Date May 2, 2025

Playing with Purpose

By Beth James

Mitchell award winner Claire Poissonnier ’25 creates a board game based on the circular economy.

When the call for a summer researcher to investigate the gamification of the circular economy, targeted to elementary and middle school students, hit the Slack channel of the Brown Design Workshop managers and monitors, Claire Poissonnier says it took less than six minutes for her to respond. Poissonnier was just getting to know Brown Design Workshop Director and Associate Professor of the Practice Louise Manfredi, and recognized the value a summer spent in her tutelage might bring.

Manfredi has long been an outspoken advocate of the circular economy, a model of production and consumption that aims to reduce waste and extend the life of products and materials. She also had the knowledge and research behind how strategy games had proven popular as a mechanism for science outreach, with multiple board and video games centered on climate change entering the toy market in the last few years.

“Her research focuses on the circular economy and education to change the paradigm. A lot of the work at her former institution was informing the student body about that, but she wanted the research this summer to target younger age groups, with the idea that students of today will be the entrepreneurs and consumers of tomorrow,” Poissonnier explained. “The pitch was to create some sort of gamified representation of the circular economy.”

Manfredi was then able to champion Poissonnier’s nomination for, and acceptance of, a Neil B. Mitchell ’58 award, one of a select number of Brown Engineering undergraduate awards that help provide monetary support for a student in collaborative research with a faculty member. The Mitchell award is specifically tagged for study associated with systems thinking.

As the summer began, the senior engineering concentrator and Brown water polo standout began to review some precedent work, brainstorming her own plans while thinking through the mechanics of a game and the target audience. She decided to go with a board game – based in part on the research that board games are enjoying a resurgence in popularity and that trend is expected to continue. She then connected with junior Jules Silva, a design engineering student who was simultaneously working on a summer Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award. Initially, the plan was to work on separate projects, but the duo relied on each other so much that the final product was a result of the collaborative effort.

Poissonnier met with Manfredi at least once a week, where the mentor offered advice and provided readings and books from her personal bookcase. She was also able to acquire other games for Poissonnier and Silva to test, as well as any needed materials to manipulate as their game board took shape.

The game was christened Resource Roundup, and has both a physical board space with moving pieces and a card element loosely inspired by the popular ©CATAN. “The idea is there is a health meter for the environment of the board, and each player plays as a member of industry,” Poissonnier said. “As entrepreneurs, of sorts, they have an option to purchase factories, trade with one another, or play event cards which might generate profit for them, but all have both positive and negative effects on the environment.

“Where it really becomes a team game is when the actions of each player has an impact on the health of the board, thus impacting the ability to win the game overall. There is an individual winner, but only if the health meter stays above a certain value. If the health meter falls low enough, well then they would basically be in the environmental state that we are right now – increasing carbon emissions, and increasing average global temperature. And so there's a direct correlation between taking risks and elbowing your way in front of your competitors, rather than collaborating with them. That will have negative impacts on not just your competition, but also you as an entrepreneur.”

“ This summer had such an impact on me. I found I really like working closely with the group that I'm designing for. I know I want to do something that might not be pure engineering, but has a design component – designing with rather than designing for is something that I feel very strongly about. ”

The game was play-tested as part of Manfredi’s pre-college program with rising ninth and 10th graders for three weeks in the summer, and is now in use in Professor of the Practice Rich Morales’ Systems Thinking class (ENGN 0610). Poissonnier said most of the data collection in the summer was based on student body language and engagement, and follow-up to see if they understood the concept of the individual role in the collaborative economy. More qualitative data is expected to come from the iteration of the game utilized by Morales’ class.

“Honestly, I didn’t have much exposure to the circular economy as a concept coming into it,” she said. “I definitely felt strongly about environmental issues. I would try to eat and shop sustainably, because I wanted to be conscious of my impact on the environment, but learning more about what that means and the potential future was really exciting.

“This summer had such an impact on me. I found I really like working closely with the group that I'm designing for. I know I want to do something that might not be pure engineering, but has a design component – designing with rather than designing for is something that I feel very strongly about.”

“Designing a game is really hard,” she continued. “To come up with an idea that is original and then refining it consistently – I spent a lot of the summer working on the mechanics of the game, and then making a physical prototype of it before we could test it. And I feel like the stakes are high here, because you hear how kids have shorter attention spans. So it was a struggle to make a product that made us proud.”

A portion of the Mitchell funding also allowed Poissionnier to attend the Design Research Society Conference in Boston in late June, to network and talk with other researchers, and hear talks about collaborative design and welcoming people whose voices can be underrepresented in the design process.

“I may not continue in the board game design world, but the conference was really helpful, including one talk in particular I attended. It was from Moving Health, a nonprofit that designs, builds, and distributes motorcycle ambulances to provide safe and reliable medical transport in rural Ghana,” she said. “They work with the local people and basically make ambulances from materials found in local scrap yards. A regular ambulance would be destroyed within the first year of circulation in the country, because there are maybe two paved roads. But by working with members of these local communities to design these products, they're able to make them a lot more resilient for travel. I would love to do something like that: Reimagining how a product is designed by just taking the first step, listening to the people that it’s being designed for, or actively working with them to make it better.”

For Poissonnier, all those game pieces and strategic moves made for a summer well played.