Imagining inclusive technological futures through participatory board game design

Abstract

In 2021, we conducted a series of experimental participatory design workshops that brought diverse groups of participants together to create a board game. The purpose of this project was to use participatory game design as a provocative medium for exploring questions about and ideas for more inclusive and desirable technological futures. This paper presents a report of our experiences conducting this project, reflecting on critical aspects of its creation, facilitation, and outcomes. Through reporting on this reflective practice, we present three key findings that were instrumental in fostering a space for imaginaries of more inclusive and desirable technological futures to emerge. Firstly, through an experimental participatory design structure that promotes polyvocality in the project. Secondly, through applying a critical framework that allowed the game design activities to serve as means for reflecting on social and technological topics. Lastly, by using the affordances of game design to collectively explore ideas for more desirable technological futures. In conclusion, this paper provides methodological insights and possible practical applications of participatory game design for bringing more inclusivity into discussions about, decision-making around, and possibly even the design of future technologies.

Keywords:

• Board game
• participatory design
• inclusivity
• future imaginaries
• digital technology

Introduction

In 2021, we participated in the The New New fellowship program with a project titled Algorithms of Late-Capitalism: The Board Game (ALC Board Game). The New New fellowship supported the creation of ‘artworks, stories, concepts and tools that [can] help us imagine and work towards digital futures that are inclusive’ (2021, n.p.). In other words, futures in which digital technologies do not benefit only certain parts of a population but respond to the needs, priorities, and values of different groups and communities.

The intention of the fellowship was, however, not to find ‘quick fixes’, but rather to support projects that explore how ‘current systems and practices can be reimagined’ (The New New 2021, n.p.). In line with this, our project consisted of a series of experimental participatory board game design workshops through which diverse groups of participants could come together and use the medium of game design to collaboratively explore and imagine more inclusive and desirable technological futures.

Drawing on Schön’s (2016) notion of reflective practice, by reporting on the experience of creating and facilitating the ALC Board Game project, this paper aims to contribute methodological insights to the field of design. Specifically, insights that can be useful to designers, researchers, activists, and other practitioners interested in bringing more inclusivity into discussions about, decision-making around, and possibly even the design of digital technologies.

To understand the unique affordances of participatory board game design, we first situate the project within a broader understanding of design as a medium for critically reflective participatory practices. We then describe the project and present key findings from our reflective practice that relate to how the project facilitates the creation of imaginaries for more inclusive and desirable technological futures. In the concluding discussion, we highlight methodological insights from and limitations of the project, as well as elaborate on how ALC Board Game can contribute to future projects.

Background

Inclusivity and imaginary futures

As artificial intelligence (AI) and other algorithmic decision-making technologies have come to increasingly shape our everyday lives, there has been a growing call for more inclusivity in discussions about, decision-making around, and the design of these technologies (Bondi et al. 2021; Costanza-Chock 2020; Zytko et al. 2022). Inclusivity, in this context, means empowering people from different backgrounds and communities, especially those usually overlooked, to participate in these processes. By incorporating a broader range of perspectives, knowledge, and experiences, we can create technologies that better align with the values and needs of those impacted by these technologies while also empowering vulnerable social groups in the process, thus creating more desirable technological futures (Delgado et al. 2021).

To address this issue, participatory and co-design methodologies are frequently suggested (Delgado et al. 2021; Liao and Muller 2019). Participatory design, originating in Scandinavia in the 1970s, marked a radical reorientation of design away from corporate and industry concerns towards citizen participation and social responsibility (Sanders and Stappers 2008). It introduced methods and practices for creating hybrid spaces that allow diverse stakeholders to contribute ‘a mix of motivations, histories and goals’ to a design process without the ‘authority relations, incentives, and obligations’ (Delgado et al. 2021, 2) that characterize traditional design practices. Thus, participatory design is concerned with methods for collecting, synthesizing, and translating diverse participant inputs into concrete design decisions and outcomes (Delgado et al. 2021).

Co-design stems from participatory design, falling under the same rubric of ‘process[es] of joint labour in creative thinking and doing’ (Davis et al. 2021, 1250). Co-design can, however, be distinguished by its emphasis on full participant collaboration from the pre-design decision-making process through to the eventual prototyping phase (Sanders and Stappers 2008). As such, the popularization of co-design in recent years has given rise to various tools and ‘processes of involvement’ (Davis et al. 2021, 125) through which ‘non-designers’ can collaborate equally with ‘professional designers’ at multiple stages of a design project. Both participatory and co-design thus present powerful tools for fostering inclusivity in and through design.

Literature around fostering inclusivity in AI focuses predominantly on practical and technical design solutions using such participatory approaches, often within core industry disciplines such as Human-Computer Interaction (Black et al. 2020; Zytko et al. 2022) or fields such as healthcare (Zicari et al. 2021). However, design importantly also offers opportunities to go beyond concerns of practical problem-solving or product development in its possible contribution to more inclusive technologies.

In Speculate Everything (2013) Dunne and Raby argue for an alternative use of design as a medium that can fundamentally challenge the way things are by letting us imagine radically different ways that things could be. Critical and speculative design practices thus focus on opening new perspectives, creating spaces for discussion and debate, exploring alternative modes of thinking and doing, and redefining our relationships to present realities. It can thus help ‘set in place today factors that will increase the probability of more desirable futures happening’ while also helping to identify and address ‘factors that may lead to undesirable futures’ (Dunne and Raby 2013, 6). Such design practices are particularly effective in challenging dominant industry narratives and processes around technology. Arturo Escobar likewise argues in Designs for the Pluriverse that the ‘ontological impetus of speculative design’ (2018, 17) allows design to challenge hegemonic value systems and power relations and can thus help foster the designing of more inclusive futures.

By incorporating participatory and co-design methods into such critical and speculative design practices, we can potentially orient them even more towards fostering more inclusive futures. Liao and Muller (2019), for example, deploy speculative design practices (specifically ‘design fiction’) as participatory design tools. In doing this, they are able to identify and generate public values issues that could inform future AI products. With this paper, we similarly argue that by combining participatory and co-design methods with game design tools, it is possible to create a space for exploring questions about and ideas for more inclusive and desirable technological futures.

Participatory board game design

In writing on what she calls ‘critical play’, Mary Flanagan argues that games can be designed as ‘instruments for conceptual thinking, or as tools to help examine or work through social issues’ (Flanagan 2009, 2). This is because, as design objects, games comprise complex systems of rules, fiction, and interactivity ‘that allow the negotiation of real-world concepts, issues, and ideas’ (Flanagan 2009, 261). Consequently, Bayrak argues that games inherently carry the traits of speculative design, serving as ‘both a problem and solution space’ that allows players to explore ‘how people think things are and how people think things could be’ (Bayrak 2019, 1411).

Yet, as Werning (2020) shows in their design research, it is not only by playing a game but – more effectively – by designing a game that a space for collective reflection on and exploration of complex topics can be created. Bayrak likewise contends that designing a game with a group of participants can serve as an ‘experiential collaborative design space’ in which to critically explore certain concepts, issues, and questions (Bayrak 2019, 1410). The Policy Puzzle Game project by Kim and Nam (2021) demonstrates this in its use of game co-design as a method for engaging citizens in exploring public values that can inform policymaking.

With the ALC Board Game project, we likewise argue that by bringing participatory & co-design, critical and speculative design, and game design methods and concerns together, we can create a uniquely provocative space for exploring more inclusive and desirable technological futures. For as Delgado et al. (2021) writes, there is a growing need for new ways of thinking, new methods of openness, and new processes of involvement if we are to make future technologies more inclusive.

Method

The ALC Board Game project consisted of four participatory game design workshops conducted throughout 2021. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the workshops took place online. The participatory process was structured to function as an experimental design relay consisting of four separate sessions, each corresponding to different phases in the game design process, drawing on the work of Salen and Zimmerman (2003) and Flanagan (2009) (Figure 1). As a design relay, we structured each workshop session to accommodate a new cohort of 5 to 15 workshop participants, picking up the design process where the previous cohort left off. As such, within the context of this paper we describe the project as participatory game design (instead of co-design) as individual participants provided input at discrete stages of the design process. Nonetheless, the project drew heavily on co-design methods and practices and can thus possibly contribute insights to both participatory and co-design methodologies.

Figure 1. The four workshop sessions in the game design relay. The arrows demonstrate how the outcomes of each workshop informed the subsequent workshop.

We recruited participants with open invitations promoted through various communication channels, our personal and professional networks, and organizations involved in The New New fellowship program. At the project’s end, 39 total participants (with seven of these participants joining two or more workshops) contributed to the board game design process. While we did not systematically collect demographic information about them, we can report that they represented 22 different nationalities (Table 1), as well as 18 different professional fields that included: researchers from various disciplines, artists, artisans, technologists, software engineers, educators, students, product designers, graphic designers, community managers, performers, journalists, and 3D animators. Our aim was to include a diversity of participants who – as technology end-users – would all have an interest in how technology is impacting society and would thus all have unique perspectives, experiences, and knowledge to contribute to creating more desirable technological futures.

Table 1. A breakdown of our workshop participants by region.

Number of participants	Location
5	South America (Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina)
15	Europe (France, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Greece, Macedonia, Netherlands, Portugal, Czechia, Romania, United Kingdom)
10	Africa (South Africa)
1	North America (United States of America)
8	Asia (India, Pakistan, Turkey, China, Malaysia)

To accommodate remote participation, we conducted the workshops over Zoom and used the browser-based white boarding tool Miro to function as a collaborative design space.

Reflective practice

Donald Schön (2016) argues that design practitioners can generate new knowledge from a project through reflective practice. This constitutes reporting on their ‘reflection-in-action’, the process by which practitioners solve problems through a conscious analysis of what they experience during their practice (Schön 2016). By reporting on these reflections, practitioners can generate meaningful research outcomes and contributions to their fields. In this paper, we followingly report on our own reflective practice in conducting the ALC Board Game project.

Jasper’s (2013) ERA cycle offers a useful framework for describing the process of reflective practice. It consists of a cycle of Experience, Reflection, and Action: one has a particular experience of something; this experience is then reflected upon; and those reflections generate new actions that once again give rise to experience. Understood within the ERA cycle, we engaged in reflective practice at the end of each cycle of the design relay structure. In this article, we thus report on how we initially conceptualized the projects and workshops; what our experiences were in conducting these workshops within the scope of the project; how reflecting on these experiences gave rise to certain insights; and how these insights informed successive workshops and the project as a whole (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The ERA cycle as we experienced it.

We consider the documentation of our process, the workshop structures, and the workshop outcomes as data used to report on our reflective practice. As the reflections only occurred after the workshops concluded, only we as project facilitators were engaged in this reflective practice. We present our reflective practice in the form of summative findings in the following section.

Findings

In this section, we describe three findings from our reflective practice that contributed to the ALC Board Game project’s ability to facilitate exploration of more inclusive and desirable technological futures. Firstly, through an experimental participatory design structure that promotes polyvocality. Secondly, through applying a critical framework that allowed the game design activities to serve as a means for critical reflecting. Lastly, through using the affordances of game design to explore ideas for and questions about more desirable technological futures.

An experimental participatory structure for polyvocality

Design relay

During the conceptualization phase of the project, we decided on the experimental design relay structure for the project. We divided the game design process into four different workshops in which four unique cohorts of participants could join and contribute.

Because to the lack of continuity between participant cohorts, we anticipated problematic breaks in the cohesion of the project. Therefore, we decided that it was necessary to structure each workshop as a direct response to the outcomes created by the previous cohort (as shown in Figure 1). As the project progressed, we found that this allowed participants to progressively define and shape the project with each successive workshop, often in ways we did not anticipate or make affordances for. For example, in Workshop 2, participants agreed that the game should include two competing modes of play: one according to the formal rules, and one that subverts those rules. We thus had to completely restructure our initial plans for the third workshop to instead focus on further exploring and refining this subversive mode of play.

Despite the consequent burden that this structure placed on us as facilitators to constantly adapt the project, we realized it also played a crucial role in ensuring polyvocality in the design process. This structure allowed each phase of the design process to be increasingly determined by and naturally build on the inputs of the previous cohorts. This also created a process through which each group had to necessarily engaged with, interrogated, and iterated on the insights and ideas generated by previous groups. We found that with each successive workshop, the outcomes thus became exponentially representative of the ideas and reflections of diverse groups of participants.

Activities as ideation prompts

Because of our open invitation, we knew we had to structure the game design process in a way that allowed ‘non-designers’ to actively participate. Within the collaborative design space we set up in Miro, each workshop consisted of game design activities structured as three or four interlinked open-ended ideation prompts. Working through these ideation prompts, participants documented their reflections, discussions, and ideas. We structured the activities in a way that allowed participants to filter these into summative game design output at the end. For example, in Workshop 4, participants were tasked with creating game content that corresponds to the different modes of playing the game. Instead of structuring the ideation prompts along clear game design directives, we asked them first to answer ideation prompts such as: ‘What technology would the [player] build to create a more fair and inclusive future?’ (Figure 3). Eventually, these prompts led participants to use their ideas and reflections to create sets of cards used to play the game (Figure 4).

Figure 3. An example of an ideation prompt used during Workshop 4.

Figure 4. Game design outputs from Workshop 4 in the form of gameplay cards.

Facilitating the process

Despite the ideation prompts working well to engage participants in the design process, they did not always result in clear or cohesive game design outcomes. This added another challenge to creating cohesion between the contributions of diverse participants across the workshops.

We realized after the first workshop that our role in the design process would not only be that of facilitators. We also needed to be editors. To progress through the design phases, we had to organize and synthesize – and at times supplement – the raw outcomes of each workshop into clear game design decisions or content. This allowed us to efficiently structure the subsequent workshop’s activities and ideation prompts and give successive cohorts a clear starting point from which to continue designing the game.

Despite the somewhat intrusive and authoritative intervention this process required from our side, we did not want to forego this structure as both the relay and open ideation processes proved consistently effective in encouraging a wide range of participants to contribute new and interesting ideas and reflections to the project.

Creating a critical framework for game design activities

Priming participants

Our aim was to use the participatory game design process as a medium for exploring questions about and ideas for desirable technological futures. To this end, we had to prime participants to use the ideation prompts to critically reflect on the societal impact of emergent technologies. We did this by developing a critical framework for the workshops through which participants could engage with specific topics and issues, such as the impact of facial recognition surveillance on privacy.

Within the workshop sessions, we would start with a presentation that introduced participants to the project, followed by a practical ice-breaker activity. Only after these would we proceed to the game design activities. In the introductory presentation, we discussed where the project’s name came from. The title Algorithms of Late-Capitalism (ALC) came from a blog¹ we started in 2017. With the blog, we collected and shared memes, tech news articles, and other online media that capture some of the most poignant and absurd examples of how hegemonic value systems and market forces shape modern technology – as well as how these technologies, in turn, shape our lives (Figure 5).

Figure 5. A typical post from the ALC blog.

Despite the intended humour of the blog, we deliberately curated it along digital materialist critique. Digital materialism argues that software technologies are not objective or neutral in their technicity. Rather, they constitute socio-technical assemblages: they materially shape, and are shaped by, the social, political, economic, and cultural conditions under which they are designed, developed, distributed, and used (Reichert and Richterich 2015). By interrogating the material realities of software, we can see how and where it exercises societal and technical power in the world (Chun et al. 2022).

Within the workshop presentations, we would unpack some of the ALC blog posts with participants, often by explaining certain relevant concepts taken from digital materialist critique. In the ice-breaker activities that followed, we likewise gave participants posts from the ALC blog and asked them to critically interrogate it by answering questions such as ‘For who was this tech created?’ and ‘At whose expense are they profiting?’. Participants would then filter these reflections into a creative output, such as an overly honest news headline or a satirical diary entry from the point of view of an algorithm.

While we were initially concerned about this priming process being somewhat overbearing, the ice-breaker activity proved particularly useful in making the critical framing accessible and engaging. Moreover, it gave participants a sample exercise for translating their critical reflections into unconventional creative formats.

Open ideation for critical reflection

We structured the actual game design process in a similar way as the ice-breaker activities. Within most of the game design activities, we asked participants to discuss posts from the ALC blog as a point of departure for the open ideation process (as can be seen in Figure 3). Furthermore, the design instructions and activities contained informational resources such as hints, suggestions, background knowledge, and key concepts that participants could draw on during the ideation process. These resources often contained paraphrased ideas from digital materialist critique, as well as other critical perspectives on the design of technology, including Escobar’s (2018) pluriversal ontological design, speculative design, and intersectional feminism. For example, we paraphrased principles found in Costanza-Chock’s writing on Design Justice (2020) in the following ‘hint’ supplied for the ideation prompt ‘Who, what, and where are your players?’ during Workshop 1:

What communities are excluded from discussions around technology – and if included could make a change to our technological futures?

This strategy worked quite well in giving a critical framework to the open ideation structure. It effectively allowed us to direct the design process toward first generating reflections on digital technologies and their social impact and, from there, filtering these into game design outputs. For example, in Workshop 1 participants were tasked with creating the game’s play world. The play world frames and circumscribes the narrative reality of the game (Salen and Zimmerman 2003). Within the workshop, participants had to construct a fictional setting for the game. Working through the ideation prompts, they created a play world that can be summarized as follows:

The forming of the first Sentient Machine Cult has led to a utopian world in which everything is perfectly organized, ordered, and controlled.

Players play as a community of cyborgs. Because they are half-machines, half-humans they don’t fit into the predefined categories of this system. The Sentient Machine Cult thus sees them as a threat to their world of order.

For the cyborgs to survive in this system, they need to try and conform to what the Sentient Machine Cult finds ‘pleasing’ or ‘pretty’ to their system. Yet the cyborgs want – but are unable to – make their own decisions.

Other elements of this play world included a social credit currency called CuteCoins that cyborgs can earn if they conform to the ‘prettiness’ standard. They can then use this to access social mobility within the play world.

In constructing this play world, participants reflected on issues around workplace surveillance, algorithmic governance, online content moderation, the use of robotics in law enforcement, discriminatory data practices, and other issues. These reflections were generated through the ideation prompts and eventually coded into the play world components.

We found that participants brought their own insights and experiences of technology to the project. However, the critical framework proved instrumental in giving participants the impetus, as well as conceptual tools, to start reflecting on and critically articulating their insights and experiences through the workshop activities. As we increasingly structured the workshops on the outcomes of previous workshops, we also realized that there was less need for this purposive critical framing from our side. Successive groups of participants could simply draw on the critical reflections already encoded into the game by previous cohorts and use that as their framework.

Deploying the affordances of game design

Designing game mechanics

The ideation prompts were helpful in evoking critical reflections from participants about specific emergent technologies, as shown in the example of the play world. However, it was importantly through structuring the ideation prompts as part of game design activities that this was achieved.

In Workshop 2, we found that this process came through the strongest. It was perhaps because in this session we asked participants to construct core mechanics for the game. Core mechanics represent the basic interactivity of a game, which are then formalized into the game’s rules (Salen and Zimmerman 2003).

We tasked participants with building on the play world and the critical reflections contained within to create the game’s core mechanics. The activities consisted of ideation prompts such as ‘Why does the cyborg not fit into the sentient machines’ system, and what will happen to the cyborg because of this?’. Here, the outcomes of the first workshop also informed the critical framing of the second workshop. The cyborg’s marginalized experience of the Sentient Machine Cult’s system innately evoked an intersectional feminist critique of technology. As Constanza-Chock argues, intersectional feminist critique allows us to reflect on how technologies impact groups and individuals unequally by centring the lived experiences of those socially marginalized by these technologies (2020).

Amongst the consequent outcomes of Workshop 2 was the idea that the rules of the game should explicitly represent the Sentient Machine Cult’s algorithmic social order. As an example, one game mechanic prohibits cyborgs considered excessively ‘ugly’ or ‘displeasing’ to the Sentient Machine Cult from accessing privileged social and institutional spaces (called Control Points) which thus prevents them from progressing in the game.

Yet crucially, centring the lived experiences of marginalized people in critiques of technology can also help us to start imagining possible alternatives that are more open and inclusive (Ciston 2019). Through the ideation prompts, we guided participants to similarly use the process of creating core mechanics from the marginalized position of the cyborg to think of transformative alternatives to this speculative play world.

Participants followingly constructed an additional subversive mode of play, made possible through the Transbox game mechanics. Unlocking a Transbox would allow the player to start changing the game’s rules and consequently transform the play world into one in which the cyborgs are empowered instead of discriminated against.

The game design relay structure effectively allowed us to build upon this in the subsequent workshop by letting participants create the Transbox mechanic’s actual game components.

Exploring alternative futures

With the last two workshops, we realized we needed to orient the ideation processes more actively towards exploring imaginaries for more desirable technological futures. In Workshop 3, we consequently tasked participants with creating Transbox cards and the new cyborg-empowering rules they contain. We supplied participants with a draft rulebook created from the outcomes of Workshop 2 and then structured the activities through ideation prompts such as: ‘What kind of values do these rules communicate?’ and ‘How can [a specific] rule be changed, overruled, or inverted to represent values for a more just and inclusive technological future?’

Using the ideation prompts, participants first generated values that they considered essential to creating a more desirable technological future. From there, they composed Transboxes cards that changed the rules of the game to accommodate these values. These included rules that override how cyborgs are valued within the system (e.g. ‘Low prettiness scores do not mean low value’); introduce new winning conditions that encourage collaboration above competitiveness (e.g. ‘Nobody wins if somebody loses’); prioritize care for the most vulnerable members of society (e.g. ‘Players can pick someone to get protected from penalties inflicted’); and more (Figure 6). The Transbox cards thus comprised a co-created value-system that could transform the play world and its discriminatory technological systems into a more desirable and inclusive technological future.

Figure 6. The CuteCoin Stokvel Transbox card changes how CuteCoins are distributed and used. Instead of reinforcing unequal social mobility, it promotes community cohesion and well-being.

The outcomes of Workshop 3 allowed us to facilitate this polyvocal exploration of more desirable technological futures further. We did this by structuring Workshop 4 to focus on creating additional game content in the form of SM4RT C1TY cards. These contained speculative technologies that would either exist under the Sentient Machine Cult’s rules or would come into existence under the Transbox rule-changes (Figure 7). In doing this, we could use the workshop to encourage participants to continue exploring how the co-created values found in the Transboxes would manifest in speculative technologies within the play world.

Figure 7. The Sm4rt Wall3t exists under the Sentient Machine Cult’s rules, while the Financial Support Bots represent the values found in the Transbox rule-changes.

Conclusions

The final outcome of the ALC Board Game project was a playable prototype that we have since play-tested and are further refining for publication.² However, as this paper argues, it is the methodology used to design the game itself that can be meaningfully employed. Below, we concludingly discuss how participatory game design presents a unique method for exploring questions about and ideas of more desirable and inclusive technological futures. In addition, we briefly consider how this method can possibly contribute to other projects that promote inclusive decision-making around, and design of technologies.

Possible methodological contributions

Generating unique polyvocal insights and ideas

The use of game design proved an exceptionally provocative medium. Using the playful prism of cyborgs navigating a Sentient Machine Cult’s rule-based system allowed participants to collaboratively identify and reflect on problems presented by current social and technological realities and explore solutions.

Throughout the project, using game design allowed us to accomplish two crucial things. Firstly, it gave us formats (such as play world components or game rules) that made it easy to use individual workshop outcomes as integral building blocks for subsequent workshops. Secondly, the affordances of game design were helpful in involving participants in identifying and reflecting on problems around the societal impact of emerging technologies. For instance, creating rules for the game became an exploration of how discriminatory algorithmic systems in the public sphere can reify the marginalization of certain members of society. Such reflections were then used, through creating gameplay elements, for imagining alternatives to this reality and exploring speculative solutions to these problems.

However, as we found, using participatory game design as a critical and speculative design medium requires striking a fine balance between the creative process of game design and the critical framing of the activities. Overburdening the workshops with critical and theoretical framing can inhibit participant’s from engaging and consequently prevent polyvocality. However, concentrating on enjoyable design activities without critical or theoretical framing can defuse the crucial reflective potential of game design as a medium. We found that structuring the game design activities not as ‘expert game designer’ tasks but rather as open-ended ideation prompts created an opportunity to do that. As Sanders and Stappers (2008) write, for participants to feel empowered within co-design methodology, they need to be given appropriate tools for expressing themselves within the design process.

In addition to the above, structuring the participatory game design process as a relay allowed the reflections, insights, and ideas generated during the workshops to become increasingly polyvocal. Despite being an untested experiment, this relay structure was central to the project’s orientation towards inclusive exploration of questions about and ideas of desirable technological futures.

As an experiment, the project did however have some methodological limitations. The open ideation and design relay structure required us to have an overbearing editorial role in the design process. This partially prevented the dissolution of the power relations between us as designers and the participants as equal contributors. An additional step could have been added in which participants help refine their contributions and perhaps assist in the editing process. However, with this, we also acknowledge that even in the most authentic participatory or co-design structures, the designer as facilitator is always to some extent a participant – albeit perhaps not in the same manner as other contributors. Nonetheless, it is crucial to acknowledge and reflect on where and how power relations are reaffirmed, as we have aimed to do in this article by explicitly addressing how our editorial role shaped the project’s priorities and outcomes.

Likewise, a related limitation is not engaging participants in the reflective practice itself. Involving participants in synthesizing their results, discussing and debriefing about the workshops, and structuring the following workshops, could have empowered participants even more. This could also have given us crucial feedback regarding whether the project outcomes adequately reflect the experiences, ideas, and values of participants in the end and thus, whether such a project could benefit them as technology end-users. Thus, a question of evaluation remains: how could we ensure that the project delivered outputs that benefit the participants?

Gathering diverse participants

In his review of co-design projects, Davis et al. (2021) writes that there is not always sufficient reflection on who gets to participate, who should participate, and how to facilitate this. To that end, we shortly reflect on how we promoted participation in the project.

Firstly, the design relay structure itself proved a valuable method for opening the project to a larger group of participants than would otherwise have been possible. In this, the relay structure promoted broader inclusion by allowing new and different perspectives to enter the project with each successive session.

Moreover, focusing the project on game design enabled us to engage a range of participants who might not have joined if it had been focused, for example, explicitly on digital materialist critique of emergent technologies. The use of playful and creative mediums such as game design can go a long way towards lowering the barrier of participation for people who might have been initially disinterested in the topic or might not have felt confident in contributing their reflections and ideas in such a space.

Conducting the workshop online relates to what Davis calls ‘low-contact’ co-design (2021): co-design mediated by ICT-based platforms like Zoom and Miro. While this does perhaps create barriers to participation in terms of access to high-speed internet, digital literacy, and other factors, it also opened the project to wider geographical participation. Instead of engaging local stakeholders in Northern Europe, where we are based, international participants from a variety of cultural contexts, experiences, and backgrounds could contribute their reflections, ideas, and perspectives. This helped facilitate a practical orientation of our project towards inclusivity and polyvocality.

However, perhaps we relied too much on this open invitation format and the use of game design to attract participants. In line with Davis et al.’s critique, we did not sufficiently consider who should be encouraged to participate. To explore questions of inclusivity in technology design, we could have done more to identify and attract the specific groups or communities that are most often ignored in discussions about, decision-making around, or design of AI or other emergent technologies. Especially as it is those that have the least influence in decision-making around the design of these technologies that often experience the most social harms because of these technologies (Costanza-Chock 2020).

Opportunities for practical applications

We lastly want to comment on potential applications of this methodology, or elements of it, in other projects. Despite the orientation away from practical problem-solving, we suggest that tactics and methods used in ALC Board Game can be meaningfully incorporated into larger design or design research projects aimed at guiding decision-making around or practical processes for inclusive technology design.

Firstly, this methodology can help create a collaborative ideation space between different stakeholder groups, similar to the Policy Puzzle Game (Kim and Nam 2021) project. By inviting relevant stakeholders to the game co-design process, Policy Puzzle’s game co-design format ‘helped ordinary citizens convince civil servants of the necessity of a policy by defining the core value of the policy based on their needs’ (Kim and Nam 2021, 11). Involving industry stakeholders or policymakers in a project such as ALC Board Game, while centring the project on the priorities and expertise of the community participants, could similarly serve as a practical intervention and provide a possible tool for inclusive decision-making around tech development.

Secondly, while the game design process is perhaps not a good source for practically applicable technological innovations, it can serve as a tool for what Sanders and Stappers call ‘front end ideation’ (2008). Within co-design methodology, this refers to activities that ‘take place in order to inform and inspire the exploration of open-ended questions’ (Sanders and Stappers 2008, 6–7). In Liao and Muller (2019) participatory design fiction project, the co-creation of design fiction narratives was similarly used as a method to identify ‘critical value issues’ that could inform the design of AI technologies that are more sensitive to the needs and priorities of different stakeholder communities. Elements of the ALC Board Game methodology could be used to similar ends and incorporated into such larger participatory or co-design projects. Importantly, however, Liao & Muller’s project was structured as design research with specific actionable research goals and industry-applicable outcomes in mind. This enhanced its practical applicability.

Participatory or co-design methodologies should inherently foster greater inclusivity in technology design. However, we would lastly argue that introducing considerations of intersectional feminism, pluriversal design, digital materiality, and other critical perspectives on digital technology into or as part of a participatory or co-design project can crucially reframe the discussion and consequent design decisions. This can likewise prevent participatory processes from being co-opted, as is often the critique, and reifying existing social inequalities and power relations under the veneer of participation (Delgado et al. 2021). Through these critical frameworks, you can bring more reflective criticality and consequent public empowerment into a discussion or design process. Costanza-Chock similarly argues that design provocations that challenge the status quo can be included in the context of larger design projects, ‘either at an early stage (during ideation) or alongside and in parallel with the pragmatic design product’ as a way to ‘produce a shift toward action that models alternative presents and possible futures’ (2020, 220) within material products.

The ALC Board Game project was experimental, and its tangible contributions towards foster greater inclusivity in technology perhaps somewhat hypothetical. Yet, in reflecting on how we brought participatory processes, critical and speculative practices, and the affordances of game design together, we have aimed to make a possible contribution to design as a field. We would be interested in seeing if and how any of the methodological components discussed above could be used in future projects interested in bringing more inclusivity into discussions about, decision-making around, and possibly even the design of digital technologies.

Acknowledgments

We want to thank the participants of The Algorithms of Late-Capitalism: The Board Game workshop sessions for their inspiring contributions to the project. We would also like to thank the funding organizations SuperrrLab, Bertelsmann Stiftung, and Allianz Kulturstiftung for the support given to us throughout The New New fellowship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

The Algorithms of Late-Capitalism: The Board Game project was funded by SuperrrLab, Bertelsmann Stiftung, and Allianz Kulturstiftung under the 2021 The New New fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Adriaan Odendaal

Adriaan Odendaal is a PhD candidate at Erasmus University Rotterdam where he is part of the Societal Impact of AI (AiPact) research team. His research focuses on the role creative practice can play in facilitating alternative AI design practices. Adriaan is co-founder of the research and design studio internet teapot, a collaboration focusing on speculative and critical design projects.

Karla Zavala Barreda

Karla Zavala Barreda is a PhD candidate in Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow with the interdisciplinary network e-LADDA. She holds an MA in Media Arts Cultures from Aalborg University and a BA in Communication for Social Development from the University of Lima. Her research interests include software studies, platform studies, and critical design. Karla is also co-founder of the research and design studio internet teapot.

Notes

1 algorithmsoflatecapitalism.tumblr.com.

2 The game will be published in April 2024 and made available at algorithmsoflatecapitalism.tumblr.com/the-game.