DX Land: The Game of Digital Transformation or Stagnation

When standard formats couldn't capture how unpredictable and human digital transformation really is, we designed a Chutes-and-Ladders-style game, and used AI-generated art to build a world around it.

The Concept

The game of Digital Transformation (DX) is hard to win. After experiencing multiple digital transformation projects, we wanted to know what makes them succeed and what makes them fail. How much is chance vs. skill?  

The Players

This was a cross-institutional collaboration between UC Santa Cruz and the California State University Chancellor's Office, to pool our collective experience in transforming digital experiences into a conference poster. We all created the conceptual framework. I lead the visual design direction and took ownership of the AI art generation process — which was new territory for all of us at the time.

Translating tacit knowledge into a game system

We structured the collective experience of the team into a Chutes and Ladders-style game, one that intuitively communicates the non-linear, chance-influenced nature of digital transformation. Each game element was mapped to real patterns we'd observed: accelerators that fast-track progress, traps that can set teams back, and the role of institutional context that no amount of best practice can fully control.

Solving a real design constraint with an emerging tool

To execute our concept, we needed original high res artwork for the sci fi spooky aesthetic that would fit our “Stranger Things” theme. Creating concept images could mean spending hours drawing or sourcing licensed assets. Neither fit our timeline or budget. Instead, we turned to DALL-E 2, then just months old, as our image generation tool. The result was imagery no stock library could have provided.

Still, the process required significant iteration. The project graveyard image alone, server towers rendered as tombstones in a fog-lit cemetery, took many attempts with varied prompts before we arrived at the right balance of eerie and readable.

Outcomes

The poster generated genuine engagement at the conference. A format that could have been a dry matrix of best practices became a conversation piece. Participants engaged with the game format as a lens for reflecting on their own digital transformation experiences, making the knowledge transfer more effective than a standard research presentation would have been.

The Poster - high resolution file