Reflective Surfaces: Experimenting with Playful, Playable Publication Formats

Reflective Surfaces is a fully interactive version of a paper that was also submitted to DIS 2024's Pictorial track. The piece explores the use of various tools, platforms, technologies and processes as organisational reflective practices in digital design. Presenting itself initially as an innocuous desktop that the player slowly unfolds into a mystery, the game becomes a tour of multiple design reflection practices. Each desktop represents a different designer's approach to capturing their own praxis, frequently through interactive demonstration of those forms of capture. By disguising these questions and analyses as something as prosaic as a series of navigable desktops, Reflective Surfaces asks the player to contemplate their own habits of knowledge formation and documentation.