Exploratory Design Games

We had a lecture with Eva Brandt about games that can start a creative process. We had some discussions on what creative is and what it might not be. We ended up with a list of words that we associated with “Creativity” and “Problem solving”.

Eva Brandt has done a lot of interesting work on the topic: Exploratory Design Games. The games are ways of understanding some of the different needs of user have, sometimes even the hidden needs as well. The game is a tool to explore and to get an understanding.

The participants in a section of gaming are often people with different background; marketing, engineer, designer, doctor, user to name some. Common for the group members are that they in some way have an interest in the current project.

There are a lot of different games, some are to get an insight in the user situation, some are to understand an already existing pattern of some character, and some involves the user some doesn’t. Some use scenarios to shed light on some of the possibilities. But I guess that the common for them are that they tend to solve some kind of problem.

We did try one version of gaming: The User Game. The aim of this game is to get a better insight of the user using short video snippets and a set of pictures and words. In this way we tried to create a picture of the user.

Still haven’t decided on what I’m going to write about in my article. But I got some ideas. “Creativity – can it be harmful/dangerous?” or “Creativity without any limit – simple?” or “How can the user take part of the creative process?” or “Division – make a big problem of a lot of small ones”