KerPlunk and Donald Judd

A week last Monday I went to Café Truva with my friend Kevin. Kevin is someone I got to know from him being the Dad of one of Louis's friends from when he was at primary school. But we now meet up maybe once every couple of months and the kids never even get mentioned. Kevin's an architect so I always ask him for advice on design ideas I'm grappling with and last week I wanted to ask him for advice on how to improve the aesthetics of the user experience of a game I've been developing with a collaborator.

So far the materials we've been using for the game have been pretty rudimentary. We are trying to simulate a hospital's patient flow processes so we try to draw the shape of hospital wards onto large pieces of mounting board and we use cards made out of thin card, and it's all a bit - well - suboptimal.

When I described this state of affairs to Kevin it was astonishing how much his eyes lit up. "Forget all that crap," he basically said. "You need materials. You need MDF. You need perspex. You need 3D. You need laser cutters. You need plastic. You need colour"

And he sent me this book he made with some of his students that shows examples of models they've made to illustrate an urban design project. And I've photographed one of them and it's a bit out of focus but who cares because it's captured my imagination. And now this game - which is called Flowopoly - is from now on going to be some mind-blowing cross between KerPlunk and Donald Judd and it's going to be amazing.