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

The difficulties in encouraging participants to act reported for example
by Seland (2009) and Iacucci et al. (2000b) and discussed in Chapter 2
guided us towards tabletop role-playing games. Tabletop role-playing
games do not demand as much bodily engagement as live role-playing,
which has a resemblance to the enacting scenarios in user-centred design.
In the Character Game, the players sit around a table, and the story
is acted out verbally from certain users’ or characters’ perspective; hence
the emphasis is on role immersion (Figure 39). Role-taking and improvisation
is supported by several game materials, including character templates,
weekly schedule of the senior houses, photos and quotations (Figure
39), as well as through a gradually evolving situation that moves from easier
tasks towards role-playing. (Further details in Vaajakallio et al. 2010b)
The users were involved indirectly as the characters of the role-playing
game that the players acted out during the performance. As the main
purpose of the co-design gathering was to seek potential for new strategic
business partnerships between the three involved companies instead
of improving existing senior houses, seniors had not been invited. The
people from the tree companies who participated had been invited because
of their expertise in the domain of senior houses that were seen as a
base for shared interests and future collaboration. Thereby, senior house
can be considered as much a boundary object as a design context. The
aim was to provide empathic understanding through role-playing mixed
with participant’s personal experiences of senior houses.
Fig.39
On left side: In tabletop role-playing games, performance is verbal and the participants sit
around the table. On right side: Predesigned design game material opened up the seniors’ world
for discussion and stimulated participants’ personal experiences and opinions. Material also
gave boundaries for role-taking and scenario building.
Altogether 17 people besides the facilitators, i.e. the researchers, participated
in the co-design gathering; six from KONE’s R&D department, nine
from the housing company and two from the construction company. They
were divided into four groups so that people from different organizations
would form a group of approximately four players in order to utilise the
wide knowledge base they represented. The aim of processing user data
149