Before we started, we had already agreed that we would gather ideas for a fictional indie electro band named Freiluftmusik. We listened to some music before getting to the cards, just to get a feel for the genre. From there we let the cards guide our discussions. I think we turned the music off while “playing”.

The first cards I drew were

Consider your direct involvement in the performance as an assistant or helper

and

Consider the chronological order as an aspect of interaction

I had a bit of a hard time getting these cards to work together. The only thing I could think of was how performances would be planned - a very hazy line of thought. But I was in luck. One of my colleagues had drawn the role card of a composer, and had some very intriguing ideas about him wanting to draw attention to the band even before concerts, raising hype and so on. This led me to subconciously abandon my role card and just think about the “chronological order” card. This created a solid base for our choice to let the audience interaction happen before, not during the performance. We switched cards once. The combination of “spacial distribution of participants” and “issues that constrain the actual realisation” led us both to the idea of tracking audience engagement and position via pulse measuring wristbands, as well as a discussion about the feasibility of the concept. One of us had the role of a participant, so we let him reflect on different forms of this interaction. We partially considered interactions over stream for people not at the performance, which led us back to our original idea. We had originally planned to “play” at least two turns with the cards, but then decided not to, as we were already pretty sold on our original idea.

The cards seem particularly well suited for generating initial ideas, especially those one might not have thought of on their own. I think this is because - in contrast to the Design with Intent cards for example - the cards incentivize thinking about the combinations one gets, instead of skipping over cards that do not seem to make sense. This forces a designer to re-evaluate ideas they might have discarded normally. On the other hand, our example with the card about restrictions shows, that the cards can bring realism back into a discussion instead of just letting the designers dream about grand projects, thus enforcing a proper scope. This might be very dependent on how lucky one is when drawing the cards though.

LiveMAP can have a negative impact on discussions too, though. If one person is dealt cards they cannot initially make sense of, they might not participate as much in the conversation as a person with two cards they can match very well. This leads to a conversational imbalance. Here, users should be careful to try and find a way to bring their cards into the discussion or swap their cards, rather than not participating.

Generally, as with any design tool, these cards are not a magical idea-finder. A user needs to be aware of their own biases when trying to create new concepts, and recognize that the cards have limited content and only act as a starting point for formulating ideas. Also, there is no real need to play exactly by LiveMAPs rules. It is not a game, where fair play is important. If you think that something is not working well for you, change it - just like I completely ignored my role card during our session.