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

ut it also had some challenges, mainly caused by some confidential issues.
For the researchers, it was important to have an open process that could
be presented for several audiences to get feedback and reflections, while
the design agency considered, understandably, the process and methods as
part of their competence that should not become too widely known.
Inviting users for storytelling
The next design game was the Storytelling Game that aimed at inviting users,
i.e. the bank customers, to get together with the service designers and
developers from Palmu and OPK to allow mutual learning through collaborative
storytelling. The name of the method was initially the Storytelling
Group (Kankainen et al. 2011) to indicate it as a creative version of
the traditional Focus Group sessions. However, unlike in the Focus Group,
the discussion is not guided through pre-determined themes; instead, the
participants introduce topics and incidents they find meaningful in regard
to the overall focus of the gathering. Moreover, the interaction evolves
through storytelling, i.e. the players propose events to the story that is created
collectively to describe customer journeys of long duration. The narrative
structure that underlines imagination on par with facts promotes
the play spirit and being in a magic circle, central elements of design games
and thus I have renamed the method: the Storytelling Game.
The main idea was to create a fictional story, a scenario of a particular
customer’s journey about what happens in a specific time period for a
particular user/character defined by the participants. Since using service
is a process (e.g. Vargo & Lusch 2008) not a single use situation or task
focusing on a longer time perspective was seen fruitful and being able to
function as a novel focus for idea generation with users. In regard to bank
and insurance services provided by OPK, the time span covered around
30 years during which users’ life situations may change drastically and
influence their needs accordingly.
The story was told from a fictional character’s point of view specified
by the participants. Hence, the Storytelling Game continued in the direction
pointed by the Character Game; the participants were given more responsibility
about creating the content, compared to the Project Planning
Game, which relied heavily on predesigned design game materials introduced
by the researchers. In the Storytelling Game, the starting point was
more open than in the previous games, inviting the users freely to introduce
topics they found relevant within the given context. The game relied
on direct user involvement and although the main responsibility concerning
the storyline was given to the users, the team members from OPK
and Palmu could also propose incidents or themes to invite responses.
So far the design games, both the ones discussed in the previous chapters
and those developed during the Extreme Design project, had explored
several tangible elements to support participants’ creativity and
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