2025.10.
2025.09.
2025.08.
2025.07.
2025.09.05
Business trip to Smilegate
2025.08.17~20
Prototype Evaluation Workshop
2025.08.04
Welcome,
Maeda Kahori!
2025.08.01
Lab Orientation &
Game Night
2025.07.31~08.06
Game Design Sprint
2025.07.23~28
Workshop with Haenyeo Community
2025.07.03
Collaboration Meeting with Smilegate
2025.10.20
Business trip to BEAR BETTER
We visited BEAR BETTER to ask for cooperation in recruiting survey participants from among their employees with developmental disabilities.
Observing the gameplay of people with developmental disabilities at the company gym gave us insight into the role of the disability community. This experience also helped us establish the necessary criteria for adapting our survey to be clearly understood by people with developmental disabilities.
We visited Smilegate to gather opinions about our survey questions from players with disabilities. We conducted face-to-face interviews. By listening to them, we gained precious insights of the ways to improve our research.
We conducted a prototype evaluation workshop with Haenyeo community members and cultural experts as part of the Preserving the Haenyeo Legacy project. Participants reviewed the initial prototype, provided feedback on how well their values and experiences were reflected, and discussed directions for improvement. The final session included a visit to the Haenyeo Museum, where curators offered additional insights for representing intangible cultural heritage in the game.
We are very pleased to welcome Kahori Maeda, a master’s student in Educational Technology from the Institute of Science Tokyo, to the Games and Life Lab.
Kahori will be conducting a short-term research stay with us from August 4 to August 29, focusing on game-based educational design in learning environments.
The day began with a lab lunch, followed by our official Lab Orientation.
After a round of introductions, members presented their ongoing research projects as well as previous work, and shared their individual research interests within the broader orientation of the Lab.
We concluded the day in a board game café, where we spent time together playing games and talking.
Following the Workshop with Haenyeo Community, we conducted an internal design sprint at KAIST. During this sprint, we reviewed the insights and narratives collected from the Haenyeo participants and translated them into concrete game elements and mechanics.
The team iteratively refined these elements and ultimately developed a game design document that captures the core values and experiential themes identified through the co-design process.
As part of this project, we conducted a co-design workshop series with the Haenyeo community in Sinrye-ri, Daepyeong-ri, and Yeongnak-ri with the collaboration with Professor Mariza Dima (Brunel Games Research Lab). Through this collaboration, we explored how lived experiences of fishing such as local stories, songs, and collective memories that can be translated into playful cultural elements within game structures.
The workshops also aimed to establish a participatory archiving process, enabling the community to actively define how their intangible heritage should be represented and preserved.
The purpose of this visit is to share our research progress and discuss plans for the next phase of our research project.