The Gapminder Project

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to work with Thinc Design and global health guru Hans Rosling to develop a unique game for Rosling’s Gapminder foundation. The final proof of concept is a game, not unlike roulette, in which the dealer asks a question about a particular country’s health statistics. Players bet on the correct answer. The answer is revealed by playing a projection onto the game board. The person whose chips are nearest the ball when it lands wins the chips. The indicators used on the graph are life expectancy (y axis) and children per woman (x axis).

A sample question goes like this: “In 1950, China had a life expectancy of 40 with 6.5 children per woman. Where do you think China is today?”

Players would then place their chips on a spot on the game board (a graph) that they believe represented the state of the Senegal’s current life expectancy and average number of children per woman.

When the wagers have all placed Hans waves his croupier rake to start one of his unique visualizations. Here is what it looks like. The balls often takes some interesting turns over time, which gives Hans the opportunity to discuss important moments in history with the players. For example notice in 1958 from the link that the significant drop starting in 1958 indicates the Great Leap Forward.

One of my early concept sketches and the final proof of concept in use

In the beginning we were presented with a challenge: to make a game. Specifications were rather loose, but there were 4 objectives:

1. To make users realize that they can easily understand the speed of change and state of development
of different countries when data is presented like game graphics.
2. To make users aware that large numbers of countries and subnational units in middle income
countries have changed in speed and ways unknown to them.
3. To make users a little more knowledgeable and much more curious about what drives the major
global changes.
4. All the above while having fun and getting links to more information and further learning.

I worked on many parts of this project, from the early concept and software design to developing the software, building hardware, and finally accompanying Rosling and his team to Washington, DC in May to debut the game at the Global Health Institute’s annual conference. The software is an object oriented Processing application that interfaced with an Xbee wireless radio that received RFID data serially from the croupier rake. The game was immensely popular and is currently being developed beyond jus the proof of concept stage.

Here are some of my original concept sketches for what I envisioned the game to be:

These sketches represent my original concept for the game.

Notice the addition of the wooden rake on the table. It is used to rake up chips and has a wireless RFID reader embedded inside. The rake allows the dealer to control video (play, pause, fast forward, rewind, stop) and trigger new game questions.

A few game cards. Games cards are roughly 7×9 and contain embedded RFID chips.

A collaboration with Andrea Dulko, Taylor Levy & Che-Wei Wang, Thinc Design, and Gapminder