Jon: Welcome to the episode 103 of The Digital Life, a show about our adventures in the world of design and technology. I'm your host, Jon Follett. With me is founder and co-host, Dirk Knemeyer.

Dirk: Hey, Jon. What's new in The Digital Life this week?

Jon: I thought this week on the podcast, we could talk about one of my all time favorite topics which is the intersection of creative routines and design process. As creative people, as designers, we have different ways of leveraging our intellectual skills in that area. Everyone's got a different take on it. I always like to hear from folks who are in different creatives fields from myself. Additionally, when you come together as a studio or as an agency, there's this intersection of this large group of creatives and you need to figure out how we're going to get the best results out of this group of people.

If you have a UX team or development or whatever your creative team is, they sort of have to decide how they're going to best be productive and sort of turn out the work. I thought today, we could talk a little bit about creative routines from the personal side as well as the studio or agency side. Let's get started with that. I think maybe folks know this about you, or not, on this show but in addition to being a design leader and founder of a couple of companies, you're also a game designer. That's sort of one of the things that you love very much to do but it's your full time endeavor.

I wanted to ask you from the game designer perspective, when you are sort of digging into a new game, are there are any routines that you follow or are there any sort of creative design routines that make it easier for you to create new products?

Dirk: Yeah, the games I've designed are table top games. I've published six so far. The first thing for me is context. I mean, it's very similar to UX design where I start with a theme. There's something in the game design community, there's a tension, sort of a philosophical difference between designers who design for the theme of the game and designers who design around mechanics that they have in mind for a game. I'm firmly a theme based designer. I start by researching the hell out of my theme. I spend dozens of hours, I think in a couple of cases it might be hundreds, really, really getting into it. Reading books, researching things on the internet and then doing massive documentation and organization, typically in Google sheets, sometimes using the Google sort of Word equivalent as well.

The early weeks or months of my work on a game are really all about that. While I'm doing the research, I'm starting to stub out ideas certainly of mechanics that would go with it. But for me, the authenticity is really important of the mechanics being crafted to best represent and evoke the theme. Procedurally, I start with theme, think strategy, put all this time into research and the mechanics sort of blossom out of that. That's how my process begins.

Jon: As you're spending those dozens, even hundreds of hours, sort of immersing yourself in the topic area, this is something that user experience designers do as well when they're sort of first getting the feet wet maybe in an area that they might not be familiar with. Do you find that the inspiration for the mechanics comes as a result of that immersion or do you have some ideas that are ... in other words, is it the research and then sort of digestion of that research that generates the inspiration for how the game is built?

Dirk: Yeah, that sure is. When I'm talking about my game design process, I mean, typically the short hand way that I talk about it, I say, I read a book on the topic and by the time I'm done reading that book, I've got the game designed in my head. That's generally true. But I'm open, even though I have that game that I think is correct in a certain way, I am open to how the additional research will possibly change that,