Playing with Research: A Board Game as Knowledge Expressions, Frictions and Travel with Engineers

In this article, we write about designing and playing a board game. We were tasked with sharing preliminary data from a five-year ethnographic study of culture change in an undergraduate engineering department. We realized that presenting a standard report would frame the engineers as spectators to their own attempts at cultural change, as the findings presented could be easily acknowledged and cast aside. As an alternative, we turned our findings into a board game to be played with the engineers. We translated our ethnographic data into the game mechanics. The players drew cards and replayed past decisions as they reflected and discussed actions they took to complete their mission towards cultural change. In each turn, players encountered knowledge expression, travel, and frictions that took place across the grant activities. We describe how change was made when engineers moved beyond their disciplinary boundaries, were self-motivated, and grounded knowledge expressions across overlapping institutional structures and collaborations. We illustrate how a board game, as a sociomaterial entanglement , functioned as a site of interdisciplinary knowledge production – where players collectively (re)constructed and enacted the project’s goals. Thereby, the game became an ethnographic practice and an additional layer of change.