Comments on Using Design Games

Chris Baum — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 01:13:06 GMT

@Brian Regienczuk Donna Spencer did a presentation about design games at the IA Summit this year. Download the mp3 of her talk here: http://boxesandarrows.com/view/ia-summit-09-day-1 (about halfway down the page) Presentation here:
http://www.slideshare.net/donnam/design-games-presentatio…

Brian Regienczuk — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:51:47 GMT

Love the article. Would love more links to and examples of bringing play to life at companies. I have found these types of activities to be excellent even if they are 10 minute starter exercises at the beginning of a very serious or technical client workshop.

Getting people out of their everyday bagage and working together on a common and unusual scenario in the middle of “work” really helps collaboration, communication, and brings out various personalities/traits that sometimes remain hidden during routine business as usual. Thanks!!!

Rory OConnor — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 02:47:45 GMT

Jess

I spend most of my time facilitating serious play with my clients. As a practicioner of LEGO SERIOUS PLAY(check out www.legoseriousplay.com), I have seen the power of play work in organisations again and again. The LEGO SERIOUS PLAY concept works on the basis of making the abstract (complex ideas or problems) concrete by getting the participants to construct LEGO representations. See the Heath Bros book Made to Stick to learn more about making the abstract concrete.

The process LEGO SERIOUS PLAY enables you to explore relationships and connections between people and their worlds in enlightning ways. During the process you can get the participants to observe both internal and external dynamics, explore and test various scenarios and guickly gain an awareness of a variety of possibilities that are open to them

During the play participants will communicate more effectively and engage their imaginations more readily . This tends to allow for taking dialogues to deeper levels as well as short-cutting to the real issues and new knowledge.

LEGO SERIOUS PLAY is a process for groups and teams. It is a facilitated process based on the latest science about how our mind works. The common language – the bricks – treats everyone as equals and allows for everyones imput to be heard. We have found it extremely powerful and a valuable tool for those that are willing to try it. I agree with Kes though, the more stuffy companies and perhaps the ones that need these types of tools the most are unlikely to take the risk. As we say you need a Coreageaous manager that has a complex problem to solve. Anybody intrested in the science of serious play LEGO have nice PDF booklet outlining how it works. Contact me through my website if your intrested.

www.truepotential.ie

Rory

Kes Sampanthar — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 18:05:07 GMT

Jess,

Thank you for the reference to ‘MetaMemes’ in your article. I like the way you use games in the design process. Games create a great environment to allow people to relax and have fun which is very conducive to creative thought and stimulates great conversations. Using games at work, changes the dynamics of a meeting can be far more productive than ‘business as usual’. I find games work really well when you need people to collaborate and work on fairly complex problems i.e. requirements gathering.

The challenge you touch on in your article is the one I find very interesting; getting buy-in for using games. The stigma of playing games is definitely a barrier to getting people to adopt games at work. Over the years I have used different incarnations of MetaMemes at different companies and there is always a little hesitancy at first. During the game people relax into it and as they do the ideas come fast, but even after a successful session the participants seem a little embarrassed at having fun at work. I have explained and shown people the concept that thinking and laughing are not mutually exclusive, and to the contrary, laughing is a sure sign of a very creative session.

In the new version, ThinkCube, I definitely downplay the game aspects to focus more on the innovation process. ThinkCube’s core mechanic is still fundamentally a game based on combinatory play, but some of the more ‘game-like’ elements have been removed. You can still play a game variant of ThinkCube, but through my play tests I found that having less game elements allowed for faster adoption than MetaMemes.

I still fundamentally believe that companies that are open to playing games at work have a far better culture for innovation. I consider ThinkCube a ‘Trojan Horse’ to sneak fun and innovation into stuffy companies. I am providing the tools to start a grassroots innovation revolution one cube at a time (yes the pun is intentional i.e. help people escape Dilbert cube hell).

I would be interested to hear other people’s experiences and thoughts on playing games at work.

Kes Sampanthar
Kes (at) metamemes (dot) com
Founder and Director of Innovation at MetaMemes
www.metamemes.com

Jorge Arango — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 13:21:18 GMT

Hi Luke, I’ve corrected the spelling of your name in the story. (Sorry about this!)

Roger Evernden — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 09:31:17 GMT

Here’s another simple game to provoke discussion about the words we use and how we classify things. I started using this several years ago, and now use standard cards and materials that I have prepared in advance – but it can easily be adapted so that the players create the game pieces. I call the game Buckets (or Category Buckets).

List the categories and words that you want to analyse or discuss. Put each on a separate card. You will need two or three sets of these cards, depending on how many teams are participating in the game. I use a set of about 200 key words and phrases – the actual number will vary depending on the domain that you are exploring.

List any high-level categories that have been proposed. Write each one on an envelope or box (like a post box or voting box). I start with a set of 10 high-level categories, but again this can be expanded; if the domain has a large vocabulary, then you may want to introduce a hierarchy of categories that can be refined over several iterations of the game. Again, you need a set of these for each of the participating teams.

Teams now put the categories or words on the cards into the envelope with the high-level category that they think is appropriate.

Now the real fun starts. When all the words have been placed into their envelopes, teams compare and discuss their selections. This is where you find out nuances of meaning, different reasons for classifying in different ways, etc.

Roger Evernden

Holger Maassen — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 20:47:06 GMT

In my point of view there are roughly three related areas of human activity related to any kind of development – Often these sections are to some extent overlapping.
__Creativity
__Problem solving
__Design
Creativeness is the process of generating something new that has value, attraction and attaches importance to the user.
Typically I use the term creative methods / creative techniques. But often it isn´t very helpful to be to technical – to formal – so I transform these techniques into games – to get a bigger involvement.
The methods I use most are …
__Brainstorming (or its variants)
__Mind mapping
__Storyboarding

… and sometimes …
__Provocation
__Brainwriting
__6-3-5 Method
__Six Thinking Hats
__Walt-Disney-Method

Not only in my work brainstorming is by far the most known and widely used of all creativity methods. It is evident that this technique is an effective method that may uncover good ideas. However, it is questionable whether this technique is suitable and the one that best fits all situations. It is not enough to use creativity methods, it is necessary to select and use them accurately in order to maximise their performance potential.
Especially in Germany is the mixture of fun ( e.g. the subject joy of use) or games and business a very negative, refusal combination.

Luke Hohmann — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:41:19 GMT

Jess –
Thanks for the reference to my work. One minor point—can you please correct the spelling of my name? I missed this until Nancy forwarded it to my attention!

I’d like to add a few more things. If you’re interested in some deep philosophical underpinning about games, I recommend reading James P. Carse’s wonderful little book Finite and Infinite Games. Innovation Games® is partially based on the notion that the (ideal) relationship with your customer is infinite and that finite games (such as the ones you describe) are played in the context of this infinite relationship.

I’d also like to stress that there is a fairly substantial difference between the “Design the Box” exercise you describe (and it’s variants) and the Innovation Game® Product Box. In Product Box, the focus is external, on your customer. What do they want? How do they design the box? What images do they use?. In “Design the Box”, the focus is internal, on the internal product team. What does the internal team want? How does the internal team design the box? What images do the internal team choose?

This difference in focus also results in a different process. In Product Box, we celebrate the many and varied boxes that customers generate during the game, as these create a rich source of information that we can mine for innovations. In “Design the Box”, the goal is create a unified consensus around what the team is going to do. Thus, while many boxes or data sheets may be created, the team works together until one is selected.

When you’re looking to create the foundation of customer understanding that drives innovation, use the externally focused Product Box. When you’re looking for a fun way to help an internally focused project team gain clarity about what they want to build, especially at the beginning of a project, use “Design the Box”.

To see some of the fun in action, check out: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=Product+Box.

Nancy Frishberg — Fri, 07 Jan 2011 19:41:19 GMT

Delighted to see playful techniques promoted. For tapping into people’s tactile sensibilities, storytelling and collaboration, I have urged “Prototyping with Junk” (Interactions, Jan-Feb 2006) as a way to create very rough 3D prototypes that can be shared with a group. The article is accessible at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1109086&coll=po… ; ACM registration is required.

Let me also draw readers’ attention to an important difference between the techniques mentioned above, and those advocated by Luke Hohmann (sic) in his Innovation Games® website, book and training: Hohmann urges product teams (represented by marketing, engineering, executive management, customer service, and any other relevant stakeholders) to take the role of observers, be active listeners and notetakers, while the players are the customers and users of the product or service. A great way to listen to customers!

Terry Bleizeffer — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 09:23:41 GMT

Here’s another game format that can be used, though it’s fairly specialized. If you work on a large project, you might run into these two problems. First, many of the developers might not have experience using their own product (if the developers are very specialized) which causes several problems, such as difficulty in transitioning developers between areas and career development. Second, discussing user experience problems can feel very esoteric to developers who don’t use the product. One technique to address this is to create a competition in which developers are asked to complete a series of basic customer scenarios using their own product (but usually outside their own area of specialty), and while doing the scenarios they need to discover UX issues and propose solutions to the problems. The developers (who might work in teams, depending on the product) win awards for proposing the best solutions. This technique provides positive incentives to use the product (rather than executive mandate), and ensures that UX will be their focus while they do it.

Of course, as Jess said in the article, just don’t call it a “game”! That’s the kiss of death for any game technique.