Teaching Co-Design Games in Five Weeks: - Exploring diversity and unity for a design school in transition

This paper is about educating designers as codesigners
and reflective practitioners. It is argued
that an important goal in design pedagogy is learning
the students’ strategies and tools for how to involve
various stakeholders in designing, and how to deal
with uncertainty and open design agendas. It is
important in order to prepare students for a career
as designers. The paper reports from an intense five
weeks course about developing and using design
games as a frame for design-oriented collaborations
with people outside the core design team. Co-design
is about making room for people with diverse
interests, roles and responsibilities in rehearsing the
future. Using the game metaphor to stage and engage
everyone is a valuable format for collaborative
inquiry and co-creating future visions – in other
words exploring diversity and creating unity about
values and goals. The professional designer is the one
to organize co-design events that can accommodate
common learning through inquiry and design.
Developing and playing design games is a valuable
format for co-designing and therefore a good example
of what could take place during a specific design
event. Hence they can be very useful in design
education.