Medium Mashup

Welcome to Medium Mashup!

Medium Mashup is an Innovation Game where you invent a new tool to solve a specific persona's problem using randomly selected mediums and notations. The purpose of Medium Mashup is to help you move beyond features of a software tool to the underlying Mediums and Notations. Medium Mashup is an Innovation Game where you invent a new tool to solve a specific persona's problem using randomly selected Mediums and Notations.

The purpose of Medium Mashup is to help you move beyond features of a software tool to the underlying Mediums and Notations.

The Setup

You're a toolsmith. You specialize in building bespoke tools for specialized use cases with arbitrary constraints. You operate as a team under tight timelines, and you (almost) always deliver. I hope you're up for today's challenge!

  1. Gather materials. You'll need the typical paper prototyping materials: unlined and grid paper, multi-colored sharpies, sticky notes, scissors, tape, highlighters, rulers.
  2. Form a team. We recommend a team of 3-5 persons.
  3. Discover the constraints. Draw 3 Medium and/or Notation cards from the Constraints deck. If you want to make it a bit easier, draw 4 cards and discard 1.
  4. Get to know the client. Draw a Persona card. Read their background.
  5. Choose a Workflow Goal. Read the client's Workflow Goals aloud together and discuss. Choose one of the Workflow Goals that your team will build a tool for.
  6. Start building! You and your team have 90 minutes to design a new Tool that satisfies one of your Client's Workflow Goals while utilizing all of the Constraints.
  7. Present the solution. Give a brief (5-10 minutes?) presentation walking through the tool that your team came up with. Describe the workflow in detail.

Advice for Presenting The Solution

Here are some questions you might want to answer:

The Constraint Deck

The Constraint deck consists of Mediums and Notations that must be used in the tool you design for the Client.

The Persona Deck

The Persona deck consists of clients with specific Workflow Goals that you must build a tool for.