Resilient Business Design: Training a reflective business design mindset through design games

Abstract

Facing a future of uncertainty for businesses, design as a process and mindset can allow businesses to become more resilient. However, transforming and working strategically with design thinking and business design requires design skills and design knowledge. In turn, we argue that this requires the development of a reflective business design mindset in non-designer. What we propose, is that design games can facilitate training this mindset and thereby strengthen business design resilience. Design games have shown to be relevant and effective tools for supporting learning and shaping a mindset. In this paper, we discuss the intersection between business design, design thinking, and experiential learning in a design game and training context and exemplify these premises with two different design games. Thus, it is concluded that training through design games can be one approach to create experience-based learning and through active experimentation training, the design mindset can be nurtured.