In my quest for creating simple, pragmatic exercises that promote elements of design thinking, I’ve been looking at games as a core model.

I just submitted a conference proposal looking at games as a way to affect stakeholder mindsets, and am looking at how games provide an avenue for accomodating new perspectives that reframe individuals’ views.

Some other interesting work includes

• the Serious Games initiative
• Rashmi Sinha’s game-like methods for user research
• the annual IA Slam
• which is similar to Scott Berkun’s Interactionary
• which draws on the tradition of the Design Charette
• and work on Facilitating Collaboration through Design Games (PDF) which has a great set of references that I’m still exploring.

So far, my favorite example is the Game Game, a game about designing games. I’ve started prototyping a product design game that I’m hoping will help me work out some of these ideas for design thinking.

To clarify: I’m not talking about learning from traditional games like Go or Quake, or socially aware games that are built to persuade for a variety of good causes, but specifically games that are created to facilitate design thinking…any pointers or thoughts? Have you ever used games to promote design thinking?

Update:
» Dave Pollard writes about a KMWorld presentation that touched on games as models of complex, real-life systems.
» Andrew Otwell reminds me that his Design Engaged microconference used games both years to promote collaboration and design thinking (and have fun).