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

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Design games for building design competence
Iversen and Buur (2002) build on Habraken’s and Gross’ concept design
games presented above but apply the idea in an educational setting in the
course organised around the notion of “design is a game”. They propose
that creating, playing and reflecting game playing can be an effective way
of learning how to establish social interaction between stakeholders in
the participatory design process. According to them “game frame encourages
participants to pay attention to the social and communicative processes
of design” which is essential in participatory design to create and
maintain collaboration between participants.
Students learn the vocabulary for talking about collaborative design
practice by first playing the Silent Game (Habraken & Gross 1987) and
then developing a game of their own. As described earlier, the Silent
Game was originally not meant for teaching, but instead aimed at creating
a better understanding of designing. However, Iversen and Buur
have noticed that the game works well in reflecting communicative and
social aspects of design process; as talking is not allowed while playing, it
forces the players to develop a shared action-oriented game vocabulary
and rules to enable collaboration. At the same time, it sensitises students
for turn-taking, implicit rules, diverse roles within a team, and several
negotiation strategies.
Design games for empowering users
Around the same time as Habraken and Gross, Ehn and Sjögren (1991)
worked with design projects aimed at supporting the democratization of
workplaces. Active user participation was seen as a key factor and design
games as a potential approach for that by allowing a productive dialogue,
where users could articulate their demands and wishes in a concrete way.
The need for a new approach came after noticing that users did not understand
the system descriptions made by the designers. Design games,
along with various mock-ups, provided hands-on tools for establishing
a common language between designers and users, and involved users in
the discussions on existing and future work and technology. (ibid.) Illustratively,
Ehn and Sjögren call their approach designing-by-playing and
the developed methods as organizational games.
The players of the organizational games are typically workers in the
organization that is undergoing some sort of change. The designers mainly
watched the users as they were playing but were prepared to intervene
if the participants were not going to be able to reach an agreement on
something. According to Ehn and Sjögren (1991, p 252), playing the organizational
game is a learning experience for all the participants. The
approach emphasizes the users’ and the designer’s changed roles while
serving as a platform for co-operation between designers and designing
users (ibid., p 177).
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