Designing exploratory design games

Abstract

The dogma of Participatory Design is the direct involvement of people in the shaping of future artefacts. Thus central for designers within this field are the staging of a design process involving participation of people. Organising collaboration between people having various competencies and interests is challenging and therefore designers need frameworks, which can accommodate this work. This paper discusses the use of exploratory design games to organise participation in participatory design projects. Examples of different exploratory design games as sources of inspiration are presented. Through a comparison of different exploratory design games the paper sheds light on the repertoire of possibilities for designers to be aware of when creating their own exploratory design games.