Documentation games: A comparison between three games to support participatory design teams to document their design process

Abstract

Sharing documentation is part of many good practices that engage participants on a long-term base. Well-known are the professional fields of Open Source Software, Open Hardware and Open Innovation, as well as academic research. At its core, documentation is about transferring information beyond one specific project team, site or time frame. We specifically explore Participatory Design projects, wherein this type of information exchange remains a challenge for many researchers. From a literature study about how to support making documentation in Open Source Software and Hardware practices, we learn how to elicit skill building and intrinsic motivation. We complement these insights with two Participatory Design practices that already use a form of documentation, i.e. design games and sensitizing. We distinguish five characteristics that designers can use to implement documentation in the design process by balancing between skill building and intrinsic motivation, and propose the concept of ‘documentation games’ as a format supporting this. We exemplify this approach through three case studies and assess how the five characteristics and the documentation games provide handholds to include documentation to support long-term engagements in participatory design processes.