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

Creative interplay between current practices and
future opportunities
During the four cases, I explored various ways (listed below) to utilise contextual
elements and insights from people’s everyday life in creative design
process to support imagination and function as a link between current
practices and future opportunities. My aim was to understand how contextual
knowledge can be maintained in design proposals when co-design
activity is set in a Design:Lab (e.g. Binder 2007) or a meeting room.
For example, the design game strategy applied in the second experiment
of “Co-design among young children” was prominent in the way it
directed discussions towards ecological issues, as had been hoped, but it
didn’t maintain the link between designed objects and everyday practices.
In the “Co-design as embodied practice” case, the setting had similarities
with a laboratory or theatre stage when the researchers’ meeting room
was transformed temporarily into a design studio. This allowed concentrating
on those elements of a design studio that were found relevant in
relation to the given design task. The meeting room was more controllable
and flexible to our purposes than for example the participating designers’
studios had the co-design taken place there. In the “Stories as source
of inspiration” case, people’s aspirations were brought into co-design in
the form of written stories, and the design game provided a framework
to link interpretations of user data and idea generation together. In “Codesigning
University” finding appropriate people, representing various
users, for collaboration was considered a key factor in gaining insights
into participants’ practices and their wishes in relation to seeking novel
design opportunities.
One reason for a contextual approach is to let the participants feel
that they are the experts in the situation at hand. When moving away
from contextual approaches, a need for other ways of trust and comfort
creation arises among the participants. The design games in the above
examples illustrate, in line with many other sources (e.g. Brandt & Messeter
2004; Johansson 2005), how the game structure can support that
aim. For instance, in “Stories as source of inspiration”, after the game the
student participants told to the facilitator that they found the game rules
and step-by-step structure helpful, since well-defined guidelines allowed
them to concentrate on the content instead of feeling uncertain about
what was expected from them.
Design materials as tools in ideation
In Situated Make Tools, I observed how tangible design representations
and continuous dialogue among ageing workers and design researchers
revealed the reasoning behind design suggestions. This process remained
unclear in children’s design proposals, and it may be even harder to capture
when designing evolves through enacting, unless the researcher is
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