Dr. Karen Pollitt Cham

Keywords: gamification, reality check

Keywords: gamification, reality check

Dr. Karen Pollitt Cham

I have 23 years experience in human centred digital transformation design; I design and build digital artefacts, develop digital production methods, establish digital business, management and migration models, and devise transformational strategies; often simultaneously. My core expertise is in emotional engagement and behaviour change, using biometric insights to isolate context specific ‘nudge mechanics’.

2017 Talk

‘Bankrupting Gamification – When a Method Becomes Mythologised’

One of the biggest risks for practice based design methodologies, when creating and marketing transferable models, is that when they are adopted outside an understanding of that practice, they can become a tick box exercise for the uninitiated that promises much and doesn’t deliver. Often, the commodification of the model, seen across for example, Design Thinking, Agile and Gamification presents the method as a recipe for success in themselves, as if the art is in the model, not its application. At worst, they are presented as an ideology that demonstrates all the empty semantics of a cult. This risks bankrupting the practices entirely. In design, the outcomes should be better known than the methods, and the practices outstrip the rhetoric, and its marketing.

2017 Talk

‘Bankrupting Gamification – When a Method Becomes Mythologised’

One of the biggest risks for practice based design methodologies, when creating and marketing transferable models, is that when they are adopted outside an understanding of that practice, they can become a tick box exercise for the uninitiated that promises much and doesn’t deliver. Often, the commodification of the model, seen across for example, Design Thinking, Agile and Gamification presents the method as a recipe for success in themselves, as if the art is in the model, not its application. At worst, they are presented as an ideology that demonstrates all the empty semantics of a cult. This risks bankrupting the practices entirely. In design, the outcomes should be better known than the methods, and the practices outstrip the rhetoric, and its marketing.

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