Formatting design dialogues – games and participation

This article discusses design games as a particular genre for formatting design dialogues. In the first part of the article we review the participatory design literature for game-oriented framings of co-design. We look at what constitutes game and play, we discuss other authors' use of games in collaborative settings, and finally we examine the board game as a particularly interesting game format. In the second part of the article we present and discuss two board games: the User Game and the Landscape Game. We show how these games respond to particular challenges, and how they have interesting characteristics in being both ‘as-if’ worlds to explore and shared representations of what the players accomplish. In the last section of the article we discuss how new games may be designed and played and what makes a good design game.