Collaborative Design Practice | Project Ideation Prototype
Melvin Yung Khun Yew | 0357241 | Bachelor of Design (Hons) in Creative Media
Collaborative Design Practice
Week 9 — Week 11
CDP Project: Project Ideation Prototype
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| Final Design |
These are the jump links to each part of this portfolio
Instructions
Mr Shamsul Hamimi, my lecturer for the Collaborative Design Practice module for this April 2025 semester, gives us a heads-up on the upcoming tasks and requirements.
Work Process
Week 9
In this week, we prepared ourselves to make our custom tokens for our version of the Gluconomy, with the hexagon shape inspired by the glucose chemical structure shape.
While we gave the token design a tweak or two to ready ourselves for the upcoming laser cutting schedule at the Taylor's University laser cut lab, we went ahead to purchase the necessary wood planks use for our tokens, and some pastel coloured acrylic paints all at Art Friend that will dry and permanently stick on wood surfaces to separate and label each set of tokens according to the players with individual colours.
Here we also made final design adjustments to our game board designs after we have a trial print of the board to aid us in eyeing and spotting the contrast issues between the game area with the colour choice, since we're using a much more light pastel colours as our main colour palette.
Week 10
Since the laser cut lab only open during the working days at Taylor's University, Winnie booked a session with the lab to secure a slot for us on Tuesday. However, we went ahead on Monday to try our luck on whether the laser machine is free to use and not occupied, and to experiment on whether our prototype planning is correct or not.
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| Laser Cut Lab at Taylors |
It's fortunate that there is a responsible staff that's kind enough to aid us during this process, guiding us on selecting the suitable material thickness for the laser cut, how to use the CAD application to take exact measurement of our tokens for print, as well as the operating and safety procedures of the laser cutting machines before we went ahead and hands on the entire procedure. It is only known to us that if choosing a thicker board, we risked having our wood board caught on fire due to the amount of power needed to cut through the sheer thickness alone, which is what we originally didn't think about.
After trial and errors with the design file from our Adobe Illustrator to the LaserCAD app by converting from AI file to .DXP (Drawing Interchange Format), we finally got the laser machine up and running, slowly forming the wood board into our custom made tokens.
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| Laser Cutting in Progress |
The results is amazing, with the help of the technology, the product is smooth to the touch and is satisfying, apart from the heavy smoke smells from the laser burning the wood away, like the charcoal during BBQ sessions.
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| Successfully cut the tokens with laser |
With us separating the colouring task with different colours between each of the members, we moved on to refine the tokens, sanding away the rough edges of the tokens, before paint a layer of acrylic over it.
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| Painting tokens with acrylic colour |
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| Applying layer of clear lacquer spray paint on tokens for glossy look |
With somewhat a messy and painstaking process, the tokens have been complete with the new look.
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| Final token outcomes |
Week 11
And week 11 is where we're supposed to present our final board game design to the head of design school, Dr Luqman again with other lecturers, Mr Shamsul and Ms Noranis. We quickly prepared our packaging, as well as printed out the rest of the board game materials such as the ATP cash, stock market and power cards, as well as the game board and game manual together.
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| Final The Gluconomy Game Design |
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| D-day |
My reflections
It's thankfully to have someone guide us during the making of our board game elements. And the valuable feedbacks from Dr Luqman really light a new path in me to think and observe more, for example: the standard market choices for the board game packaging. Though the module itself is somewhat limiting our design choices, but I believe that it's the limitations during our design process the main lessons and challenges to help us develop more as a designer.
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