Understanding FLOW, being low tech, Day 2 Innovation Learning Network #iln11

On day 2, we were treated to a discussion and exercise hoted by FrogDesign’s Giorgio Baresi (@giorgiobaresi) from Milan (Italy), that focused on creating Flow experiences, and how we might apply that in health situations. You can see a version of Baresi’s presentation on slideshare here. You’ll note later in the slides (slide 47) a description of what makes for a good flow experience – the right level of challenge, the right amount of skills/time required, and a little variation in that ideal zone. I think this is helpful for game-designers to be, and I would even say environment-designers to be. Looking at the analogy that @drlyle1 created for me, the “current treatment of hypertension is a really bad game,” it’s easy to see why it might fail for some people, or maybe I might say, for the people who are on the fence about it’s importance. Clearly a lot of people understand the need to treat their blood pressure and take their medicine. The question I have is what percentage of people will benefit from this approach and what are their characteristics?

We were also treated to a low-tech, paper-based game created for nursing students entering into their training in the pediatric oncology world. What I learned here was that games do not have to be graphical or apps. The game we played was plenty complicated (and complicated to create, unfortunately), and involved teams given tasks on the wards, including delivering medications, obtaining knowledge references, and collaborating with other students and health professionals. My team did the doctor thing (if I can call it that), and didn’t huddle or look at the tasks, we just did them one by one. Probably not the best strategy! One interesting outcome of the discussion was that our game designer, Jason Morningstar, from the School of Nursing at UNC, was told that impacting the actual way the ward was run our how the student nurses were treated was out of scope. Our group, the innovative-empowered, scratched our heads on that one, which is good, we could see how this go to the next level…..

1 Comment

Ted Eytan, MD