A recently designed workshop concept on Remixing Play into a Gameplan has a key aim to make game-based design thinking more accessible to anyone with different literacies in game playing. As described in my previous post, “play is key to expanding and broadening our embodied experience with our surroundings. It is an exploratory and experiential means for incrementally, iteratively and continuously updating our understanding and interpretation of the various concepts, objects, people, emotions and the mapping between these variables“.
We need to focus on designing experiences suited for our target audience (clients, stakeholders, customers, students, employees, etc.), which will inform the types of services, products and/or technologies that can be used to facilitate those experiences. The act of play often produces intrinsic engagement and pleasure that enhance our interaction with services, products, problems, challenges, etc. It is therefore possible for us to be inspired by the mechanics of play for informing our strategy, design and construction of solutions that will be more human driven, more emotionally intelligent.
Simple example:
- Challenge – how to increase sales of a product?
- Inspiration – Hide and Seek with simple mechanics – Hiding and Seeking!
- GamePlan – Hide rare items in products for customers to discover and collect. If done right, the Willy Wonka effect can be achieved when customers are encouraged to purchase more in order to stand a chance to discover those rare items.
The game plan can lead to a strategy, a service and/or a product! As the process is based on Design Thinking, it will be iterative, agile and incremental in order to refine the gameplan. The process will exploit playfulness and engagement to help encourage creativity and innovation.
The Remixing Play methodology has been implemented with different stakeholders. For example:
Embedded within a masters module (Sports Science, Coventry University)
Workshop with the Online Learning Educa community in Berlin
Experiential workshop with the industrial community in Trinidad
https://twitter.com/lokjackgsb/status/806466795691450369
https://twitter.com/lokjackgsb/status/806510602579509248
Slides used for the workshop in Trinidad:
Sylvester Arnab 
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