A Case Study in Playful Facilitation for Designing Embodied Experiences

Embodied design is fostering relevant advancements in novel design methods for learning and innovation. Nevertheless, practice and research show that teaching and facilitating embodied design is a challenging task. This paper presents a playful approach for conducting embodied design sessions, which adapts existing card-game mechanics to improve the accessibility and usability of existing embodied design toolboxes during a design session. Our approach hypothesizes that card-game mechanics can address usual pitfalls common to card-based facilitation toolkits by adding structure, guidelines, and playfulness. We also envision that such toolboxes, that have become popular in the research in participatory and co-design contexts, can seamlessly incorporate card-game mechanics like the ones we propose. We describe the setting of the design session, as well as present and discuss the results obtained from observation and participant questionnaires. Finally, we also outline the next steps for designing an embodied workshop in sustainability based on the results from this study. We strive to analyze our proposed method by its capacity to blend into the structure and materials of a card-based toolbox, eliciting the playfulness embedded in the leveraged card-game mechanics to implicitly provide support and guidance through the session, to both facilitators and participants, without disrupting the flexible and open flow of an movement-based design session.