Teaching Co-design Games in Five Weeks: Exploring Diversity and Unity For a Design School in Transition

This paper is about educating designers as co-designers 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.