24 Playtesting participants
Across four rounds
Grab a Seat
Permission to speak. Not more information to read alone.
A facilitator-free board game for reproductive health conversations
The challenge
How can we provide women with access to the sexual and reproductive health information and resources they need — before it’s too late?
My role
I led research protocol and facilitation, game mechanics and content development, four rounds of playtesting iteration, and physical production.
20 Research participants
14 survey · 6 interviews
Shipped artifact
Board · 4 card families · 3D-printed pieces · Play Pledge
The information exists. Asking for it doesn’t.
Women aren’t failing to find sexual and reproductive health information — they’re failing to ask before shame, stigma, and silence delay care. Our research found this across regions, religions, and lived experiences. Not one community’s problem. A structural one.
I designed and shipped a physical board game that lowers the cost of the first question out loud — no facilitator required. The breakthrough wasn’t better content. It was reframing Discuss It prompts from first-person confession to strategic third-person distance, which changed playtest behavior in round three.
Help has to be reachable before the moment passes.
We designed for the threshold where women need information and resources but can’t ask yet. I owned the system from research protocol through four playtesting rounds to a shipped, facilitator-free artifact: four card families sequenced by emotional cost, a Play Pledge that replaces the facilitator, and reward-based movement that never punishes hesitation.
One-month HCID 511 team project at UW MHCI+D. The interesting problem wasn’t the health content — it was whether anyone would say the first sentence aloud.
The information is out there. The ask isn’t.
Sexual and reproductive health resources exist — online, in clinics, in communities. The failure mode isn’t scarcity of information. It’s that the people who need help most are too afraid to ask — and miss the window where early conversation could change outcomes.
Health systems respond after harm: unintended pregnancy, STIs, dismissed pain. This project starts upstream — at the moment before someone reaches for help at all.
“In my culture, sexual experience lowered your worth. Pre-marital sex was shameful. So I learned everything alone — from Google, from WebMD at 2am, from guessing.” — Research participant
Silence is systematic, not individual.
All four team members carried lived experience of this silence — but intuition isn’t evidence. We needed to know whether fear of asking was idiosyncratic or structural across backgrounds.
Is this a regional or cultural problem — or a shared pattern across regions, religions, and experiences?
Design question
How can we provide women with access to the sexual and reproductive health information and resources they need — before it’s too late?
We designed the protocol before we designed the game.
For sensitive work, the protocol is the product. I led facilitation, question design, and the consent protocol — then ran four playtesting rounds to validate what we built.
Survey — n=14
Women 18–40 recruited across backgrounds where women’s health was taboo, to separate cultural variation from shared patterns.
Interviews — n=6
In-depth sessions on where silence comes from, who people trust, and what would make a first conversation possible.
Playtesting — 4 rounds, n=24
Observation protocol tracking deflection, passing, and voluntary disclosure — especially on Discuss It prompts.
100%
Turn to the internet first — not clinicians, not family
92.9%
Rarely or never discussed sexual health at home growing up
64.3%
Do not know who to trust for health information
“Not enough people have conversations about women’s health. If it weren’t for people talking about pap smears on social media, this isn’t something that’s talked about at home.” — Research participant
The pattern held across every background we studied.
Key insight: This wasn’t a regional or religious outlier. Shame, self-directed learning, and fear of asking appeared in every interview — regardless of region, religion, or lived experience.
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Silence is structural — not a knowledge gap Shame and self-directed learning appeared across every background we interviewed. The problem isn’t missing information. It’s missing permission to ask.
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Systems trained avoidance Participants learned not to bring their full selves into clinical spaces. Help exists — but the path to it feels too risky to take.
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The hunger is for permission to ask Everyone wanted somewhere to speak — not another resource to read alone. They needed a room, not a PDF.
Design requirements
Lower the cost of the first ask — not add more information.
Co-present interaction: help happens between people, not on a screen alone.
Sequenced vulnerability: build toward harder questions safely.
Shared norms before first draw: no assumed facilitator or expert in the room.
The breakthrough wasn’t the topic. It was the framing.
01 · Four formats. One passed the permission test.
We pressure-tested four directions: anonymous digital storytelling, myth-busting inserts, a parent–child toolkit, and board play. Three failed the same way — they put learning back in private, solo consumption. Board play was the only format that kept bodies co-present and lowered the cost of the first ask without a trained guide.
Why physical, not digital
Digital formats defaulted to solo learning — the failure mode we were designing against. The first conversation had to happen between people, in the same room.
02 · Every component has a behavioral job.
The system sequences from low-stakes vocabulary to higher-stakes honesty — and establishes shared norms before the first draw.
| Card family | Design intent |
|---|---|
| Myth or Fact | Name misinformation without humiliating whoever believed it. |
| Body Basics | Build vocabulary before crisis forces it. |
| Describe It | Practice describing bodies and symptoms at low stakes. |
| Discuss It | Host honesty without requiring confession. Strategic distance makes the first sentence possible. |
The Play Pledge replaces the facilitator — read aloud before the first card, it makes permission a shared ritual. Movement rewards showing up, not being right. Every card traces to a research transcript.
03 · The prompts were asking for performance, not conversation.
Round one: mechanics worked. Discuss It didn’t. Read, pause, deflect, pass — three rounds, same pattern. The topic wasn’t too hard. The framing asked for first-person confession, which reads as performance with loose ties around a table.
Before
“Have you ever…” / “Share a story about a time when…” — first-person confession framing
After
Third-person strategic distance — “Someone might…” / “What would you tell a friend who…” — conversation, not performance.
Why
Strategic distance lowers the emotional cost of the first ask without reducing the depth of what follows.
We removed penalties, added tokens for participation, and redesigned the playing pieces — distinct chair silhouettes, not identical shapes in different colors. What the components say matters as much as what the cards say.
A game that works without a facilitator in the room.
Four card families, reward-based movement, Play Pledge, 3D-printed pieces, token system. Built for replication — standard card sizes, vinyl board, batch-printed pieces. Packs flat.
The rules the game never breaks
Read the Play Pledge before the first draw. No penalties for passing. Tokens reward participation, not correctness. The playing pieces are distinct chairs — they argue for inclusion before anyone draws a card.
Playtesting round three changed what happened at Discuss It.
Before the reframe: Read the Discuss It card, pause, deflect, pass. Same pattern across three rounds.
After third-person prompts: Deflection turned into disclosure — including stories participants said they’d never said aloud. Within fifteen minutes, hesitant groups were laughing and asking real questions.
Twenty-four people across four playtesting rounds. The structural fix changed behavior, not just sentiment.
“I wish I had this game growing up.” — Playtesting participant
Grab a Seat doesn’t solve the system. It creates the microenvironment where the first conversation becomes possible — once — between people who might otherwise never begin. A safe room, anywhere.
What I’d carry into the next build.
1
Safety is designed, not announced.
Remove mechanics that punish hesitation — including prompts that confuse honesty with performance.
2
The artifact must argue with itself honestly.
Our first pieces were identical chair silhouettes in different colors — which contradicted “one size doesn’t fit all.” Distinct seats argued for inclusion before anyone drew a card.
3
Listen for shame indirectly.
People rarely label it. They tell you about 2am searches and skipped appointments. Design for what’s underneath — not what’s named.
What’s next?
Pilot in dorm and clinic settings. Build a facilitator guide for higher-stakes rooms. The skills here transfer directly: behavioral framing for sensitive domains, research protocol design, and shipping a complete system under tight constraints.