A deep dive into the nature of co-design, and how games might help us be better at it.
We welcome our first external guest, Dr. Emma Blomkamp, an expert in co-design and participatory engagement, with a focus on policy. Together with Emma, we go deep on definitions and disambiguation of the relevant terms, and some of the enablers of and barriers to meaningful and inclusive co-design. We also discuss how to develop capability in co-design, and how games and play might play might help with this.
Love what you’re hearing? Buy us a cuppa!
When you make a small donation to our ko-fi, it makes a big difference to our ability to keep making free-to-play games.
Links to resources
Dr. Emma Blomkamp’s homepage, with links to various trainings and initiatives
https://www.emmablomkamp.com/
Emma’s academic work
https://unimelb.academia.edu/EmmaBlomkamp
Innovate Change design agency (now merged with another agency)
https://www.innovatechange.co.nz/
The Policy Lab, at the University of Melbourne
https://arts.unimelb.edu.au/the-policy-lab
Paper Giant design agency
https://papergiant.net/
Nicole Barling-Luke
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicole-barling-luke
Richard Hylerstedt
https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardhylerstedt/
Capgemini Accelerated Solutions Environment (ASE)
https://www.capgemini.com/au-en/operating-model/accelerated-solutions-environment-ase/
Google Ngram View of “design thinking”
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=design+thinking&year_start=1980&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=true
The Eames Chair
https://eames.com/en/articles/eameschair
Lego Serious Play
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Serious_Play
Ezio Manzini
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ezio_Manzini
‘Design, When Everybody Designs’, an article by Ezio Manzini that might be the one Emma refers to
https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/design-when-everybody-designs
Dungeon Master
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Master
‘Green Hollow’ game by Amble Studio
https://amble.studio/green-hollow-game/
Nora Bateson
https://batesoninstitute.org/nora-bateson/
Artefact, story game by Mousehole Press
https://mouseholepress.itch.io/artefact
Theory U methodology
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_U
Game Master
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamemaster
Mario Bros. video game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Bros.
Emma on Twitter
https://twitter.com/emmablomkamp
Transcript
Hailey: [00:00:00] This is Amble! The podcast where we take a disciplined wander through the borderland between ways of working and games.
I’m one of your hosts, Hailey Cooperrider.
Jason: And I’m Jason Tampake.
Hailey: Jase, I’m pretty excited because we have today, our first non-Amble troupe member guest; Dr. Emma Blomkamp. Emma, would you like to say hello?
Emma: Hello!
Hailey: Hello, welcome. I’ll introduce you. Emma is a facilitator, researcher and strategic designer best known for her work in co-design and behavior and systems change.
She’s a Kiwi, living on Wurundjeri Land in Melbourne and is committed to co-creating compassionate systems. Her research and practice focuses on creative and participatory approaches to systemic design, especially through policies and services that aim to improve public health, access to justice, and community wellbeing.
Yeah, I know-
Jason: Welcome Dr Emma!
Hailey: Yes, I’m a fan. And Emma and I have [00:01:00] been getting policy geek-out coffees for quite a few years now since we first connected. And I like to think of you as one of the few people that I know that actually has a PhD in co-design, which I know isn’t totally accurate. So feel free to correct me on exactly what your PhD is in.
Emma: Yeah, it’s a common misconception. Cause I’m so into co-design I think people assume my PhD must be in co-design. But actually I didn’t know about co-design until after my PhD. Actually my research that I did in my PhD and the work that I came to do and co-design, and social innovation were really different. But recently I’ve been realizing that actually they’re not so different after all.
So in my PhD I was particularly looking at why and how government supports arts and cultural policy. And went fairly deep into theory about what is the role of government, and the idea of community wellbeing being something that government should support.
I was [00:02:00] also really exploring the idea of cultural measurement. Particularly ideas about how we can measure or evaluate intangible outcomes, things like cultural vitality or social cohesion. So-
Jason: Just the easy stuff Em!
Emma: Easy, easy answers! There are; I don’t have good answers for those. But what I really enjoyed in particular with the case studies I did that were around participatory arts and what are some creative ways that government programs enabled citizens to have a voice in the cities in which they live. You know, ways that people could express themselves and shape their urban environments in particular.
And I think there was issues of having voice, having agency, questions around whose stories get told, who gets to make the decisions about whose stories get told. Those have been common threads in my work. So it’s not very surprising then that I became interested in co-design as a practical [00:03:00] vehicle for that as a way to give people voice and agency in the services, programs, policies that shape our lives.
So for me the interest in co-design is similar in terms of interest in sharing power and improving equity and justice.
Hailey: Okay. Right. There’s so many threads there when you said, ‘What is the role of government really?’ I was like ‘Ah can we do the episode about that?’ I will stick to our topic loosely.
So you went from doing the work on a PhD, through quite a journey up to today. You’re actually building skills, helping people build skills in co-design. Can you connect the dots from that point through to today, including some of the stops along the way, if you like.
Emma: Sure. So I was really lucky to land a job in Auckland, New Zealand, in this little social innovation agency called Innovate Change, where we were getting to try out some, at the time what [00:04:00] felt like very new and innovative methods, for engaging community members in design and decision-making processes.
So I learnt by doing, very much and quickly to where I am now as I’m helping others to learn by doing. But along the way I got really interested and passionate about using design methods in particular to engage community members in service design, program design.
And because I’d come from this academic background with this interest in the role of government and policy, I was really curious about how we might scale up some of the methods that we were using, where we were working in quite a local place-based way to think about, well, how might we use some of these methods to actually shape public policy? And some of the really big structures that determine what can happen, how public money can be spent, what kinds of services are provided?
So I spent [00:05:00] a few years on the ground, learning tools, techniques, methods for engaging communities and stakeholders in quite often service design type projects. And then I had an opportunity to come back to Melbourne where I did some of my PhD research, to join the policy lab at the University of Melbourne. And part of my role was helping set up there as a research lab. But part of it was actually getting to do my own research on co-design for policy. So I was able to connect up my more academic interest in policy with some of the practical experience I’d been doing in co-design and really started to explore what might co-design look like or does it look like if people are doing it at the level of public policy.
And also more broadly looking at how we are building design capability in government. So did some research [00:06:00] on that. And then got a bit sick of university environments to be honest. Needed to be doing more applied work and found myself back in a more agency consultancy environment and spent 18 months working with Paper Giant here in Melbourne, doing more strategic design, co-design, service design work.
And then at the beginning of last year, I set out on my own, not really sure what that was going to look like. But what it’s ended up looking like is, now I’m doing a lot of co-design capability building. So I launched my own training programs this year and have been stoked that people have signed up and enjoyed them and given great feedback. Teaching people co-design skills and also doing a bit of project mentoring and coaching and occasionally bespoke training programs as well for organizations who are wanting to often just simply learn how to engage people better in they work. [00:07:00]
Hailey: Yeah. Awesome, thanks. That brings us up to what our intended Amble destination is for today, which is; that building capability in new ways of working that are more collaborative, that are more equal in terms of the distribution of power and whose voice gets heard, that are more including and involving of diverse voices. And the Amble intuition that games and play might have a role to play in building this capability more broadly.
So to get us into things as usual, we like to start by talking about a game that might have some relation to today’s topic. And I think you were going to tell us about a game that you use as part of your co-design skills building. I believe it’s called ‘one word at a time storytelling’. Can you tell us how that works, but also why it matters to teaching co-design capability?
Emma: Yeah. I came [00:08:00] across this game recently when some friends and I started doing online improv and that came about because many of us were adapting to online facilitation during the pandemic. And we found that some of us, myself in particular, found it a bit more overwhelming dealing with all of the tech, as well as all the facilitation challenges. And we wanted to be quicker on our feet at responding to tech meltdowns and that sort of thing. So we had the idea of maybe if we practice improv online, that will help us.
And so Nicole Barling-Luke started this group, and brought her friend Richard Hylerstedt in, who’s been doing his own training and improv, but also works in the service design, strategic design space. And he led us through a few activities. And one of them was this ‘one word at a time storytelling game’, which worked pretty well.
And immediately I thought ‘hmm, this could be useful in some of the training and workshops I run’. [00:09:00] So I introduced it into one of my co-design bootcamp sessions, where we had a session on co-creation and thought let’s get people warmed up to the idea of, in this case, it was creating a story together.
So it works by each person says, literally what’s on the box, it’s one word at a time. So we take turns, one person says one word, the next person says another word. And together we start building a story. So that’s basically it.
Hailey: Right. And so we did a little warmup with this before. I think we decided to frame it as writing a letter and it was something like ‘Dear Yoda, I’m concerned that the users are turning to the TikTok side.
You know, it’s that emergent property of one person on their turn has creative control. And the rest of us have to respond to that. And something emerges that we couldn’t have predicted from the beginning.
Emma: It can definitely go in some surprising directions. [00:10:00]
Jason: One of the things that evoked in me around the improvisation piece is how crux it does seem to be, like as a skill, improvisation as a capability, as a skill, as something that’s worth having on the tool belt is certainly something that facilitators draw on.
And when you mentioned that you brought in someone to help enable facilitation, to allow you to be more flexible on your feet, made me think of the ASE reading list, for instance. The Accelerated Solutions Environment reading list. For many, many years, you’d go to a Cap Gemini center in collaboration, there’d be the free playbook about improvisation in art and life.
And similarly the other book that’d appear in that space is the ‘Trust the process: an artists guide to letting go’. But this idea that the thing that’s interesting in that for me is that people seem to be paying attention to the need, to be able to respond, the need to be able to flexibly engage, the need to be able to riff off one [00:11:00] another as a key part of being together in something collaborative.
It’s exciting to think through that. And is that something you actively bring to your classes? Is that something you actively try and encourage in people?
Emma: Definitely. And I think it’s an example of how I’m encouraging people to experience what it’s like to do co-design when we’re learning about it. Often I would do something like that, would introduce a game or an activity and get people to play it without too much explanation. So definitely that idea of just trust me, trust the process. We’ve done some work to establish that trust already, it’s not the first time we’ve met.
And then we debrief and talk about like, what did that mean? Why might we do that? And I definitely found the debrief really valuable on what people got out of that game and what they noticed. And absolutely I think it’s that principle of ‘yes and’ that really demonstrates you’ve got to accept what the person before you has just said and build on it. You can take it in a new direction. You can continue where [00:12:00] you thought they were going, or you can introduce something new. But we keep building this thing together. And we each offer some new perspectives, so that’s great, but also it’s just a bit silly and fun. I think it’s like that basic rule of brainstorming, of ‘you’ve just got to accept and keep going’.
So it’s a really good game to introduce that idea. And in a really light, free way where there’s not much at stake for people to just keep going and potentially go on a wacky direction and then see how wonderful an experience that can be.
Jason: Nice Em.
Hailey: Something that also comes to mind in that is, I’m always thinking about this boundary between improv and freeform and games.
And one thing that games often have is more constraints or more guidelines. And I think one of the things that makes ‘one word at a time storytelling’ maybe a more accessible form of improv is that the constraint [00:13:00] is the English language syntax. And so there are valid and invalid moves and there’s a rule there of, well, the word you add needs to plausibly fit within a possible sentence.
And you can probably smush that a little bit, and it’s not a big deal if someone just takes the grammar in a different direction. But I think it gives a constraint that’s interesting. You know, I find myself often doing the filler words that need to come in, just so that the sentence has a form. I’ll be the one saying ‘that’, or ‘the’, or, ‘and’. And also it kind of provides rails to make that a little bit more accessible so that people who aren’t already well-developed in improv and ‘yes, and’, and getting over that self cringe that often comes with it, can more easily participate in a game like that.
Jason: Totally. And that’s the thing I’m really interested in exploring Em, today. That’s the thing that’s getting my stoke up. And we are very, very excited to have you here. It’s this idea of with what we’re trying to do if we think about Amble [00:14:00] in a broader context and that is to bring collaborative capability through the use of games to folks, or human skills that enable working together to folks, through games.
Just seems like in many ways your experience in the professional sphere is doing that very, very practically. This idea of enabling people, the on-ramp into what it means to be able to do collaboration or do co-design in many ways. I’d be interested to hear from you what you feel those on-ramps might be. What those key ingredients are, what the necessary constraints are for good collaboration.
Hailey: And before maybe you answer that Emma, this might help you get into it as well. It’s just, what is co-design? We’ve talked a lot about collaboration on the podcast, but this word co-design is overlapping with collaboration, but it has a very specific meaning. It’s historically situated as much as being a true definition of itself of a real phenomenon. What do you [00:15:00] think that word means? And also why does co-design matter?
Emma: A very good question. The word gets thrown around a lot these days, and I think it is important that we try to define what we mean when we talk about it. I do have quite specific understanding of it that perhaps there’s lots of things out there that could get called co-design that I wouldn’t consider co-design.
Hailey: Well, you do have a PhD in co-design. So, you know…
Emma: According to some. Through an administrative error, I have two PhDs. So we could say one of them is in co-design.
Hailey: That sounds like an interesting story, but maybe for the end of the session.
Emma: So the most plain language definition I can give of co-design would be ‘making stuff together to improve a situation’.
It misses some of the nuances, but I think that’s at the heart of it. Another way that I would try and break it [00:16:00] down in a plain language way is break down into the ‘co’ and the ‘design’. So obviously on this podcast you’ve talked a heck of a lot about collaboration. And for me, I would normally assume the ‘co’ means collaborative, but it could mean collective or cooperative. There are other interpretations of what that ‘co’ means. Obviously all of those words are about people coming together. And ideally we’re talking about different kinds of people coming together. We’re especially thinking about the kinds of knowledge and roles that we need to come together and in co-design we often talk about people with lived experience, as well as people with professional or specialist experience or expertise.
So if we’re talking about a healthcare system, it’s about not just having doctors and nurses and managers and funders come together. But also the people who have lived experience of health issues and receiving care in the health [00:17:00] system. So those are the people who make up the ‘co’, who should be collaborating or cooperating to design.
And I think this is one of the things that’s often missing in the way some people use this word. Design is a material or tangible practice, even if we’re designing intangible things like services and systems. We’re trying to give them form in some way. So there’s usually some thing or some stuff, that we’re making together. But it could be intangible. It could be relationships and networks. But often it is in the form of things like services or programs, campaigns even. So that’s one way to understand co-design. Does that make sense?
Hailey: Yeah, that was really clear. And I’ve had an interest in this use of the word ‘design’ because I got interested in collaboration maybe just a few years before the design thinking [00:18:00] craze stepped off. In, I want to say, like the late twenty-oh-oh’s. However you say that.
Jason: The noughties.
Hailey: Oh the noughties! And how design became the new word that everyone used that got applied to everything. And I really appreciated you making that distinction, that it is about something tangible where tangibility is, it might be a conceptual framework or a plan, or a process, but it still is fairly concrete. It’s got some objectivity to it. As opposed to, it’s not really consensus building, for example, or understanding values and priorities, or visioning. Maybe you’re designing a shared vision, there’s this interesting, another interesting borderland to explore between where is it appropriate to say design or not?
Emma: Hmm.
Jason: Can I press on that a little bit? Cause I mean I think we’re all aligned in our understanding of the value of it, but Em do you have a particular take on, on why co-design? Why does it matter to be doing co-design [00:19:00] as opposed to just public engagement or stakeholder comms. Why co-design, why invest in something like that?
Emma: Yeah, it’s a good question. And in fact, I was ready to say why co-design really emphasizing the ‘co’, but I think that question is why design and co-design. So I think there’s an argument for both. I do just want to say that the argument for involving more people in decision-making is really important and some other methods like deliberative methods and public engagement could be equally good for that, for making sure that people in power are not making decisions on behalf of other people who they don’t understand. That people in power are not making decisions, that they don’t understand the implications of. So we need to hear from people who are actually affected by those decisions, but that could be public engagement. So yeah, why co-design rather than consulting with people or engaging with them.
And I think this is where, and I’m not a professionally trained designer, [00:20:00] so I think that gives me an extra appreciation of design, of the creative practices that enable us to express things beyond words, beneath the surface. The way that creating things together using expressive techniques like drawing or sketching or acting out or choosing images even, that can help us think about things in different ways. And get at stuff that sometimes language isn’t good at expressing, or we might not be good at expressing.
For me, it’s far more inclusive. One of the challenges with some of the more deliberative methods like people might’ve heard of citizens’ juries and those kinds of things, they’re really based on a model of- and this is where my political science training comes in- they’re based on this model of rational, analytical thought, which typically-
Jason: A hundred percent!
Emma: -educated white men and how they talk.
And that’s not how everyone expresses themselves and not everyone has the capacity to [00:21:00] express themselves in that way. So how can we make sure that people who maybe aren’t fully literate or fluent in English, or have different ways of thinking and understanding the world can also express themselves and be understood?
Jason: Thanks Em. The thing that evokes in me is that distinguishing between something that’s consultative and something that actually involves people in the creation or the co-creation of the policy, the artifact, the new tool, the playground, whatever it happens to be, that’s going to be used.
There’s an adage that comes up a lot in the corporate facilitation environments that certainly Hailey and I have come from in the past; that ‘people support what they help to create’. And that’s often used as a justification, an axiom to justify why you would invest the time in involving people in the actual building of a new strategy or the building of a new roadmap.
So yeah, it just seems that you have a similar perspective that there is a difference between the purely rational [00:22:00] engagement in dialogue and getting people to sign things off or say, which five boxes do you want to tick? What five adjectives would you like to be associated with this new playground? You know, there’s a difference between that, and actively involving someone in the creation of it.
Emma: Totally. And I think the other thing is, there’s a difference between a roadmap or a plan, and actually creating the thing that that roadmap or plan is supposed to make. So I think that’s the other thing is, by actually starting to make often smaller, quicker, low fidelity versions of the big thing you’re trying to create, you actually start bringing to life things in ways that don’t happen when you’re just making plans.
And some of those things are the assumptions that get surfaced that when you’re talking about things can remain hidden. But if you actually start creating something and realizing, “oh, this thing isn’t working in the way that we said it would work in our plan, why is that?” Or a [00:23:00] classic thing would be like, “oh, we expect people are going to really want to come to this thing or be involved in this thing.” but then if you make a version of that thing and no one comes or not the right people, or not as many people or not the target audience, you have to really start questioning what’s some of the assumptions you had were.
And so by actually starting to do those things and actually starting to take action together, you’re really getting much better feedback, stronger learning, and often starting to achieve the results that you want to achieve just through the process of trying to create these things.
Jason: And that’s the design element of things isn’t it? That sort of test and learn, rapid prototype, build stuff, test it, use it, refine.
Hailey: So let me take it down to, Jase you gave the example of a playground. So Emma we’re co-designing a playground. How do we do it?
Emma: It’s really funny you ask that because that example I gave of, when I used the ‘one word at a time storytelling game’ was for a session [00:24:00] on co-creation in bootcamp. And the activity I had participants take part in was quite similar to that challenge, but it was more about an open community, like vacant piece of land. What do you do? And it was how might you engage people, community members in some activities to decide how to use the land for the benefit of the community? So it wasn’t specifically saying we want a playground, but sometimes that is the kind of constraint that you have in a co-design process.
And the question then is, okay, well thinking about it, I guess. Okay. As a playground example, if we know we want play ground, then say, you know, we know we want a playground. Well, we have to think about first; who’s the playground for? Ultimately who’s going to use it? So I would expect that we would find that’s for children probably quite young children, but perhaps it also serves a really important role and function for parents.
I would say, especially in recent lockdowns in Melbourne, we’ve seen [00:25:00] that. What’s the role of the playground for parents? There might be other kinds of community members who use the playground. Maybe it also is really useful as a piece of sporting equipment for people. I know someone who likes to do pull-ups on playground equipment.
So first of all, we think about who is this for? And then what is it for, why does it help them? And try and get really clear on what that vision is and what the outcomes we want are. So for me, that’s always a really important starting point before we start thinking about how does it work? What’s in there? What color is it? What bits are there? Is the ‘why’, ‘what good is this going to do?’ And making sure we get really clear on that. So that gives us a clear objective to design for.
And so it might be ‘providing children with physical activity’, ‘play interacting with the natural environment’, ‘giving parents a break’, there could be these kinds of outcomes. There could be social outcomes. Maybe we want to encourage interaction. If we realize we’ve got a really diverse community, who don’t talk to each other and encouraging social connection [00:26:00] between them is important, and we think the playground has a role, then we would think about, well, how do we design the playground in a way to foster positive social interaction?
So all of these things are things that I would want to work with the people who are supposed to benefit from it to understand how it could serve them, how it might improve lives and get clear on that, and then start thinking about, okay, what might we put in here that would actually help to achieve that purpose?
And ideally let’s give it a go. Okay. So, it might be, well, let’s go and try out some other playgrounds and see how we like them. Or are there ways that we can safely create some little pop up versions of things before we install things permanently and actually see how people respond.
Hailey: Is that what you mean by a low fidelity prototype?
Emma: Yeah. And I mean, I’m being cautious there because you don’t want to build too low fidelity a slide and let a child go down [00:27:00] because that could be dangerous. But that’s a good question though. A low fidelity prototype. Actually what we might do is we might get some blocks out. Some Lego or some cardboard, or even the classic pipe cleaners and things and that would be creating a low fidelity prototype of the playground. And that would be a really fun thing potentially to do with some local families. Like, okay, here are some materials let’s make a playground. What do you think it would look like?
Jason: That is fantastic Em. See because in many ways that process that you’re describing, in terms of what it means to be designing with a community for a community, I think for the gamers who are listening or the game designers who are listening to our podcast, that idea of build a low fidelity model, think about who’s going to be playing the game, maybe do some test runs with them around how the mechanics are going to work and build a really basic version first and then refine it with your players is something they probably will recognize as something that they’re already [00:28:00] doing. The process of design or working with folks to make something seems to be similar, it ports across pretty well.
Emma: Yeah.
Hailey: Yeah, yeah, exactly Jason. I have a thread in here, that it might get a little abstract, that I want to pull which is around the nature of design and how it’s different ways of being, different ways of expressing. And when you were talking earlier, I could tell that something you’d given a lot of thought to. So I want to set up a question here, which involves a piece around, when I think of designers and the historical idea of design, I think of when I’ve seen coffee table books and there’s a really beautiful transistor radio.
Jason: Sorry, yeah totally.
Hailey: Yeah. There’s a really beautiful chair. The Eames chair, it is a Paragon of chairs. And to be able to create a chair like that is a transcendent act of a new kind of artist who is a designer.
And also I’ve brought Legos into workshops[00:29:00] for this low-fidelity prototyping, even to do a low fidelity prototype of like a new organization, a new organizational collaborative system, a multi-stakeholder, so we can just see where the information flows are in that sort of thing, in this new thing that we’re trying to create. And I have had people just see the Lego’s come out and they cross their arms and they lean back and they go, “that’s what my kids do. I don’t do that.” And yeah, it can be gendered. It’s more often that men feel comfortable getting in and starting to put the blocks together. And we can go into the social origins of that.
And I wonder, I have two layers to the question. Like what are the considerations around these different modes and how they include and exclude. But also this Delta between designers, with a capital D, and then co-design and how those two come together. Because usually there are professional designers in the mix in these co-design experiences. They’re creating the conditions, but they’re also being creatives as well. And they’re moving [00:30:00] the ball along and there’s almost a tension, another power tension there between whose voice is heard and can the designer start to dominate too much or leave too much space and then it doesn’t gain momentum. Any thoughts on that?
Emma: Yes. I heard two key different ideas and questions there.
So I think the first one is about the role of the designer. And then the second one is about participants’ comfort level and appetite with playful modes. And I think that they’re a bit different. I think it was Ezio Manzini who wrote that we need to shift from the big ego designer to more of a design facilitator.
And so within social design and social innovation, there’s been a call for a while to shift from that traditional model of the designer as this creative genius working on their own, to facilitating [00:31:00] other people’s creativity. That’s a challenging shift. And I don’t think design schools are likely teaching the facilitation role, currently.
A lot of the training that I offer is for designers who are really keen to move into more of a facilitative type of role, who are keen to understand and share power, and are particularly curious about what that means and how they do that. But it’s challenging.
And I think it’s a good question of what is the role of the designer in here? Because there still is a role for professionally trained designers and their aesthetics and material practice. It’s super valuable. You know, I said before, I’m not professionally trained in this area and I usually am working in collaboration with someone who is a communication designer who can help me to create visually compelling and effective representations of what we’re doing, because I don’t have those [00:32:00] skills myself. My natural skillset is more on the facilitation side of it. But I think both of those skillsets are really important. I don’t think there’s one person who has to have all the skills. This is how it’s about collaboration, right? We’re not saying one person needs to be able to do everything.
And there are some of those unicorn like individuals out there who can do it all themselves and also engage others in the process. But for most of us, we don’t have all the skills required to realize an amazing co-design project. So how do we work in collaboration then with others?
So for me, it is about making sure there are designers, and it doesn’t have to be a professionally trained designer, but somebody who has the kind of creative or artistic skills that can help visualize or materialize what people are doing, can be really useful. So that’s something about the designer role.
Hailey: Yeah.
Emma: And then in terms of playfulness, I too have seen [00:33:00] negative reactions from people when playful materials have been introduced into co-design workshops. I think it is important to be aware that some people will react badly to things that they see as toys or, they have a gendered connotation that they don’t think they should be using.
As a facilitator I think it is really important to be sensitive to people’s needs and responses to the materials and to actually choose materials carefully for the group or groups you’re working with. That said, sometimes people don’t realize the value of using Lego or cut out caricatures to tell a story until they’ve tried it. So if there’s a way to introduce something in a way that’s safe and easy for [00:34:00] people to try it out, that can be really, really helpful. But there are some contexts where I know people deliberately avoid using things that are associated with children because it’s not seen as ‘serious enough’.
So I think there’s not one tool for everyone. And choosing the materials of play that are appropriate for the people you’re working with is part of the skill of designing and facilitating these kinds of sessions and processes.
Hailey: Yeah. Yeah. Brilliantly said. And I think, as I said in a, in a Twitter thread we were both in, it can be really tiring for the facilitator to worry about it. And it’s why I’m on an indefinite hiatus from facilitation, because I find that quite hard. So bless you. Bless you, Jason, for keeping the work up. But do you have a thread and you want to pull there Jase?
Jason: I’d like to click down if we may, if we’ve got time. I’d really love to click down a little bit more around this idea of how we make the active design, not the [00:35:00] sacrosanct space for design, a capital D, and something that everybody can engage in.
And in many ways, that act of using materials that are playful, using materials that are easily accessible, using things that people have a fluency in, is a way of inviting people into the design space that they may feel otherwise ostracized from. They’re not at a architectural desk. You’re not asking someone to do that.
And one of the things that really interests me in this space and certainly something Hailey and I’ve talked a lot about is one of the challenges in co-design or in collaborative environments is how you do create the conditions for genuine equity. So how do you enable people to engage meaningfully in the process? And I’ll use a corporate examples. We may have the best of intention to create an organizational strategy that involves a diagonal slice of the organization. So you’re including C-suite all the way through to frontline. But if you sit someone from the frontline of senior consultant straight out of [00:36:00] university, next to the COO, their voice is not going to be the same. There’s a whole bunch of things that impede them, there’s a whole bunch of institutional power dynamics. There’s a whole bunch of things that get in the way. And we as facilitators are constantly trying to create the conditions in which people can engage equally.
I wonder, do you have a perspective on the role of conveners in this sort of space or, this role of facilitating design activity? Do you have a perspective on the things we could be thinking about when trying to make co-design something that’s not at worst performative, like where you just wheel out someone and hear their story and it’s sort of performative, and at best, probably a little bit empty because people just can’t participate fully in the way that they want.
Sorry, there’s a lot in that.
Emma: No, that’s a good question. I probably had a good example of, of where I’ve done that in a project as well. Which shows how challenging it is and how you [00:37:00] can create conditions for equity to a certain extent. So I think it’s a question at the heart of the work that I do.
And probably a good example to make it more concrete is a justice project that I worked on a couple of years ago, where our goal or the outcomes that we were working towards were about just casually trying to transform the criminal justice system here in Victoria, to better meet the needs of people with disabilities. Specifically cognitive disability, like acquired brain injury or intellectual disability. But it also includes, in the definition that we were given, things like autism spectrum disorder. So a wide range of things that could be called disabilities or conditions where there are people who are not having their needs met and are actually too often imprisoned. So quite a complex issue. Try not to get too much into that, cause there’s a lot to unpack there, but just setting the [00:38:00] scene where we had this project where in particular we were designing for court professionals and lawyers so that they would better meet the needs of people with cognitive disability.
But obviously for me, taking a co-design approach, of course that meant involving people with disability in the project too. We deliberately did not try and engage everyone all the time in all the same activities.
So that’s also just something I want to say also to dispel a bit of a myth of co-design that you need everyone in the room together all the time. That’s not always possible or effective. It’s not always safe.
So we worked separately, initially, with groups and people from different groups. But at the heart of the project were some co-design workshops where we did bring people from these different backgrounds and experiences together. And for me, that was probably the most challenging facilitation I’ve done, where we had people like magistrates, judges, court staff, [00:39:00] lawyers, health bureaucrats, and we had people who had spent time in prison, had an intellectual disability, had experience of mental ill health, and many other social challenges related to that.
And so trying to create some sort of equal playing field for these people was extremely difficult. They live in different worlds to a certain extent. And so one of the things that was really important for us was thinking about being aware of whose voices usually get privileged and trying to address that imbalance. Which meant actually deliberately privileging the voices of people who had what we would call lived experience, and making sure that we were really careful about hearing their voices, but also being really sensitive to the fact that some of them would have actually had traumatic experiences with the likes of some of the other people in the room.
So working [00:40:00] really carefully with the people who we invited to take part based on their lived experience, firstly, to understand what they were comfortable with and introduce them to what we were trying to achieve and how we were doing that. So that did involve some individual calls with people. And also we had a project team member with lived experience too, who was able to provide advice and suggestions about the best way to do these things.
What I realized in hindsight was I should have been actually working one-on-one with all of the professionals there. I sent them out some information about what to expect about some of the principles, a bit of a code of conduct really, about how we were doing things, and trying to encourage them to think about using plain language and things like that. Just to be more inclusive. But actually, although these people came in with really good intentions to the process, some of them didn’t know how, or weren’t able on the spot to adapt their behavior enough to be really inclusive.
So for [00:41:00] instance one of the things that happened that we weren’t happy about was one of the people with lived experience got upset because the conversation started moving too quickly for them to follow. And that’s really challenging. But we did a lot of things to try and avoid issues like that. So one of the tactics we had was that when everybody first gathered and did introductions, we had a very specific way in which we asked people to introduce themselves to avoid people using their job titles and listing their long CV and making sure that everyone could actually introduce themselves as a human being with an interest in this topic.
We had kind of visual cards that people could refer to that helps people also be a bit more metaphorical and break out of the usual way that they might say things. So we had some tools and techniques like this. We set a code of conduct together where we asked people what they needed. And someone who was actually an [00:42:00] advocate as someone with lived experience was really good at telling the professionals in the group what they needed to be able to feel like they could take part and so on.
However we couldn’t actually completely change the nature of the people who were in the room and the systems that they’re part of. And for me, that was kind of heartbreaking because I worked really hard to make it an equitable experience, but there’s only a certain amount you are able to do as a facilitator.
Jason: Sorry Em yeah. That is a fantastic story. And a wonderful, wonderful example, a practical example, lived example of how that sort of thing cashes out. And what it evoked in me, relaying your experience there, is this idea that, and this is possibly me just trying to bring the metaphor back for the gamers who might be listening. So this is going to listeners out there, ‘Dungeon Master as facilitator or enabler’. But you [00:43:00] know, really experienced DMs, especially if they’re working with a new group, will spend an inordinate amount of time, energy, and effort working out the individual needs of players and trying to bring them in to a game context in which they have some sort of common understanding.
So the parallel let’s say here is that, if you’re trying to convene a game that’s fun for everybody, if you’re not sure who you’re playing with, just picking a game off the shelf that has really crunchy rule set, is highly analytic, involves a whole bunch of historical knowledge of gaming, is deeply, deeply strategic and takes hours and hours and hours to master may not be the best choice of game if you’re trying to make a fun experience for your mum, the lady who lives down the street, your mate next door who’s a hardcore gamer etc.
And this sort of idea of thinking about creating the conditions for good gaming as being more than the game itself. Being things that sit before the game, like reaching out to [00:44:00] your potential players, equipping them with a common language, equipping them with ways of engaging. As well as then pregame things like you mentioned the creating a shared set of values, for instance. I mean often in the gaming environment, facilitators, storytellers, dungeon, masters, et cetera, will have, access to safety tools. So ways to navigate challenging scenarios for the players that often the players agree on. And then the other thing that you mentioned, and I think there’s a parallel is that in game managing the expectations and the feelings of people whilst they’re engaging in the process itself is something that you’re into.
I don’t know, Hailey, what do you make of that parallel? Because it just seems so obvious the way Em clearly outlines that experience, it just seems like it’s a natural parallel. What do you, what you reckon?
Hailey: No, I find that compelling. And I was having a few similar thoughts along those lines.
One being that thinking about our now somewhat mythical or caricature ‘capital D designer’ [00:45:00] that they have this experience of a particular game field, or set of rules where it’s materials is maybe a handful of other people that you’re working with. You’re working to a brief, maybe there’s a client. But the landscape or the amount of different factions you’re engaging are relatively smaller than when you get into co-design, where the sort of factions and forces in play multiply. And you’ve got to play this kind of diplomacy meta game as a sort of shell around the design micro game, of actually then getting creative and expressive and choosing the right materials and designing in response.
Again, and to extend your Dungeon Master metaphor, there’s the other potential pitfall of the Dungeon Master who has a really robust, deep, lore for their world. And perhaps too strong plan for where they think the campaign wants to go, that doesn’t respect the agency of the players. And I wanted to take this opportunity to direct our [00:46:00] amble a little bit back to this building of capability for designers.
So, I mean, you said ‘I work with a lot of experienced designers in the classical sense who are looking to move into understanding the more facilitative space of co-design’. And I think the conversation, the amble for the last 30 minutes or so has really answered a lot of the, ‘what are the mindsets and skillsets?’ What are the kinds of things you’re preparing them for? So I think I’d like to get curious now to transition into that about what are the methods you’re using? How do you take them through that journey? What do your bootcamps look like? And that can then allow us to get to that point of how might games and play come into that. And your experiences even with our game Green Hollow or the one word at a time storytelling. How does that fit into that picture?
Emma: Yeah. Yeah. We’ve talked about co-design boot camp a bit, and I think it is definitely an example. It’s a six month training program where we have a session a month and things that people do in between. [00:47:00] The idea is I have these themes that I introduce, like power and participation, co-creation, and we explore it together in an online session that hopefully provides a bit of an experience itself. Like we were talking before, like we’ll actually play with something, but also do a bit of conceptualizing. And then ideally people are going out and applying this in their own work.
So that’s one thing, but I think probably more interesting might be to introduce here is how I introduce co-design to people who haven’t experienced it before. Which is where I really start getting into more, trying to facilitate a mini immersive experience for people. And it’s not a game as such, but it’s more of a simulation.
One of the things that I found incredibly challenging is trying to get people to understand co-design when they haven’t seen or felt it. And I knew from my own experience that actually doing it, being in [00:48:00] co-design was the best way to understand how it is different from other things.
Because that question you were asking before, Jason. It was around why, why co-design rather than public engagement. But one of the challenges is people who have any experience off public engagement, or they have an experience of service design. They go, “oh yeah co-design is just like that. I got it. I know. I, yeah, I know. I know it.” However, to do co-design actually looks and feels different. So the best way I’ve found to get that across to people is to run a little mini simulation of being in a co-design process.
So I get asked to guest lectures occasionally. And I basically, I hate lecturing and I don’t think it’s a very effective way of learning. So I usually turn that into a workshop and we’ll take master’s students in social policy, for instance, through this experience of being participants in a co-design process. I’ll give them a scenario. I really like using a [00:49:00] scenario of graffiti prevention because it’s quite polarizing and I’ve worked on projects like that. So I was able to easily imagine some characters and ideas. People take on a character who represents some of the different kinds of people you would engage in the co-design process.
And then we very quickly, very, very quickly just rush through a bunch of what’s the outcome we want to achieve together? How might we do that? What would that look like? And it’s just an hour or two version of a co-design process that we just have a go at. Leah Heiss when I did it for some RMIT students described it as the co-design Olympics because we were quickly like running around and doing different activities.
And then we have a debrief and the debrief is really important. So what’s really important I think about how I do that is like, I give people a taste of what it might be like in a very low stakes way where it’s a [00:50:00] hypothetical. And some people will really get into that, really get into it and take on their character, and others might do it in a more half hearted way. But together they have this experience and it creates a shared experience that we can then talk about and then debrief on and go, “okay, well, what would be the difference if this was in real life?” And point out some important things. Like we wouldn’t pretend to be characters, we would actually engage real people.
And talk more about what else might we do is different? What is similar? How does this relate to actual work that I’ve done? So that’s an example of how I might more playfully try and introduce people to co-design.
Jason: You role play the co-design mod! That’s, that’s fantastic Em! I mean a lot of that sort of technique of stepping in another’s shoes is used quite a lot. Like, the idea of role-playing for empathy. It’s been documented quite a lot in folks who work in the serious games sort of space,[00:51:00] the role of role-playing and empathy building and how valuable that can be.
And you’ve just explained really clearly how that can give people a shared sense of what something feels like that they may not have had access to before. I, and this is just me having a bit of an amble and trying to draw out this sort of point, and asking the question: do you feel that that ability to role play and create a shared narrative together- maybe not the shared narrative bit, but role play- and think through the shoes of others or experience through the lens of others is an important part of co-design? Is that explicitly one of the things that you’re attempting to enable? Is that one of the techniques that you’re enabling?
Emma: I’m trying to figure out how to make this a ‘yes, and’ rather than a ‘yes, but’…
Jason: Make at a ‘yes, but’, sometimes buts are really important though. Like sometimes that differentiation between things is really important.
Hailey: Something that stood out for me is that it sounds like that particular exercise is [00:52:00] much more driven by the simulation side, rather than the roleplay and empathy side. It’s about seeing how the process concretely rolls out in an accelerated fashion without all of the time lags and resource inputs that are required to do it for real. And that makes it safe to fail. It’s very, very cheap, but gives you a concrete connection to how it actually flows.
That might bring up some emotions and might bring up some real, almost similar brain states to going through it actually would, in a way that is way more fruitful and will land for people as a learning experience, far more deeply than explaining to a diagram and then getting into very abstract territory about it.
Jason: Yeah. And that’s what I was potentially doing was conflating the simulation experience with a specific empathy building module, which is a different thing. Sorry Em.
Emma: Well, they are different, but funnily enough there is definitely an aspect of empathy in it and even what I invite people [00:53:00] to do to get into their character’s shoes is use the tool of an empathy map to imagine what that person might think, feel, see, and do. What the distinction I want to make though, is that even using that tool, even doing that activity is slightly problematic.
And I think this is one of the distinctions between human centered design and co-design. That the problem there is that we might be suggesting that you can feel what it’s like to be someone else. If we’re encouraging empathy in that way, where of course we never really know what it is like to be in another person’s shoes, and we should never be assuming what someone might think, feel, do. We actually should be engaging with that person to understand them.
And in co-design we might want to put more emphasis on compassion rather than empathy. Thinking about how we engage people with compassion and [00:54:00] respect, rather than just trying to empathise in that like, “oh yeah, I know what you mean. I feel, I feel that too sometimes.” So we’re not conflating our own understanding and experience with that of another person.
Hailey: Can I try to nuance this a bit? Cause I think you’re putting a fairly strong ‘should’ on there, partly because it’s a real trap, right? It’s a real risk that we think we’ve done the work of empathizing with someone. But it’s a fairly common technique in the world of serious games to try to immerse someone in the experience of someone that they might not.
And so there are literally, there are games out there about escaping from a bad situation as a refugee. And these are award-winning and they’re by people who lived that experience, who create these games. And the attention is that then, we, as the person who’ve never experienced, that play the game and it deepens our empathy. And maybe there’s a distinction there as I talk about it, which is not necessarily then therefore it makes you an expert who can inform [00:55:00] design solutions, but it just makes you give a crap.
Emma: Yeah. And maybe it’s the first step. At least the first step might be about just trying to have empathy for people who have a different experience to yourself. That’s good. That’s not enough if we’re then wanting to design things that are meant to improve those people’s lives.
Jason: Ooh, Em! Okay. I’ve got one for you then. Nora Bateson who has spent a lot of time in the systemic change kind of space often talks about how we as humans need to radically rethink. So human centered design doesn’t go far enough because when it comes to protecting ecosystems, if we think just from a human perspective, we’re probably limiting ourselves to a whole bunch of biases that are built in to us and what we need.
And this is going to click down. This is not even saying, ‘I want to imagine what it’s like to be a refugee’. This is trying to say ‘what does it mean to [00:56:00] think through or experience our system through the lens of a Bayou’ or ‘what does it mean to be a watershed?’
And one of the things that we’ve talked about in the past- and yes I understand that it doesn’t go far enough- but part of the value of role-playing games is that it can give us access to different ways of approaching things. So I often bring up a game called Artifact. It’s one of my favorite things to reference in and it, rather than setting up a context for people to be a heroic fantasy character or a space farer or anything like that, it asks, ‘what does it mean for you to be an ancient heirloom artifact that passes through multiple generations over time and experiences different lives and different aeons’.
And there’s something in that practice of asking us to challenge our own assumptions and asking us to begin dropping a lot of [00:57:00] our fixed kind of mindset. There’s something that could be valuable in there I think. So the question I’m getting to Em is yeah, ‘how might we engage with those sorts of tools and use them for their positive without somehow lulling us into the sense that we’ve somehow solved for what it means to be a Bayou or we’ve somehow solved for what it means to be a refugee? It’s tricky, right?
Emma: Yeah, super tricky. What it makes me think of though is like, if I was just saying empathy is a good first step, but it’s not enough, we might also say co-design is a good methodology, but it’s not enough either. And I think bringing system’s thinking, bringing indigenous knowledge systems, bringing these kinds of different ways of understanding the world and really seeing it in its complexity and interconnectedness and beauty and all of that, are really very helpful ways of thinking that I think are very [00:58:00] complimentary to co-design that maybe don’t come from co-design practice itself.
I think one of the ways in which design is really helpful is it is quite naturally a multidisciplinary or transdisciplinary kind of approach that is able to provide a bit of a container for different approaches to come together. So I think for me, definitely in recent years, that really has been about bringing in the systems lens into my work and thinking about how do we understand these systems that we’re within. Also as someone who’s well aware that we’re in a climate emergency, I think we need to be thinking about ecosystems in all of our work. Even if that’s not necessarily part of the brief, we’ve got to think about how what we’re doing might have impacts on other systems that are connected with the system we’re directly working on.
So I think [00:59:00] those kinds of ways of thinking offer useful lens to bring to co-design work.
Hailey: I love what you said there about co-design is a really useful, you said a container, for bringing together all of these different wisdoms and intelligences. And yeah, if I get my really abstract hat on I think all of these methodologies, whether it it’s co-design or co-creation, or even Theory-U and those sorts of things they’re integrators. They’re things that integrate, that bring in perspectives and facts and dreams and stories and whatever, right.
They’re all fundamentally the same and different expressions of that. And they just, because of their historical situated context, they privilege different lenses a little more strongly. Like co-design privileges the design lens and tries to elevate that. But I think ultimately, as they all bring in and try to bring in all these different capabilities and let’s get systems in here, they all kind of mix and they’re all moving ultimately into the same[01:00:00] meta-genre.
And games are similar. You know, one of the things that I love about immersive games are, and this is why we like role-playing games at Amble in particular, is because they’re incredibly effective integrators. Because the rule sets are fairly simple, but the shared field of co imagination leaves a lot of room for us to integrate all those layers Jase was talking about earlier. About people’s needs and where they’re coming from and their experience. The Game Master’s ideas about where the story should go. All of the tropes that we’re pulling off the shelf and so forth. It was just another amble to say that there’s these incredible resonances here that can be explored and exploited to move the fields forward basically.
Emma: One of the things I really picked up what you were saying there Hailey, was about co-creating a shared field. And I think that’s one of the beauties of what games can offer. And the kind of work you’re doing [01:01:00] is this experience of co-creating a shared field that helps us to imagine that a different world is possible. That we can together do things, create things, make things perhaps differently. It might involve taking on a slightly different role. It might involve shifting something about how I see the world or how I behave in the world. But they offer us a little taste and experience that that is possible. And that gives me great hope.
Hailey: So when you say a shared field, you kind of mean like the resonating subjectivities kind of coming together into imagining a world together. Cause at first I thought you might be saying a field like the field of the profession of co-design.
Emma: No, I think that’s what I mean. I think someone like Nora Bateson could probably explain this a lot better than me. But it is about more like creating this, almost this new social system- that’s probably too big and clunky- but like this new kind of way in which we are interacting [01:02:00] and understanding and yeah.
Jason: No, that’s, that’s awesome Em! There you go. There you go games friends. When we’re spending time doing, telling stories together and imagining other possibilities we’re exercising that muscle that might allow us to imagine, future potential futures that are worth pursuing.
So, you know, there’s, there’s something in that. And Em, that’s really exciting to me because that is sort of the intuition that Hails and I run with in this sort of space. That the gamers of the world are developing very real capabilities that A) parallel work that for instance, you’re doing in the real world. Very tangible, real work. And B) they’re valuable things they’re not just parallels, but they’re also valuable things to be importing into other spaces.
And it’s wonderful to amble around and begin pulling on some of the threads where those sorts of capabilities, skills, shared practices crossover, because I think it’s about us all working together to start putting some of this into [01:03:00] play. And yeah it’s been enormously rewarding having you on Dr Emma. Can we do this again sometime? I think we’ve definitely got a couple of threads to pull yet.
Emma: I would be delighted to, it’s been a wonderful amble with you both. Thanks. Thanks Jase. Thanks Hailey.
Hailey: Yeah. Yeah. Very, very, just rich. And it was real pleasure to really go there and go deep on the concepts.
And what we often like to finish with this, ‘what do you have on the game table this week? Or what have you played recently?’ I didn’t say introducing you that I know you are an avid gamer. Board games, some video games. Yeah. So what’s top of mind?
Emma: Well, I don’t know how much of an avid gamer I am. I do like a good game. I like to play. I like being playful. I haven’t played video games in a very, very long time. I joined a D&D troop not long ago, but I’ve been struggling a lot with games online at the moment. And I guess just my [01:04:00] brain capacity with lockdowns and work and everything.
And one of the things I’ve actually really been enjoying is just playing poker with some friends. I’ve been sorry for my friends in Aukland, that they are stuck in lockdown, but I have enjoyed the fact that that means a group that I would normally hang out with in person if I was living in the same place as them, hangs out online on a Friday night, and just plays a game together.
And I was hesitating about even sharing that, it feels like a guilty pleasure. Like we play for money, we’re not co-creating a beautiful story. We talk shit. But I was actually reading something yesterday about recovery. And I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about rest and recovery lately as an important part of what we need to do the kind of work we do, to cope with all the shit that’s happening around us. And actually one of the really important features of recovery experience is psychological detachment. So poker offers me [01:05:00] that in ways that facilitated games don’t because so much of my work involves facilitation.
Even if it’s like we’re playing at being pirates or something very unrelated to my work. If there’s an aspect of facilitation, I think there’s a part of me that’s like the work switched on of like, how could this be facilitated differently? Whereas poker, it’s just, it’s just fun.
Hailey: I have been experiencing that as well. Yeah, for sure.
So get your rest folks, don’t feel guilty if you aren’t playing the latest, very extremely detailed co-creative storytelling game. And you’re going back to just, you know, playing Mario brothers so that you don’t have to think about it very hard. That’s totally valid in these times.
So thank you both. Thank you, Emma. Thank you Jase for coming on the amble today. As always, if you want to continue the conversation with us, you can find us on Twitter at @TheAmbleStudio. And if you enjoyed [01:06:00] this conversation and you’ve got some pocket change to spare, you can buy us a coffee by going to amble.studio/podcast and hitting that donate button. Every little bit helps to allow us to keep making free content like this.
So, looking forward to next time. Jase, you’ve got something to add?
Jason: I was just going to ask Dr. Emma, where can we find you?
Hailey: Yes.
Emma: Oh yeah, sure. So I have a website that’s emmablomkamp.com, and on Twitter, I’m @EmmaBlomkamp. Those are both spelled E M M A B L O M K A M P.
Hailey: And we will put those on the show notes, which you can also find on our website.
So fantastic folks. I think we’ll leave it there. Bye for now.
Emma: Bye!
Jason: Bye.