About

Some designed products or services can be better explored through role-playing. Those products or services will involve the interaction of various people with each other, or of people with machines and systems, and so forth. In Role-Playing, the team of designers, who are keen to see how their design ideas will work in practice, can adopt the roles of key stakeholders, and play-act scenes that show their product or service in action. For example, the design team may be designing a trading app, therefore they decide to play the roles of a street vendor and their customer using the trading app to make a sale. That way, they can experience using the hypothetical trading app, and ‘walk through’ the steps necessary to make a sale, and see how their ideas will happen in practice. While they are using this method, the designers will have plenty of opportunities to brainstorm for new ideas, or refine their design concept, as it is being acted out.
 

What you need

• Your sketches and notes from your design process.
• A4 notepad, and pen or pencil.
• A suitable place to work freely without distractions.
• Half-an-hour to one hour for role-playing.
   

Method

Begin by selecting the design idea or concept that you want to explore. You may wish to compare two or more different design concepts. You can sketch or build rough mock-ups of your designed artefacts to use as props in the role-playing session. One student designer will take notes.

• Members of the design team are assigned the different stakeholder roles to play.
• Using props and so forth, you play-act key scenarios (or scenes) in the use of your product or system.
• As you are role-playing, so you may do the following:
  • Discuss any problems that are arising and find solutions.
  • Propose other ways of offering your product or service, by modifying your design concept.
  • Think outside the box, and come up with a radically new way of doing things.
• At the end of the role-playing session, you should have improved and refined your design concept, or come up with something even better.
• Take the time to confirm that the entire design team understands and agrees with the results of the role-playing session.
  • Check that your design concepts from the session agrees with your Problem Statement (IV).

​​​​​​​Tips

• Keep notes and make sketches of the design concepts that emerge from the role-playing.
  • Photograph any props that you made that might be useful in the future.​​​​