Gamestorming

Preface

IN 1807, THE GRIMM BROTHERS BEGAN COLLECTING FOLK TALES that had, up until that point, never been written down. In 1812, they published a collection of 86 tales under the title Children’s and Household Stories. By the seventh edition, the last published in their lifetime, the collection had grown to 211 tales. If not for the work of the brothers Grimm, we might never have heard such stories as Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and the Frog Prince.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were motivated by a few things: as philologists, they wanted to understand the linguistic elements of the stories and their sources; as historians, they wanted to record the stories as they were told in households; as storytellers, they wanted to entertain, and as Germans (there was no single German state at the time) they were interested in understanding and developing a sense of common identity among German-speaking peoples.

A few years ago, the co-authors of this book embarked on a similar project: our goal was to identify a set of emerging methods and approaches to work that have been germinating since the 1970s and are deeply intertwined with the burgeoning Information Age.

Since the invention of the computer chip, we have been moving from an industrial to a post-industrial economy, where the nature of work is changing. In an industrial society, workers are expected to fit standardized job descriptions and perform their duties ...