Abstract
One major design debate is how design thinking can be applied in non-traditional design contexts. A particular hot new area is business model design. When entering new design grounds, codesign and the direction of design games have proven beneficial in the past, especially when it comes to engaging a cross-disciplinary circle of stakeholders and reframing and proposing new scenarios. In early business model design workshops in which I experimented with design games, observations revealed two concerns. First, to create big surprises that could lead discussions to novel directions, there was a need for techniques supporting the game purpose during play. Second, participants who are not predisposed to a constructionism agenda and who do not have an immediately playful attitude find it harder to relate to the game, and the rules and procedures governing it. This paper investigates through three design games how game feedback techniques during play can be used to elicit big surprises and how to sustain the subsequent action in which novel business model configurations tend to occur. The findings suggest game feedback techniques as a major addition to design games and the role of the facilitator as that of a co-enabler of the feedback.
Keywords
Design games; Feedback techniques; Codesign; Business models; Design thinking
Citation
Gudiksen, S. (2014) Game feedback techniques: Eliciting big surprises in business model design, in Lim, Y., Niedderer, K., Redström, J., Stolterman, E. and Valtonen, A. (eds.), Design's Big Debates - DRS International Conference 2014, 16-19 June, Umeå, Sweden. https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2014/researchpapers/13
Game feedback techniques: Eliciting big surprises in business model design
One major design debate is how design thinking can be applied in non-traditional design contexts. A particular hot new area is business model design. When entering new design grounds, codesign and the direction of design games have proven beneficial in the past, especially when it comes to engaging a cross-disciplinary circle of stakeholders and reframing and proposing new scenarios. In early business model design workshops in which I experimented with design games, observations revealed two concerns. First, to create big surprises that could lead discussions to novel directions, there was a need for techniques supporting the game purpose during play. Second, participants who are not predisposed to a constructionism agenda and who do not have an immediately playful attitude find it harder to relate to the game, and the rules and procedures governing it. This paper investigates through three design games how game feedback techniques during play can be used to elicit big surprises and how to sustain the subsequent action in which novel business model configurations tend to occur. The findings suggest game feedback techniques as a major addition to design games and the role of the facilitator as that of a co-enabler of the feedback.