What to Know About Throwing an Office Baby Shower - The Muse

What to Know About Throwing an Office Baby Shower - The MuseWhat to Know About Throwing an Office Baby Shower Your colleague just announced his wife is pregnant. Or maybe your teammate just sent an email letting you know shes expecting.Either way, your co-workers start talking about possibly throwing the partie an office baby shower. And yet you have so many questions about the protocol of the whole thingDont fret- we talked to several working parents and employees whove thrown one before so youll know everything you need to make the event worthwhile.How Do You Even Know if You Should Throw One?This is the ultimate question, right?Well, after informally surveying 20 working parents, the answer varies. Some told me they were thrown one, yet they didnt want it. Others said they were glad they had one. And even others told me they werent thrown one and wish they had been.What I did discover is that if youre really unsure if the person wants it, its best to ask. Because yes, surprises ar e fun, but they could lead to making someone uncomfortable, or point attention at them when they dont want it, or highlight their pregnancy when theyd rather notlage get into specifics.And doing this also ensures you throw the right kind of party. One of my co-workers who recently planned one was glad she brought it up beforehand because she knew the mom-to-be was more introverted Finally, it helps to know if the person will even be available that day.Who Throws It?At some companies, HR plans all celebrations- meaning they may take the lead on any baby shower.But if this isnt the case at your organization, its usually the persons closest friend, manager, or direct report. If you problematik into any of those three buckets and dont want to do it alone, loop in the other two people listed in that sentence above and see if theyd like to work together.Graphic by Tyler Tamulinas.Who Do You Invite? Men, Too?This also depends on your companys culture as well as the guest of honors personal ity. Like the above example, your colleague may be more introverted, and therefore, uncomfortable having a big, blowout party.So keep the person in mind- do they tend to like attention, or shy away from it? Do they like to spend time with everyone in the office or only with a small group?And again, it doesnt hurt to ask- and in terms of whether or not you should invite your male colleagues, thats also up to the person, what theyre comfortable with and who theyre close to at work. Where Do You Have It?If you want to have it in the office, make sure youve checked with your office manager to make sure you can reserve a spot. Of course, keep in mind if you have it at work, youre more likely to exclude people who werent invited- which is why if you want to keep it small, go elsewhere.The benefit of that is that going to a restaurant makes it feel less like a work event and more like a celebration.When Do You Have It?For the most part, baby showers occur before the baby is born so the par ent can celebrate before they go on parental leave. That said, make sure it doesnt conflict with the parents schedule (both in and outside of the office), and also that the parent and their baby is healthy. Planning a party when theyre going through a tough period may do more harm than good (which is another reason to ask the person before you plan it).And, if youre having trouble finding the right time, its definitely not off the table to throw it after the babys born- after all, its better late than neverWho Pays for It?For most baby showers, teammates chip in collectively for the event. You shouldnt expect your company to pay for it (especially if they havent in the past), but its worth asking HR or your own manager if there is budget for these types of events.Can Dads Have One, Too?Yes In fact, we believe that celebrating soon-to-be-fathers is an important reminder to everyone that men are parents, too. With that said, all the same rules above still apply (namely, making sure th e person wants it).Anything Else?Yes, a few final notesThink beyond the party You can still celebrate without making it a big deal by having the team pitch in for a nice gift instead. This is a great way to keep things simple and still show you care.Make sure the event isnt patronizing, inappropriate, or overly gendered. Be respectful of the parent, their situation, and their decisions (also, because this is a work event, you should respect your colleagues regardless). This means staying away from games that can be insulting or presumptuous.Keep conversations light and impersonal- and keep your parenting advice to yourself (even if youre a parent yourself). The shower should be about celebrating the person and having some fun during the work day, not an ask me anything on being pregnant.Baby showers can be an incredible opportunity to show your co-workers you care about them as more than just co-workers. Many of the parents I spoke with were pleasantly surprised and grateful for hav ing been thrown one.And, even pitching in on something on their registry or taking them to a nice lunch goes a long way in making them feel more at home at work.

High-Tech Startups Its About the Business

High-Tech Startups Its About the Business High-Tech Startups Its About the Business High-Tech Startups Its About the BusinessSteve Blank, co-author of The Startup Owners Manual, who also co-launched a course at Stanford University on starting a high-tech company, says one of the biggest mistakes engineers make is celebrating that they have a great product. It brings up that old question of why McDonalds blows away most fancy steakhouses in sales. Because its not just about the productits about the business.Having a technology idea is not the same as having a company, Blank says. Theres often a disconnect between engineers and scientists and what commerce and capitalism is about. These people are often the smartest but you dont get paid for being the smartest in the world in a start-up. You get paid for being the one who put it together the right way.Steve Blank, co-author of The Startup Owners Manual.In my class the real shock to the system is that I throw them out of class the first day, says Blank. You have an idea? Well get out and start talking to the potential customers. Call up your peers and friends and start testing key assumptions. Find out who would buy your product and how much would they pay? How much will it cost you to produce it?And some of the answers may even be in their eyes. Look for their pupils dilating, for that excitement, he says. Or for eyes glazing over and knowing you missed your mark. Until you get a reaction, you dont know where you stand.Understand Your CustomerThe Startup Owners Manual, co-authored with Bob Dorf, describes discovering who your customer is in four phases 1) The authors break down the business model into product, customers, channels, demand creation, revenue models, partners, resources, activities, and structures. They recommend writing a page for all hypotheses and deciding on the research to find out if theyre correct. 2) Test the hypotheses. 3) Try out a solution through a minimum viable product for customers. 4) Analyze the experiment results to assess if you understand the customers problems, passions or needs, confirm the value proposition for those same three things, and decide if you would have enough customers who will buy at a price point that will allow for profitability.Take Feedback SeriouslyRemember, you dont have to complete the product to find out valuable information. Keep building your product as you get feedback on part of it, Blank says. People dont need to see everything to get excited. Get earlyvangelists, people who will offer money for the product even before its done. This happens all the time.Now are you ready to scale? Does your research show that this product deserves a sales force, a formal training department, and can you raise the money for this because you have proof of need? Blank asks.Proof of need is vital. In The Startup Owners Manual, the authors mention Webvan, an online grocery store company that raised around $400 million and had $8.5 billion in market c ap the day of its initial public offering, but went bankrupt less than three years later because, in the authors opinion, it tested less and grew more.But even if youre sure the business model fits, the last key can be among the hardest to master staying with the process. Sometimes the same people who are great at starting something arent the best at the day-to-day, Blank says. They get bored. You need to keep policies in place, make the sales numbersthats why most founders dont end up running their companies but hire people who can. Its important to be honest about your personality.Eric Butterman is an independent writer.You have an idea? Well get out and start talking to the potential customers.Steve Blank, author of The Startup Owners Manual

Engineers on the Mechanics of Designing Board Games

Engineers on the Mechanics of Designing Board Games Engineers on the Mechanics of Designing Board Games Engineers on the Mechanics of Designing Board Games.indent width-removed 96%margin-left 4%.numbd-left float-removed leftwidth-removed 4%font-weight bold.numbd-right width-removed 90%float-removed leftfont-weight boldIf the words mainmotzu sichboard game bring to your mind the tried and true games of yesteryearMonopoly, Clue, Riskyou may be unaware that we are now living through a veritable board game renaissance. Thanks in part to Kickstarter, which has allowed board game designers to produce games without the backing of a Milton Bradley-sized corporation, and to BoardGameGeek, a thriving online community that rates games in addition to hosting several annual conventions and awards ceremonies, and perhaps to a somewhat nostalgic yearning to get off the phone and engage with other physically present people, there are thousands of new, beautifully designed games on the market.But how ever pretty the box and board, it is ultimately the mechanics of a game that make it a thing worth playing. So its no surprise that a large percentage of board game designers are or have been engineers. Are they drawn to the puzzle-like nature of constructing gaming challenges for the player? Do they use the saatkorn part of the mind that solves engineering problems to solve the problems of developing an engaging game? Nine board game engineers weigh in on these questions.1. Scott Almes Tiny Epic series, Best Treehouse Ever, Martian DiceMy mechanical engineering background has had no small part in my success as a game designer, Scott Almes said. Hes a product development engineer by day and a board game designer by night, as his blog puts it. For Almes, designing a game is just like designing any other product. Both have phases of research and market, as well as prototyping and development.Join ASME and Leading Industry Experts for Offshore Wind Turbine Webinar seriesExperience with this process is what can give an engineer an edge in the game business. Many designers come in thinking of their games as an art piece that cant be touched, and will be resistant to further iterations, outside input, or even customer feedback, Almes said. As a mechanical designer, I was already used to the process.But that doesnt mean the engineering process and board game development are the same. When you are designing a mechanical product, your goals can be very detailed and technical, Almes said. You might need a pump that cannot weigh mora than X pounds, must move at least Y gallons of water a minute, and should cost less than Z. For games, you might have some hard data pointssuch as price, game length, or player countbut fruchtwein of your goals are going to be softer. You want players to get a certain feeling, or you want to set the game in a certain fictional world, or you want the players to laugh while playing. These soft goals can not only be hard to define, but hard to test.2. Adam Wyse Masque of the Red Death, Poetry Slam, Head of MouseholdAdam Wyse was once a software engineer who worked for a mechanical and civil engineering firm and, later, an energy billing company. Then he found games.Playing my first modern board games and seeing the kinds of mechanics and experiences that games were now providing blew my mind, he said. Owing partly to my engineering background, I wanted to start getting into the innards of the games . . . and wondered if I could make one myself.Soon thats all he was doing. In addition to creating games he now works full time in logistics and development for Roxley Games in Calgary.Read more on Design Game Theory Helps Robot DesignFor Wyse, the embryonic stages of a game have little to do with anything engineering. When I first start a game design it can at times feel like an artist sitting down in front of a leer canvas, he said. It is more about exploration and creativity than I found with engineering.But once a game has taken form and needs revision and refinement, the engineer in him kicks in.Being able to separate out use cases or game states and evaluate the probability of these things occurring, or being able to figure out how many of a certain card or component are required, can often be very mathy, Wyse said. Some designers will go by feel, try what seems right, test it, and see how it works. The problem is there is just not enough testing that can possibly be done.I feel that a math background is so important to making good games.Thats not to say that after the initial stages a board is just another engineered product. With most engineered items, the mechanics are the means to an end. When it comes to game design, the mechanics are the game, he said. And the ends to which a game is the means is a nebulous, subjective concept called fun. It was definitely a skill Ive had to learn (and continue to try to learn) to find the fun.3. Phil Eklund Neanderthal, Bios series, Pax seriesOf what objectiv e merit is a board game? asks Phil Eklund. The engineering problems of building bridges, vehicles, power networks, etc. have obvious consequences to help man command the resources of nature and the problems of social living. But of what survival value or human advancement does a board game represent?The question is an important one for Eklund, who, after working for 32 years as an aerospace engineer for Hughes Aircraft segued into fulltime gaming with his company Sierra Madre Games. Hes produced many games including a trilogy of Bios games which encompass the entire history of Earth as a habitable planet.For Eklund, gameslike all artmirror the world. Crucial to that mirroring are the rules, as important to games as they are to engineering. Games and engineering are similar because they both require a grasp of rules, Eklund said. Perhaps even more than in engineering, the users of your product will be poring over the nuances and interpretations of every word, seeking a literal interp retation that will give them a competitive advantage.Read more on Latest Tech in Old School Toys VR and Drone Technology in a Paper AirplaneThis need to organize and record our world is Eklunds answer to his existential question. Man, who is a uniquely conceptual being, finds use for art, which I define as the recreation of reality according to the artists value judgements, he said. Obviously, board games fall under such a definition. My board games are simulations of reality according to value judgements, which I take the effort to identify in footnotes in each game.4. Tunca Zeki Berkkurt Ittihat, IhtillTunca Zeki Berkkurt is currently working on his PhD in Mechanical Engineering at Istanbul Technical University. He designs games in his spare time. Ihtill, or Revolution, and Ittihat, or the Union, are strategy games that recreate events in Turkish history. But my methodology is based on engineering design rather than historical research, he said.After breaking down a piece of histo ry into manageable components, he develops a mathematical model that captures the relationships that produced the historical occurrences. I always define a fundamental rule that players winning strategies will focus on, Berkkurt said.This conceptual process takes about a week. But fine tuning and end design takes almost a year. Tweaking rules, actions, come-back mechanisms and winning conditionsall of which need to be tested in playcontribute to the long gestation. Berkkurt uses analytical and numerical testing to supplement what he learns from humans at the game table.Of course, after the game has been properly calibrated, it becomes a product like any other. So when I Kickstart a board game, I find retailers and printing presses, I choose the materials that the games components will be made of, and I even check the tools and workers, he said. All this work is the manufacturing engineering process and should be taken carefully.5. Joan Wendland X-Machina, Counting Zzzzs, Evil Vendet ta Pie FightJoan Wendland is the owner, operator, game designer, and Queen of Cardsas her website puts itof Blood and Cardstock Games. Shes also an engineer. Game design doesnt pay the bills, she said. For 25 years shes been an engineering consultant, which has included gigs as a systems engineer, a technical trainer, a test engineer, a requirements manager, and a data liaison. She also writes novels.When creating her quirky games, Wendland largely leaves her engineering self behind. I do know a lot of technical people will use statistics to balance a game, but I lean more heavily to reproducing the feel of the theme, she said.Her Counting Zzzzs game is so close to the actual mechanics of sleep there is a sleep doctor in Portugal that uses it to talk to children about their sleep disorders.But her engineer returns when it comes to testing and writing the rules If theres a way for the players to break the game, your product will fail. If someone cant teach themselves to play from the instructions, the product will fail.Read more on Inspiration Sources How Elephants Use Their Tails to Chase Away MosquitoesAnd the problem-solving part of her brain works to keep gameplay well oiled. For instance, in her Pie Fight game she found that certain dice rolls could land all the pies on a single limb which would not hurt that player any more than one pie, she said. So I decided after a second pie, the third pie would be able to slide to another body part because the first two pies made that limb toogooey for the third pie to stick. This did the trick.6. Geoffrey Engelstein Space Cadets, The Fog of War, The Ares ProjectGame design, like all design, is about solving problems, Geoffrey Engelstein said. Engelstein should know hes solved a lot of problems. As a junior and senior at MIT he was president of the Strategic Gaming Society. Now he runs Mars International, an engineering design and manufacturing firmin New Jersey, while simultaneously creating games. He also teaches b oard game design at NYU.One of the first things I talk about are the strong analogs between game design and engineering, he said. Game design is, in many ways, a type of engineering. Engineering is about dealing with constraints. And tabletop games in particular have tremendous constraintsthe physical nature of the components, shelf cost, playing time, the ability of players to comprehend and remember the rules, and moreall of these need to be considered and juggled by the designer, and you have to balance them against each other.The ability to test a game with iterations of a mathematical model can give an engineer an advantage in making board games. You can get a much quicker understanding of the behavior of your design by doing simulations, similar to finite-element modeling for structural strength, Engelstein said.But the advantages are not just limited to testing and product developmentIn product design, mechanical engineers and industrial designers build affordances and signif iers into designs so that users know what to push and what to pull, and how different features may interact with each other, he said. The best products are intuitive to use. The same holds true for board games. Using iconography and other features can make it a lot simpler for players to understand what is happening, and what their options are.There are elements of game design that require a shift in the engineering mindset. The biggest eye-opener I had taking my engineering skills and applying them to game design was in writing the rules, he said.Read more on Engineers and Fun YouTube Star Goes Viral with Glitter BombEngelstein had first thought of writing rules the way he wrote code, breaking structures into small chunks and giving specific steps for each piece Well, my first rule book was completely incomprehensible to the vast majority of players, he said. A rulebook is a teaching guide, not a flow chart that should be memorized.7. Haim Shafir Piraten kapern, Speed Cups, Halli G alliGames are products. They are a special kind of product, Haim Shafir said. They are distinct from industrial products in which the functionality is the paramount issue to consider in order to make a decision on whether to buy them or not. Games are meant to fulfill personal satisfaction. Industrial products are meant to fulfill functions.Trained as a mechanical engineer at Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, Shafir found his own personal satisfaction in the world of play. After several years I found myself attracted by social and humanistic questions which led me to be involved in toys and games, he said. On the one hand, one may say it is far away from engineeringalmost the oppositebut I disagree. All my training as an engineer is still useful as a game inventor.For four decades now Shafir has put that training to creating games for his company Shafir Games.The skills one need to become a successful game designer depend on the type of games one is focused onbut mathematics is certainly important, he said. But above all creativity is paramount. Creativity starts with curiosity.And Shafir is curious about whats fun. I am the kind of designer that focuses on social and fun games, so I learn and research fun and the roots of fun. This is as far as one can think of from mechanical engineering but any successful creative career is always surprising, transformational, and combiningmany disciplines.8. Bruno Cathala 7 Wonders Duel, Five Tribes, KingdominoFor 18 years, Bruno Cathala created Tungsten alloys for the medical, aeronautic, and military industries. To create a new material, he always went through the same stages. As he puts it First there is a sparkling idea.This requires the design of an experimental plan for validation. During this stage, you adapt, correct, modify, cancel, and validate to reach the final answer you are looking for. Then, when you have exactly what you want, you have to write the process with very precise and simple sentences so th at anybody on the production line can understand all the instructions.The development of a game follows exactly the same path, he said. So, today, Im doing the same job. Its only the field which is different.Read more on Designing Learning Environments Rats Play VR Game to Explain How Human Brain Works Same job or not, Cathalas path has produced some very popular games. 7 Wonders Duel is owned by over 60 thousand registered users at BoardGameGeek and is ranked 14th most popular game. Do Cathalas sparkling board game ideas come from the same place that his engineering ideas come from? Well, its quite impossible for me to know if ideas for games or products come from the same place, he said. Because I just dont know where my ideas come from, never mind if its game ideas, or metallurgical development ideas in my former job, or music ideas (Im trying to play guitar).But he does know when he gets his ideas. Ideas come when Im not focused on searching for ideasand maybe even what theyre made ofTheyre generated by a lot of different influences Papers, movies, and discussions. But its always unconscious. That means that my brain has digested a lot of different data and, at one point, generates something which seems unique to me, but is for sure the result of this digestion. Then the works begins to try to know if this idea deserves some development or not.Engineers hoping to develop any board game ideas of their ownwherever they come fromcan check out the Board Game Design Lab. There, board game designers from all walks of life get into the minutia of just how an idea becomes something anyone can sit down with and play.Michael Abrams is an independent writer.Register today for ASMEs Offshore Wind Summit to learn about the latest technologies, opportunities, and supply chain strategies from leaders in the oil, gas and wind energy industries. The Best Stories of the Month Open Source Engineering Creates Great Ideas for Rural AreasHelp Wanted Aerospace Engineering Jobs Engineering Thrills from Cedar Point Rides When it comes to game design, the mechanics are the game.Adam Wyse