The Co-Design Facilitator's Game Through the Lens of Sustainability

This work scrutinizes the PhD research conducted on the changing role of the designers and co-design education through the lens of sustainability. As emphasized by various researchers, the designers’ role is less about ‘designing for’ but more about ‘designing with’ users [1, 2, 3]. This shift is caused mainly by the clear understanding of the fact that the active involvement of the users in design processes may lead to real innovation. However, it is seen that how to better facilitate the co-design sessions has not been integrated into the design education curricula [4]. Thus, this PhD research aims to develop a game-based toolkit (‘Co-design Facilitator’s Game’) that would inform, motivate and/or guide design students in the facilitation of the co-design sessions. In this poster, the topic itself and the tangible outcome of this PhD research, which is a phygital game-based toolkit, have been put under the microscope in relation to sustainability. During this PhD research, several sustainability issues have been encountered and strategies have been developed to cope with them. On the technocentric level, the first coping strategy was ‘dematerialization’, which is a crucial concept for environmental sustainability that aims to reduce the use of natural sources to prevent waste [5]. On the human-centric level, the participants’ contribution is recognized and attributed through small gifts and certificates, being one of the most essential principles of design justice [6]. The ‘Co-design Facilitator’s Game’ can be still improved in relation to sustainability. First, to be more inclusive, multiple senses will be engaged in this toolkit. Moreover, in order to break the linguistic hegemony, the game-based toolkit will be designed to allow transferability and adaptability to several contexts. Lastly, the research-through-design process of this game-based toolkit will continue with the active involvement of design students, designers, and design educators through co-design sessions.