efficiently inefficient: service design games as innovation tools - hannula, harviainen

GAMES THAT CHANGE otsohannula.com

Efficiently Inefficient

Service Design Games as Innovation Tools

ServDes. 2016 Otso Hannula, Aalto University

J. Tuomas Harviainen, Hanken School of Economics


Which is a tool?


Tool Game

Inefficient Efficient


What is a game?

Salen and Zimmerman (2004, p. 80): “a system in which players engage in artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome”.


What are these people doing?


Service design games

Data gathering

Service concepting

Creation of physical

prototypes

Prototyping interaction

Design education +

time

Vaajakallio (2012: 89)


Research question

“How do service design games accomplish their goals as efficient innovation tools, if they as games

are supposed to be inefficient?”


What are these people doing?


Design games (Vaajakallio, 2012)

Knowledge creation (Tsoukas, 2009)

•  creating new distinctions later incorporated into new practices and services

•  bringing background knowledge into focal awareness by attempting to understand each other, and see their own words in new ways based on how others respond to them

•  adopting a positive attitude toward each other, a desire to work on a shared goal, and practicing self-distanciation

•  studying design environments •  building design competences •  empowering future users to discuss existing and future alternatives

•  engaging multiple stakeholders in generating shared understanding


Information, knowledge and games •  All multiplayer games facilitate both information sharing and knowledge creation, whether they are designed for that purpose or just recreational •  The creation of knowledge has to be encouraged through either design, active facilitation before and during play, or preferably both •  Trust and positive interdependence have to be established before the social environment becomes conductive for exploration, innovation and learning •  The game’s rules and level of complexity should support “flexible strategies”, the possibility to collaboratively select different approaches to problem-solving and knowledge creation


Embedded reflection

We argue that in well-designed SDGs, the reflection and a large part of the “debriefing”

is actually embedded in the gameplay.


ATLAS material


ATLAS gameplay


1. Choose

2. Read

3. Discuss

4. Answer

5. Integrate

ATLAS game loop

“Map” “What data gathering events are you planning?”

“”Collaborative and single sessions. E.g. three different user groups will go through the service journey and think how it would ideally go.


Debriefing


Game

strive to reach a game goal

dialogue through the game material

Tool

decouple usual problems from usual solutions

think in ways they might

not normally do

Inefficient Efficient


Reflection-in-action through game mechanics

•  SDGs create inefficiency by separating ideation from the problem context in either time, space or context

•  If a game is to create wider societal changes (design in the large), the actual design of games (design in the small) has to reflect the intended goals

•  The creation of a new distinction can move the dialogue to a next stage by using a new word

⇨ SDGs enable reflection though self-distanciation, and disconnecting means from ends

⇨ SDGs align the design in the small with the

design in the large and foster deeper understanding of an existing subject

⇨ Rules in design games can be modified, enabling transformative play and double-loop learning where the players create a game better suited to their needs


Thank you and game on!

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