Designing for social action

David Wilcox's picture

Pradsa
I'm really looking forward to tomorrow's first PRADSA workshop in Loughborough, and since I'm running a session I thought you might like a preview. We'll be trying out a version of a game I've developed over the past few years with my colleague Drew Mackie.

The game aims to help people design a programme ... which might include regeneration projects, participation activities, or technology development. In this case we'll be looking at how groups or organisations might use social media, and other activities for ... well, whatever they want to achieve.
I ran something similar at the Circuit Rider conference back in January, as you can see here, and it went pretty well. This time I've done more work, talked it through with Ann Light, know there will be some really buzzy people taking part, so I know it's going to be fun.
Put simply we'll start by inventing a scenario, and some characters, then look at a set of methods on cards , choose those that could be useful, put them into some sort of order, and tell the story of what happens to the programme and the characters. I'll be throwing in a few challenges to liven things up.
I've uploaded the full instructions here (zipped pdfs 2M), and you can see other similar games on our usefulgames site, including one developed for the Digital Challenge programme.
I hope that tomorrow the game will be a good way of helping us get to know each other, and that in the longer term it might be a tool that we could use more widely in our workshops programme ... with any improvements that you might suggest.