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Philips Design has published its quarterly ezine, New Value News, with a few materials about ‘serious games’ and their use in design and innovation- see Playful Innovation (small intro and pdf) . This basically a short description of one of such games – Spark, a tiny, cute boardgame that helps in generating so called ‘insights’ during so called ‘ideation workshops’. This is not really a self-standing game, but rather an element of quite a rigid workshop structure, but well, it’s still fun to play.

Another publication, Playing with Futures, is a small piece about serious games as a tool to explore possible futures. There are few relatively well-known examples there, and another game developed by Philips Design (i.e., by Otto and myself), which we titled ‘Building Futures’.

[The] “game developed by Philips Design for Design Initiatief, a new Dutch organization helping businesses collaborate and co-create new future-proof solutions. In this game, different teams construct possible futures in an interactive and competitive way, using ideas as building bricks for their projects. Importantly, people not only ‘imagine’ new futures, but are also ‘live’ and ‘work’ in them – preparing and transforming themselves for new emerging realities.”