Play games to improve at design thinking.

A guide on practicing Design Thinking through playing games.

While nowhere near perfect, Design Thinking is still an effective way to solve a problem. And as a professional, it’s important for you to keep evolving and leveling-up your design thinking skills.

Despite the fancy naming of Design Thinking, it’s actually more about Design Doing, Like most things, you get better at it with lots of practice.

I’m going to show you a unique way to practice your skills in design thinking and decision making using games and your own imagination.

Like pilots, we are going to use simulators to kick-off our careers. By simulators I mean games since they are a perfect and proven way to educate.

While not all games will support this type of learning experience, it’s important to point out that every single game is a simulator of some kind; for example, Legend of Zelda is an adventure simulator, Grand Theft Auto is a crime simulator, and so on.

A great category of games to practice design thinking with are construction and management simulation games such as Tycoon titles, they are designed to simulate real life and encourage experimentation and allow multiple solutions to the same problem.

This is a shortlist of recommendations of games that simulate real-life businesses:

That’s just scratching the surface of what you can do in these types of games. While the results may not be identical to real-life situations, don’t forget that you are doing it for the sake of practicing methods of problem solving and testing assumptions.

Make sure that you experiment using the right tools, and that you’re solving measurable problems to confirm that you’re solving something, and always test your assumptions with new ways to fix problems.

You need to move forward and think outside the box (I mean the screen you are staring at). Design Thinking is rooted on the basis of the iterative process of user observation and post-action learning. Utilizing games is a great way to start experimenting and prototyping ideas in simulated real life.

Inspire your inner child and invent real-life games; figure out the best bike route to the city, make the perfect pizza and see if the solution you already made to save your pet from falling from the balcony is actually working (note to self: install better fencing at the balcony, note to reader: he hasn’t fallen yet).

The importance of collaboration in this type of problem solving is critical; always team up on solving problems and you’ll be amazed by how much you will be learning.

In the end, this guide shows you a unique and simple way to start practicing Design Thinking. It’s always a good idea to try new and different ways of doing things and change the “what if?” into a “why not”.

Thank you! I hope you enjoyed this topic, feel free to leave any comment or feedback in the comment section below.

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