Explicating Stakeholder Criteria: Opening Up the Power Field through Design Games

Abstract

Participatory design games involve both users and, later, stakeholders in the development process. Research has shown that such games have documented benefits, such as mutual learning, shared communication and joint propositions for sets of alternative scenarios and future practices. However, as the complexity of participatory design projects increases (e.g. due to a widening circle of include stakeholders), it becomes harder to keep track of the various stakeholders’ diverse criteria. Recent design research has shown that criteria of importance to stakeholders—and, subsequently, their ownership—is a first step towards infrastructuring as a key factor in bringing about organizational change. For this reason, we ask: What happens if we open up the ‘power field’ of stakeholder criteria through design games? In this paper, we investigate how three design games manage to engage a circle of stakeholders in identifying and explicating stakeholder design criteria in order to prioritize and select ideas, scenarios and concepts.