(Co-)Designing Games for Transformations Towards Sustainability: Connecting Non-Experts with Alternative Socio-Economic and Governance Models

Abstract

With social and sustainability goals being in conflict with the dominant "neoliberal" narrative and path-dependent instiutitons, various scholars, activists and practitioners around the world are currently working on a number of radical alternatives (e.g. commons, circular economy), yet there are persistent disconnects between such strands of thought, design and practice, and non-experts as aspiring and/or active 'agents of change' on the other. This thesis critically investigates in scope and depth some of these emerging and 'path-deviant' alternatives, the theories of change associated with them and conceptual heuristics that may be used to facilitate thinking about and practices around them, and how foresight methods and tools, and games specifically, may offer new co-generative templates and boundary objects to integrate such inquiries in playful, engaging, experimental and experiential ways; and forge new connections and virtous cycles of co-creation between the worlds of alternatives, and non-experts, between different sources and ways of knowing. A number of prospectous cross-fertilizations among these fields of study and practice are put forward; and on the basis of these, further critical questions with regard to the normativities and politics of transformations towards sustainability are outlined. The findings are discussed by means of interviews with relevant experts in the respective fields in question. The inquiries into alternative models, theories of change, and foresight methods, are applied in the design of a gamified backcasting prototype that may facilitate reflexive communication around more radical socio-economic and governance alternatives and pathways towards their realization, and further explored in a game testing and co-design workshop with non-expert practitioners in a practical case study. Further avenues are explored with regard to the strategic applications of such tools in ‘post-normal’ and ‘post-political’ times, most notably involving questions around the possibility of scaling such tools to comprise more globally-oriented networked-foresight applications.