Dan Lockton, Josephine Chambers, Jet Vervoort, Joost Mattheus Vervoort, Joyce Browne, Raimon Ripoll-Bosch, Suzan Ruijtenberg, Jessica Duncan, Maikel Waardenburg, and Lotte de Lint
This workshop explores the use of play to foster and support interdisciplinary connections and collaborations in a systemic design context. We are developing creative prototype ‘minigames’ which address different aspects of the challenges faced in collaborations between disciplines, including facilitating collective imagination, surfacing worldviews, embracing ambiguity and uncertainty, and/or ‘unmaking’ systems, as part of a project which brings together an interdisciplinary team of researchers working at the intersection of technical, social, political, (bio)medical, and humanistic fields. The systemic design community, experienced in crossing boundaries and working at different levels of abstraction, is well positioned to contribute to this area, but also, we hope, will benefit from participating in playtesting some of the prototype minigame activities at RSD11. We will aim to make the most of participants’ own (inter-)disciplinary and systems expertise—this is intended to be a session in which participants make new connections and collaborations with each other through play, with the minigames potentially offering useful methods for participants to use and apply in their own work and practice.
Keywords: interdisciplinarity, play, games, methods
