Knowledge Games: Design practices for systems thinking and co-creation

All design involves systems thinking. As designers we must find ways to understand and explore systems, along with the experiences of users and how they interact with those systems. Design is also increasingly participatory, where designers, partners and users work together to co-design experiences.

Co-creation and participatory design requires new skills and design practices that many firms are exploring, in many ways. What are the underlying principles that make these great collaborative design processes work? How can you engage more people in the design process, more effectively?

Knowledge games are a way to apply game thinking and game mechanics to these kinds of business and design challenges. Knowledge games can be used to quickly form simple models of complex systems, so you can involve others in your design thinking, explore systems, and experience them from within to gain new insights. Knowledge games are a holistic design approach that will help you combine design practices like sketching, sorting, prototyping and role-play to gain meaningful design insights and outcomes.

In this workshop, led by Dave Gray, co-author of an upcoming book on knowledge games from O’Reilly Media, we will talk about knowledge games: What are they and how do they work? You will learn the ten essentials of knowledge games, a basic toolkit for knowledge-game designers. And together we will design and experience a knowledge game.