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

whereas in the first time the method cards included colour coding, illustrating
how challenging a method would be to perform, with OPK this
extra information was left out. This resulted from the observation that
colour coding made playing the game more complicated without evident
benefits. Arguments over whether some methods would be hard or easy
to apply were left for verbal negotiation among the players.
The game helped to discuss the upcoming collaboration, resources,
goals etc. but would also have benefited from the presence of the designers,
besides the researchers and representatives from OPK. The overall
vision, including a timeline and methods, was settled, and the feeling of
progress was felt even though the design research process couldn’t take
the leap before the design agency was chosen.
The Project Planning Game showed the importance of getting familiar
with different partners’ development processes when initializing
collaboration: on one hand, it increased the researchers’ knowledge on
the decision-making process at OPK and its influence to practical activities;
on the other hand, it introduced the user-centred design process and
methods to the OPK partners, who were not familiar with them beforehand.
Thus the design game worked as a sort of semi-structured interview
but with bidirectional learning. In this case, distinct professional
backgrounds were more in evidence than with KONE, where most members
of the core team had had experience with user-centred design. Thus,
going through the set of methods and discussing what they could denote
was an essential step in creating a shared vision of the case study.
In the end there were two distinct but overlapping projects going on, as
is illustrated in Figure 34 (page 141): the Extreme Design case study, and the
service design project initiated between OPK and the Palmu design agency.
The two related projects had their own timetables, recourses and responsibilities.
In order to have a dialogue between these two, collaboration between
all three parties was necessary, and several meetings involving the
key people were organized to ensure sharing of information and heading to
the same direction. The collaboration was culminated in co-design gatherings
that always involved people also from outside the core team.
In this case study, the co-design gatherings can be divided into two
different types of encounters: those involving users i.e. bank customers,
and those with bank personnel i.e. people working at bank offices, whose
work practices were to be changed through new service models. The codesign
gatherings with bank personnel are left outside the scope of this
dissertation, and I will focus on user involvement.
The researchers drove the design games development, but the core
team members from Palmu and OPK were involved in guiding the activities
towards a common goal; the co-design gatherings informed designers’
work and vice versa. From the researchers’ perspective, the involvement of
the design agency provided a realistic design project to which to contribute,
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