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

2.2.3
Facilitating
co-design
materials’ role in co-design.
Although role-play in its different variations has been regularly used in
design during last decades, it has not been used systematically (Seland
2009). Examples are mainly from human-computer interaction and mobile
communication domains, but its potential has been considered outside
these areas as well, for instance in service design (Holmlid & Evenson
2006). One of the reasons why role-playing hasn’t become a common
practice could be the stress it puts to the facilitator. According to Seland
(ibid.), in a role-play workshop the facilitator has a large influence on the
validity of the created scenarios, and thus leadership is a critical factor.
Moreover, making participants to act everyday scenes may not be always
easy. It is relevant to notice that in all kinds of co-design, the facilitator
influences the situation and its results through the tools and rules. Bødker
(2009, p 23) states:
“We must accept, as it were, that people (or users) are not the transparent
‘containers of information’ that would be ideally suited for
qualitative social research. This does not mean that user involvement
is hopeless or value-less as some critics of UCD would argue.
It means, however, that we need to understand the dynamics of
practical user involvement and the ways in which we as researchers,
designers, or practitioners are tacitly-but-tactically shaping the
outcome of user involvement by allowing participants to speak or act
through a particular set of very different artifacts.”
One specific challenge of role-playing, according to Seland (2009), is creating
credible characters instead of overacted stereotypical behaviour. This is
critical if participants play roles they are not very familiar with, and it puts
pressure on the facilitation. The more distant the theme or role is to the
participants’ experiences, the more detailed the descriptions of the roles,
props and scenario that precedes the acting should be. Seland (ibid.) proposes
minimizing the risk of producing stereotypical characters by not letting
participants take roles or act scenarios they are not familiar with. This
suggestion is based on his observations from several experiments: when
the participants played themselves, their improvisation became natural
and they were able to base the play on their own everyday experiences instead
of relying on stereotypical acting. Stereotypical behaviour emerged
when the participants were asked to pretend to be someone else. (ibid.)
However, that is not the whole truth: for instance, contrary to Seland’s
(ibid.) advice, Diaz-Kommonen et al. (2009) purposefully set the story and
role outside the participants’ everyday life, in order to release them from the
restrictions of their work practices and to allow them to imagine the system
from several perspectives. To support role-taking, they utilised assigned
roles, costumes and props, a brief with a narrative and some tasks. The nar-
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