Karma Against Ignorance

A Speculative UX Case Study in Ritualized Play

Karma Against Ignorance (KAI) did not begin as a polished product. It began as a spark — a handful of croc jibbits on fabric, an intuition that play could be something deeper.

Across six courses at MICA’s UX program, the spark grew. The first prototypes were physical — hand-drawn tokens, a fabric game board, a bag to carry it all. Later came the digital layers: the Karmic Library, the Daily Fortune prototype, and finally, multiplayer online play built in Lovable.

With each iteration, the project transformed. What started as small, tactile experiments unfolded into a hybrid system: part analog ritual, part speculative technology. Along the way, users laughed, argued, lingered, and told stories that surprised even them.

KAI’s background, then, is not only about what was built. It is about how it was lived into: a series of experiments in compassion, playfulness, and design as ritual.

Timeline & Iterations

Six-class journey:

  1. Foundations UX Design → Croc jibbit prototype on fabric.

  2. Foundations of UX Research (w/ Shadi & Taylor) → Full physical game: 96 tokens, board, bag.

  3. Prototyping → Karmic Library + How to Play guides.

  4. Design Lab → Daily Fortune prototypes.

  5. Capstone Ideation & Research → Competitor analysis, affinity mapping, early digital testing.

  6. Capstone Development → Multiplayer prototypes in Lovable:

    • Prototype 1: Host-controlled (frustrating).

    • Prototype 2: Database-backed multiplayer, hover states, no time limit (facilitator pacing).

Problem Statement

In a world where play has been commodified into trivia nights and mobile dopamine loops, and wellness has been productized into apps that whisper a single voice of calm, we are left with tools that flatten the complexity of being human.

Wellness apps like Calm or Headspace offer peace, but only the narrow kind: individualized, decontextualized, stripped of culture, and packaged for productivity. Board games, too, often smuggle in invisible barriers — assuming Western cultural literacy, privileging competition, and leaving immigrant, BIPOC, and neurodivergent players standing at the edge of the circle.

The result is a double-erasure: of cultural truth, and of collective imagination.

The problem, then, is not that we lack games or apps. It is that our games rarely ask us to know each other more deeply, and our apps rarely let us hold paradox.

👉 How might we design a system of play that:

  • Refuses to reduce meaning into a single interpretation,

  • Invites multiple truths to co-exist,

  • And transforms gameplay into a ritual of discovery, curiosity, and belonging?

Karma Against Ignorance was born of this tension — a response to the hunger for tools that do not simplify life, but honor its complexity; that do not isolate the self, but weave us back together in shared myth.

Solution

If the problem was erasure — of culture, of imagination, of collective truth — then the solution had to be creation: a system spacious enough to hold contradictions, and playful enough to invite anyone in.

Karma Against Ignorance is not a game to be solved, but a ritual to be entered. Players draw tokens — cabbage, astronaut, crow, ramen — and place them within archetypal realms drawn from Buddhist psychology. A cabbage in the God Realm sparks laughter; a crow in the Hungry Ghost Realm might stir grief. Each placement becomes a mirror, an invitation to tell stories and to listen.

Instead of prescribing answers, the system cultivates questions as play. The board and tokens provide structure, while the digital companion opens portals: ritualized onboarding with a sound bowl, multiplayer modes that let each player hold their own token bank, hover states that reveal layered meanings.

This is the heart of the solution: a hybrid system of analog tactility and digital wonder, where design scaffolds the conditions for curiosity and compassion. Not a product that flattens life into metrics, but a playground for many truths, coexisting.

“This was the first time I felt like I could be weird and wise.”

“This was the first time I felt like I could be weird and wise.”

“That was actually kind of beautiful. Can I come back?” "I didn't know I needed that!"

“That was actually kind of beautiful. Can I come back?” "I didn't know I needed that!"

“People shared stuff that was real. Not just game-night real — soul-level real.”

“People shared stuff that was real. Not just game-night real — soul-level real.”

Design Process: From Ritual to Prototype

  • The work began in Research & Discovery, grounding the project in a wide field of references. I mapped the strengths and limits of existing systems — games like Dixit, Betrayal, and Catan alongside astrology and wellness apps — to understand how meaning is scaffolded, shared, or sometimes excluded. User testing then brought the work into the world, with live play at Psychedelic Science and in community pop-ups. To frame the inquiry, I leaned on speculative design theory and Kapkin-Joines’ Design Brief as Catalyst, which helped me approach the project not as a problem to solve but as a stage to ask better questions.

  • From there came Ideation. Sketching tokens in the style of Filipino tattoos gave the project its distinct visual language. Sticky-note clustering revealed recurring themes of betrayal, impermanence, and agency, while archetype mapping — Trickster, Guardian, Humanitarian — helped stretch the narrative possibilities. Each exercise expanded the symbolic vocabulary of the game.

    I chose to use the language of Filipino tattoos with intention. Colonizers of the Philippines sought to erase this tradition — especially among the shamanic class, who practiced ritual tattooing as both identity and cosmology. By drawing on this language, I was not only designing tokens; I was reclaiming an ancestral inheritance. Using a Western tool like AI to render these patterns became its own act of resistance: a way of remembering what it might feel like to see through my ancestors’ eyes, and to restore the sacredness of play as a vessel for memory, myth, and healing.

  • The next phase was Prototyping, where concepts became tangible. I first built physical artifacts — the tokens, the fabric board, and the carrying bag — before layering digital interactions through Lovable. The digital prototype ritualized the flow with sound bowls, crystal ball animations, and hover states that revealed token meanings, balancing tactility with speculative technology.

  • Finally came Iteration, the practice of refining through play. The first multiplayer prototype gave too much control to the host, overwhelming facilitators and leaving players passive. In response, I built a second, database-backed version that restored agency by giving each player control of their token bank. The result was smoother gameplay, richer storytelling, and a system that felt closer to the spirit of ritual play.

Closing Reflection: Where Questions Become Play

In its final form, Karma Against Ignorance revealed itself as more than a prototype. It became a living system — physical and digital, playful and contemplative. Ninety-six tokens and a six-realm board carried the tactility of ritual, while the Lovable app opened a multiplayer space where players could hold their own token banks, hover over meanings, and let stories emerge. In testing, people didn’t just play — they lingered, exchanged numbers, and asked when they could return. One participant said, “This was the first time I felt like I could be weird and wise.” Another whispered, “That was actually kind of beautiful. Can I come back?”

The journey was not without friction. Balancing mysticism with usability, weaving together analog tactility and digital scalability, and defending unconventional tools like Lovable against Figma orthodoxy all demanded compromise and clarity. Each challenge became a refinement: decentralizing control, adding layers of meaning, and removing features like time limits so the game could flow like a ritual, not a stopwatch.

From these iterations came deeper lessons. UX is cultural translation and the building of systems for belonging. Speculative design does not seek solutions but provokes possibilities. Iteration is ritual — each round a practice in listening and letting go. Sustainability, too, is design: subtraction, restraint, and efficiency as ethical practice.

And the work continues. The next horizon is community co-design of the token library, deeper multiplayer experiences that center facilitators, and adaptations for classrooms and therapeutic contexts where social-emotional learning meets contemplative play.

Karma Against Ignorance is not an end product. It is a reminder that design can be ritual, that questions can be played with, and that many truths can coexist.