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.