "Teaching Health Professionals," and one of the assignments was to create and present a teaching project for the class.

I wanted to raise awareness of what it was like to live with a chronic mental illness, and thought that a game would be a good way to do this.  Obviously, I had some literature that backed up using games to impact the "affective domain of learning," which essentially means impacting attitudes of the learners.

The game had a track that snaked around the board with numbers randomly assigned.  There was a second board showing six different "health and function" tracks.  These tracks showed each player's status in Self Esteem, Mental Status, Relationships, Physical Health, Housing, and Job.   These tracks were number lines, going from 1-40.

To play, each team would place their movement pawn anywhere they wanted on the board, and a pawn on the number 30 for each of the Health and Function tracks.  The start player would roll a die, move the number of spaces on the board, and call out the number of the space landed on.  Someone would refer to the reference book and read the event associated with that number.  The results would impact some or all of the Health and Function tracks in some way.  Most events would drop one or more statuses in some way.

Play continued like this until one of the tracks dropped to 10 or lower.  Then the player would be in "Crisis." There was a separate section of events for being in Crisis.  If two tracks dropped to 10, the player would be in the psych hospital, and would use the events from the Hospitalization section of the results booklet.

I used this with a couple of different groups, all nurses in my grad program, and people loved it.  It really prompted some great discussions, and I think it was successful at helping people understand chronic mental illness a little differently.  Then I filed it away at the end of the semester and forgot about it.

Recently I found the event booklet in a box of things I was sorting through.  That gave me the idea to revive it, and over the past few weeks I completely updated the game.  Instead of a single status board with everyone's pawns on the same tracks, there are now individual player boards, one for each player.  Instead of three sections in a reference book, there are three decks of cards, all revised to reflect events I'm familiar with from working with people in the community over the past 11 years.  Instead of a randomly numbered board and a die, the movement board is a six-week calendar.  Players move one space at a time and draw a card from the appropriate deck.  They move one day at a time.  A lot like how so many of my clients live...Day by Day.  Which is now the new name for my game.

I made two copies today, complete with wooden cubes to track status and wooden meeples to move through the calendar.  I wrote up the rules and discussion guidelines last week.  It's ready to play.  I'll be using it this week with my students, and the week after that with the group of newly graduated nurses on orientation at the hospital.  I can't wait to finally have this as a teaching tool!

Wordlessness

I changed offices at work two weeks ago, and it highlighted a wordlessness that I find confusing.  My new office is in an older section of the hospital.  This means that when you get on the elevator there are two buttons that say "Door Open" and "Door Closed."  This is in stark contrast to the buttons on the elevators in the new section of the hospital, that say "<||>" and ">||<"  

I'm sorry to say that it takes me more than a few seconds to figure out what these pictures mean.  Every time I get on the elevator I have to stare at them for a few seconds to figure out which is which.  They are confusing.  A while back I pushed the button I thought would hold the door open for someone and ended up closing it in their face.  Now I usually stick my hand in the doorway and hope the door opens.  Or do nothing.

Moving also showed me another way that wordlessness makes things confusing...

We got new phones a while ago, but my old office had both a new phone and an old phone.  Since the old phone was "where the phone should be" on my desk, I kept using it.  The old phone had buttons saying "Transfer" "Conference" "Hold" etc.  My new office only has the new phone.  This phone is a really sophisticated piece of technology, which is obvious because you can customize the ring tone.  What confuses me about the phone is that the buttons have a bunch of meaningless pictures on them.  Even though I had a two hour inservice on how to use the new phone, and I have a quick reference guide (somewhere in my moved stuff), I have no idea what the wordless buttons on my phone do.  The pictures are indecipherable.  

Today I got a phone call from an agency looking to refer a patient to the hospital.  The number they were trying to call is one digit different from my extension.  I politely gave the caller the correct number before attempting to transfer the call.  I warned her that I might lose the call, because I had no idea what the buttons on my phone did.  She laughed and said she understood, because she didn't understand the buttons on her phone either.

I realize that the intent of wordlessness is to create an environment that doesn't discriminate against people who can't read English.  The problem is that the solution discriminates against people who can't understand the icons.  Which might be everyone.

The elevator example is probably my own mental block against figuring out what the icons mean.  They're pretty obvious, just hard to read quickly.  The choices for icons on the phone, however, are really tough to figure out.  Other than the envelope icon (clearly voice mail, at least to someone who grew up with real mail), the button to transfer a call and the button for a conference call both include an arrow and a person.  I'm not quite sure which is which. 

In order to cope with this wordlessness, I may have to make some labels with real words and and tape them to my phone, so I know what each button does.  

I have no idea how I'll ever figure out the elevator buttons.  I guess I'll just have to stand and wait for the doors to do their thing.  

Wordlessly.