Special Issue of Simulation & Gaming: Service Design Games (May 2014)

Deadline for submissions: 31 May 2014
Website: http://sg.sagepub.com/ and http://www.unice.fr/sg/

Service Design may, to an outside eye, seem an unlikely area in which to use games and play. However, the fields of Service Innovation, Service Design, Participatory Design and Co-Design have a strong tradition of using games and playful activities to improve existing services and innovate new ones. Games are used with the staff, management, customers and other stakeholders of service providers. Yet these games have so far been developed, deployed and analyzed in relative isolation from the research conducted within game studies and the study of simulation/games. The aim of this symposium (special issue) is to fill this academic void by bringing together, consolidating and promoting contributions from service design games and placing them into dialogue with work in the sibling fields. Thus, the study of service design games will also contribute to simulation and game studies and design worldwide, and will in turn assist service designers in making their games even more efficient and interesting than they are now.

We therefore invite both researchers and industry professionals to participate in a symposium issue of Simulation & Gaming: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Theory, Practice and Research. High-quality submissions from a wide range of disciplines are welcome. We have chosen Simulation & Gaming as the venue for this special issue, because it is the top journal in the area and it covers serious gaming, virtual businesses, game-based education and many related methods. This will be a fruitful, new context for the study of design games, one that will benefit all parties to the discourse.

 Potential topics for the symposium include, but are certainly not limited to, the following:
– Service design role-plays
– Comparison of service design games with games and simulations used in other areas
– Debriefing of service design games
– Playful activities for service innovation
– Design games and spatiality
– Games and playfulness for explorative participatory innovation
– Gamification of services x Games and simulations for organizational training in services
– Games and playful activities for engaging different parties during a service design project

The concept of Service Design Games is to be interpreted broadly. We would welcome, for example, contributions that also go beyond the established understanding of games and simulations as tools of training for best practices. We are also looking for papers on explorative play as a way of inquiry-based learning and sense-giving between different service stakeholders across boundaries under boundary conditions of complexity and uncertainty as we find it, for example, in participatory innovation challenges. Also, as not every game is playful, we encourage work that helps to establish a critical understanding of how we can grasp the opportunities and weaknesses of play, playfulness, games and simulation in relation to services. Furthermore, how can play in a broad sense help grasping and learning for development and innovation in services, which are characterized by intangibility, heterogeneity, simultaneity of production and consumption, perishability and information intensity? From experience we know that play reveals new perspectives among different stakeholders in product development processes and often leads to the renegotiation of relations, power and meaning. How do play and games change the conversations among stakeholders and affect service innovation? How can we understand leadership and management in services and service innovation, and how can different kinds of play matter in the development of relevant knowledge, skills and competences. How can play be designed for different purposes in the management and innovation of services?

The editors are especially interested in seeing high-quality articles that build bridges along a variety of perspectives on service design games and the various other game and simulation scenes in the world.

Accepted articles will be published relatively fast electronically (and thus count as a published article) before the complete symposium is published. Please send to the Guest Editors a one- to two-page outline proposal (.doc, not .docx) containing the following elements:

– Your name, e-mail, phone, address, etc.
– A working title, an abstract and a plan for the proposed paper (less than one page).
– You may, if you wish, also send copies of any relevant already-published articles of yours.

Schedule
– Receipt of proposals during May, 2014.
– Response to proposals in a month.
– Writing & submission of ms, from 2 to 4 months.
– Review of v1 of ms sent to authors within 2 months.
– Ms revision (maybe 2nd review), editing, proofing.
– Publication online as articles are accepted.

Guest Editors:
J. Tuomas Harviainen, School of Information Sciences, University of Tampere, Finland
Kirsikka Vaajakallio, Diagonal Design Agency, Finland
Henrik Sproedt, Mads Clausen Institute, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark