ORGANISATION, STRATEGY & DESIGN : Design Heroine : Play, Business & Design : 28.11.05

ORGANISATION STRATEGY & DESIGN
Seminar Series

WHEN : Monday 28th November

TIME : 7:00pm – 8:30pm

WHERE : Robinson Rooms, A316, Old Building, Houghton Street, LSE











Design Heroine – Play, Business & Design
A dynamic young practise, working across disciplines in the UK, US and Japan.
DesignHeroine.co.uk

Harriet Harriss and Suzi Winstanley have built a practise using design processs as the starting point for all interactions with their clients. They work through creative processes to come to an understanding and an outcome with their clients.

Tools, such as games, are built from scratch and used to explore conceptual and spatial topographies with clients and users. The resulting experiences, as reflective processes, in turn lead to outcomes co-created with their clients. The tools also enable them to scale up the numbers they work with.

Suzi and Harriet introduced a number of games they had created for clients - including a multi-dimensional Process Tool - which allows participants to problem solve and make decisions. This game has five levels - pursuit, parasite, pioneer, prompt and people.

They began with a quote of Eric Frohm's that defines creativity as allowing yourself to be puzzled, accept conflict, and your ideas to be born afresh everyday. They described the interplay between business and design, through play as a dynamic set of relationships which build off of each other. They spoke of the tools as being a resource through which we can talk to each other.

They next invited the attendees to participate in another game of theirs "Transformation Story". Without rules, the attendees created a challenge for themselves. Group 1 attempted to solve the problems attending 24 hour drinking and Group Two were interested in making mass produced food tasty.

The reflection and conversations of the groups, having played the games, focussed on the relationship between content and structure - and the processes of developing structure, rules in order to make sense of the situation. The group reflected on the relationship between structure and freedom - and the need for order, the decaying of structure and the mediation of content to enable different modes of discourse.

There were questions concerning whether it was people or the game (even sans rules) which imposes the structure.

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