Dear designer, engineer and/or design researcher,
here you are, at our virtually connected long-term brainstorming in board game style. We adapt to the prevailing COVID-19 pandemic situation and introduce ourselves with an avatar game figure. Here it’s me, Ines, the facilitator and inventor of the game, who also has started “playing” it even before its inception.*
*Thanks to all the inspirations from sustainability research related board games I have played or seen being played, for example by Sonja Eser at the PLATE 2019 conference (SimplyCycle) or at UiO for the Climathon 2019 (Play Sustainability! FREE Educational Game) in Oslo, the 2019 European Green Capital.
The main workshop will take place in a manner that each of us participates in this star-formed board game, which is represented online. Each participant follows one coloured path, and engages in the sometimes asynchronous sometimes synchronous play over a period of some weeks. The frequency and amount of time invested can be chosen by each participant. The different colour paths refer to different, very sketchy, design briefs. One is assigned to you, asking you to deal with that particular alternative mobile phone design proposal.
The path is all about each participant brainstorming ‘desirable futures’ to the prompted idea.
The stepping stones represent ‘events’. In the beginning and whenever up for new prompts, tasks or desires – one is allowed to move one step on the path in front. Events mean that the game provides you with some item(s), for example (virtual) cards with questions or reflections that are supposed to give more information or to prompt taking a different perspective. Items can even be prototyping materials, that’s where the brainstorm game gets “hands-on”. If feasible, individual visits or an interview-style brainstorm session with some of the participants take place (in the Oslo-region), else material packages and/or video instructions are sent out to kick-start participants’ critical making and speculative design!
Each path in the game is a similar series of prompts to do design and material explorations and note down ideas from them. Along this brainstorm-make-reflect path in the game, each participant is asked to document her/his progress through a diary, or by making oneself available for follow-up interviews. It is intentional to have participants “walk around” with ideas for quite some time, facilitating for “long term tinkering” and refraining from “solutionism”. No matter the time and effort one can afford to spend on participation, the tiniest ideas and thoughts are valuable!
Note down (your very own) thoughts, for example as soon as you have read the brief. Allow for any kind of idea, not starting to judge them. Take different perspectives, letting them all have some say! Whenever you desire to look things up on the internet (or in a book, an earlier project of yours, or asking a person you know would be able to answer your question), do it! A nice-to-have is if also surprises, personal insights, laughter, anger, critical reluctance or any such experience in the process get documented! Hopefully, everyone will be comfortable to immerse oneself into what both the brief and the game path and its events ask for.
Find a brainstorming journal in the format that suits you best here:
brainstorming journal Word docx
brainstorming journal Word 97-2003, doc
Feel free to print, duplicate and annotate (& scan again) pages as you please, or use your favorite journal from before.
Note that participation will be much more asynchronous than if we could have met for a classical physical workshop at a conference or similar! The online representation of the game board is basically static, a website that I am able and responsible for to manipulate according to all the participants’ progress. So, over time, game figures will move, you can follow who is participating, and eventually engage with other participants’ results.
Now Join the game! and hit next, as you probably are curious about this game and workshop... :)
