13º Congresso Brasileiro de Pesquisa e Desenvolvimento em Design

The use of games in situations of formal education demands understandings and practices, whose results depend as much on the concepts and contexts involved as on the experience of its producers. When we recognize who plays as creator and developer, in addition to interacting, we operate methods and processes of knowledge construction, in order to turn content into rules. The Academic Life Game was developed by graduate students in Design to provoke an experience of the challenges experienced in a doctorate course and stimulate the consideration of this path in an interdisciplinary way. This article discusses the game as an approach to learning and teaching in the postgraduate in Design, the project of the game in question, its accomplishment and the methods and processes developed. The board game presents itself as a synthetic and systematic representation of concepts and relationships and promotes collective problematizations of the lived "rules", opening spaces for the re‐discussion of academic everyday life.