Using games as learning tools for design research planning

Abstract

Designers are required to understand human behavior and people’s needs in order to design solutions. According to Muratovsky (2015), society today demands designers to not only design products and communications, but also a system for living. The definition of design is changing from a craft-oriented profession where the emphasis is on individual creativity and commerce, to a discipline that is robust and committed to conceptualization, configuration, and the implementation of new ideas (Muratovsky, 2015). Therefore, the current demands become the reason cross-disciplinary studies is a required skill for designers (Muratovsky, 2015). In order to broaden their knowledge, designers need to become strategic planners and thinkers who can work across disciplines. In order to meet the current demands for designers to become strategic planners, the designer needs to find a way of improving the design research planning process. Based on the author’s experience and observations, novice designers or design students found difficulties when they plan to design research in professional and academic contexts on their teams. It seems that they often forget the various methods, theories, or tools about design methods that should be used for the research. To solve these issues, games could convey a solution that helps designers to understand the whole process of design research.

Games can be used for designers as an activity to learn the planning design research experimenting method by knowing what is a better plan in a particular case. Design games enable design actions to be studied in a manipulable and well-bounded environment that creates situations similar to real-life situations (Habraken & Gross, as cited in Vaajakallio, 2012). Games can be used as a tool or medium in a cross-disciplinary team for having engaging discussion and collaboration process.

This thesis explores how to create games that help the designer to plan research in order to guide designers to understand better the design research context. This knowledge can help designers to expand their emphasis based on individual creativity towards conceptualization, configuration, and implementation of new ideas. The outcome of this thesis is games that help designers to plan design research.