Concepts and Attributes

An alternative board game for externalizing frameworks of mental representations

Re-interpretation of the board game ‘CONCEPT’ where players have to guess a word, name or phrase with only the help of a board. (2018)


The idea is to externalize frameworks of mental representations when it comes to categorizing anything we come across - what attributes of a ‘thing’ is used to recall / organize / categorize it mentally?

The board attempts to provide an alternative taxonomy, that allows for finer sensory and physical definitions, it relies on:

• The senses and the quality / magnitude of their engagement.
• the material basis and phase of any tangible object.
• a small circular time-scale for hours, months, seasons.
• a (large) time-scale for decades, millenia, and map to contextualize any event, invention, location.

We tend to mentally group objects, concepts, animals, etc into categories based on their features. Understanding mental categories in cognition however is challenging because they may not have clear boundaries, definitions or rules. the category of ‘Dogs’ is an example: there are exceptions in features like size, ear shape, coat color, etc that end up blurring the borders.