Two players interact with the box to attempt cooperation

Players wear gloves to limit their sense of touch and increase confusion, then put their hands inside.

Players were give separate to see whether different motives of cooperation can work together.

Another player was told to work individually while player trying to cooperate with this player will bring confusion.

Player working individually approaches the box with caution after understand the instructions.

This game was designed to see how players might interact during the game and to discuss the results.

The Challenge

How does cooperation help us understand complexity?

The Goal

We set out to engage different people with competing motives and separate goals, then force them to work together in a confined environment.

Our Approach

What might occur when two people navigate a space they can’t see?

We assigned tasks to each participant, then obscured the tasks to be completed. We made our cooperation space enticing and curiosity inducing to pull participants into the encounter.

We defined cooperation as the process of motives working together to create an outcome.
We believe cooperation to contain the following ingredients:
Motives: The reason behind why entities take action
Together: The interaction between entities
Outcome: The entities enact change to transform the current state into a preferred state

By placing their hands in this box participants give up the possibility of planning what move they will make next. We placed ordinary and familiar objects in this space: a sponge, pipe cleaners, corks, toothpicks, binder clips, among others.

Two players were given different instruction cards and different task cards. Some instructions were designed for players to compete, but some were also designed to force players to rely on another player in order to complete the game.

The Outcome

We expected to see self-serving behavior from the competing player. However, as the players discussed their instructions openly, we noticed that the two players cooperate together to finish the assigned tasks.