Design games as a tool, a mindset and a structure Kirsikka Vaajakallio

Fig. 26
1. proto–performance 2. performance
3. aftermath
training
workshops
rehearsals
context sustaining the
public performance
warm-up
public perfomance
cooldown
critical response
archives
memories
Schechner’s performance process (adapted from 2006, p 225) describes the three main steps
which are then further divided into several actions or elements.
According to Schechner (2006, p 226), many professions (besides those
in the performing arts and sports, e.g. lawyer, doctor, carpenter, and
teacher) share similar process. One of his examples concerns car design
(ibid. p 234): “In auto manufacturing, new car prototypes are conceived, designed,
and built by teams pooling resources in an atmosphere of workshop.
[…] The process goes from workshop (concept car) to rehearsal (prototype)
to production (performance).”
In addition to using performance process as an analytical foci to understand
co-design process and the nature of activities during it, the ritual aspects
of performance have opened new ways to approach co-design activities.
According to Schechner (2006, p 236), workshops participants follow
a path similar to that in rituals by isolating themselves from their ordinary
lives, learning new behaviour and knowledge and becoming reborn as a
new or a changed being to reintegrate the society on a new level of responsibility,
status etc. In his dissertation Design Anthropology: Borderland
Experiments with Participation, Performance and Situated Intervention,
Halse (2008) has viewed co-design sessions, whether taking place in-situ
or in a more artificial workshop environment, as rituals. According to him,
it is the practice under investigation that is transformed in co-design instead
of the people. As he (ibid. p 83) describes: “The design workshop is
enacted in ways similar to the rite of passage: as a momentary suspension of
the everyday order, as betwixt and between, in order to prepare the subject
for transformation. In the design workshop it is not a social individual that is
to undergo transformation – it is practice as it meets technological artifacts.”
Even though an interesting illustration of the way co-design gatherings
can be perceived as rituals, Halse’s view limits the impact on individual
level outside. While I am sympathetic to this proposal, I will expand it to
cover the mutual change that happens through personal discoveries on
the subject, thus impacting the personal level – an issue that I will return
to later on in my analysis. His (Halse 2008, p 121) following statement is
illustrative of my research as well: “The subject matter of the design workshop,
mobility in maintenance for example is momentarily rendered open for
123