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

in its aims of eliciting inspiration, empathy and fresh points of view by
making familiar unfamiliar, pastiche scenarios resemble cultural probes.
The examples above were given to clarify the nature and meaning of
user information in co-design as a way of eliciting empathic understanding
and inspiration, instead of concentrating on explaining the current situation.
User representations aim to encourage creativity by inviting imagination,
the way Mattelmäki (2006, p 95) explains probes: “Since the probe
material never tells the whole story about people and their experiences, the
material is supplemented, through storytelling.” Consequently, user representations
are influenced by the purpose, selection of the material, the
chosen visualization format, and personal skills and interests of the people
doing it. Thus the outcome is not an image of reality but reconstruction of
parts of it. We can adopt theatre director Professor Richard Schechner’s
(1985, p 51) notion, concerning ethnographic films that are shot in the field
but edited at home, about user representations: “History so-called is not
“what happened” but what has been constructed out of events, memories,
records: all shaped by the world view of whoever – individually or collectively
– is encoding (and performing) history. To “make history” is not to do
something but to do something with what has been done.”
In order to engage their audiences and to elicit empathy, user representations
should be rich in details and allow some level of role immersion.
In co-design, this is often reached by co-constructing user
representations together with those people who should implement user
information in their work, whether they are researchers, designers or
other stakeholders. Moreover, creating representations of current and
future world collectively is often more than just sharing information by
engaging various people, such as users and other stakeholders, to vision
what could be. I will next give some examples of co-design techniques
that engage participants by performing either in order to reach role immersion
or to rehearse the future in terms of Halse et al. (2010). Again,
some of them build on direct user involvement, while others understand
design partners in wider terms. Also, user data is broadly considered as
covering the data collected during a user study as well as the verbal and
visual material available in face-to-face encounters.
When these action-oriented scenario techniques are referred to in
design literature, they are often called theatre techniques (e.g. Sato & Salvador
1999), drama methods (e.g. Brandt & Grunnet 2000) or role playing
(e.g. Iacucci et al. 2000a; Svanæs & Seland 2004; Diaz-Kommonen et al.
2009) to highlight their connection to theatre performances. I will next
look at techniques where play and performance shape the dialogue while
creating future visions in relation to the themes addressed before: design
collaboration (roles and facilitation), interplay between current practices
and envisioned future (contextual information), and role of design material
(the link between future visions and people’s daily life).
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