Instructions: Building a Coffee Shop
This is the instruction guide for Entrepreneurial Community Managers to build the interaction type of “coffee shop” in their communities.
You have a pack of cards with different lenses. All of these lenses come from “The Art of Game Design” and have been altered with the original author’s permissions to be specifically for entrepreneurs can be found in an accumulated format here (link to article).
Think of a coffee shop not just as a place with coffee, but a mentality, a coffee shop as a space where people come to work with close friends, but also often a space where you meet people in closely adjacent fields. These people you can bounce ideas off of, and over time they might become friends, or can help you connect with others.
These instructions are for how to build the physical location, lenses, and this game of Set for Entrepreneurs is meant to help in this specific
These lenses are free to use and copy with proper attribution to Roadmap. It is also highly encouraged for people to create new card decks of their own.
These lenses help entrepreneurs think about their ideas in new ways.
If there is one person in the room, they can simply use the card deck on their own to help them think differently. Some of the cards relate to emotions, user value, design, and marketing. These cards are meant not to answer students’ questions, but to provide them with new areas of thought that they can then pursue further.
This card deck is meant to create a “place-based game”. This is a game people can join only when they are in the space. The goal of this game is to mimic the energy of a high-energy coffee shop environment by incentivizing people to talk to each other more.
What Kind of Space Can Become a Coffee Shop?
The kind of space this should be in is a coffee shop on campus, potentially owned by the university or with the permission of the coffee shop owner. This space might also be an atrium in a university, a lounge outside of a library, a common space in a dorm.
- These spaces are delineated by a few people that commonly inhabit this space with a steady inflow of new people.
- These people have actors that are formally or informally in-charge of passive control of the safety of the space, but are not in charge of specific programming of a space.
- These spaces do not have singular use-cases. They are not explicitly “for entrepreneurs”.
- These spaces encourage staying and relaxing for medium lengths of time (1–3 hours). This tends to mean
- These spaces encourage conversation.
- These spaces have flexible components, such as chairs or tables that can be moved for different uses.
How to Utilize Lens Cards and Stickers
The core idea of Set is that people need to match
In your box you should have two things: Stickers that say “Entrepreneurship Set”. This denotes to people that there will be a
Each card will have a small square to stamp them with some insignia of your space. This will make it so people do not simply design their own Set cards.
B
Rules for High Control, High Time Duration (Coffee Shops)
Rules for Low Control, High Time Duration (Common Room, Library Lounge, School Atrium)
Rules for Low Control, Low Time Duration (Meet-up)
Rules for High Control, Low Time Duration (Specific Event)
Sets are three cards that are:
- All different or all the same shape
- All different number or all the same number
- All different or all the same color
