Adeline Hvidsten

Gaming literacy proposes specific ways of thinking and acting by providing cognitive, creative, and social skills, which are necessary in the face of complex (Zimmerman, 2008) and wicked problems we encounter in today’s society (Rittel & Webber, 1973). This paper presents preliminary findings from an exploratory study of how students within arts, design and media might redesign board games and develop gaming literacy; helping them understand and make sense of the world “from the point of view of gaming” (Zimmerman, 2008, p. 156). Through research-based teaching at both bachelor and master levels, we developed a work-in-progress workshop where students must face complexity and practice navigating it. In the workshop, students redesigned the familiar board game Monopoly, using it as a metaphor, and our emergent findings suggest that it can provide a scaffold that enables students to map, prototype and simulate different complex problems and systems onto it - without prior game design knowledge. Monopoly introduced a balance between familiar and known rules and constraints on one side, and hackability and the freedom of play on the other. The monopoly workshop provides an experimental, hands-on, and collaborative approach to understanding complexity through intertwined actions of exploring, prototyping, testing, and reflecting (Zimmerman, Forlizzi & Everson, 2007). We found that the success of such a process seemingly depends on the facilitator and the participants. Here, allocating time for explicit reflection on learning outcomes was a necessary and vital part of the workshop (Alme & Hvidsten, 2022; Dewey, 2018). This work-in-progress workshop method contributes to studies of pedagogical games by focusing on how students might develop gaming literacy through board game redesign, offering a novel, hands-on model for engaging students in, and understanding, systemic complexity. We suggest that future research should validate this approach further, in other contexts and with other types of (board) games. Further, future research should investigate this approach as an introduction to the overarching model of gaming literacy in the face of complex problems.

Fashion is both a global industry and a domain for small-scale independent designers who approach fashion as artistic practice. Fashion design practices that are positioned outside of the industrial fashion system are enacted in the “gaps” between the fashion industry and fine art and form alternative modes of fashion to those of the dominant fashion system. Fashion design practice in between discursive categories, institutions, and systems form a ‘middle ground’ between fashion and art, without fully belonging to either. Such modes of fashion are enacted in a context of “in betweenness”. This paper engages with how this results in the space usually occupied by the human body is left blank as a demarcation of this ambiguous position. We apply the analytical concept of boundary work” and “free spaces” to explore emerging fashion practices that probe new territory that prompt us to review prevailing notions of fashion and its structuring systems.

MAD statement This annual leading article is making a difference (MAD) through providing an overview of what is design and designerly thinking, and how these constructs may be of interest to organizational change management and leadership theory and practice. In doing so, we are setting out to support a transdisciplinary application of design thinking principles, methods and tools in the continuous development of organizational change and management capabilities, as well as leadership mindsets fit to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Approaching services as sociomaterial constellations might bring to the fore new temporalities and accountabilities in designing, beyond that of the immediate service (Kimbell & Blomberg, 2017). This work-in-progress paper draws on a processual study (Langley, 1999) from Norwegian health care. It is inspired by objectivist strands of Science and Technology Studies (STS), especially Actor-Network Theory (ANT) (e.g. Latour, 2005) it explores in what way non-humans might partake as co-designers in the development, provision and re-design of service delivery: finding policy ideas, legislation and ICT hard at work.