Gamestorming 2.0

Chapter 5. The Design Canvas

Gamestorming is more than a book. It’s a collaborative way of life, a sweeping invitation to make work more visible, sharable, engaging, and meaningful. We’ve been workshopping and teaching gamestorming since before it had a name. In fact, the original working title for Gamestorming was “The Visual Thinking Playbook.”

One of the early adopters of this approach and evangelists for the movement was Alex Osterwalder, known for producing the best-selling book Business Model Generation with coauthor Yves Pigneur, which featured the Business Model Canvas (John Wiley and Sons). This canvas was shared in the first edition of Gamestorming, and both books came out in 2010. Gamestorming was introduced to Alex in a workshop in Geneva in 2007, and he quickly saw the value and supported it. Since that (fantastic!) year, the Business Model Canvas has taken the world by storm and created a new category of artifact, a hands-on tool (a kind of game board) called the design canvas, defined and explored in the following section. This category is so useful that it has been rapidly adopted by consultants, practitioners, and facilitators all over the world, and there are now hundreds, if not thousands, of design canvases, available for every imaginable personal and professional use.

This rapid proliferation has also created quality problems. Design canvases have a tendency to look similar to one another. Many are ultimately just worksheets labeled as “canvases.” It’s very ...