Facilitating participant engagement in remote co-design through gamification

Rapid-changing innovation environments require more interaction and interchange of knowledge among multi-stakeholders. The co-design approach is increasingly popular on these occasions thanks to its unique and diverse approaches to engaging people in design activities. However, impacted by the covid19 pandemic, the classic in-person co-design event cannot be organized. A challenge has emerged during the lockdown and in the post-pandemic era when working from home becomes the new normal. That is, how to facilitate co-design activities remotely? As the employment of game elements in non-game contexts, the gamification approach has been applied for many serious purposes in online environments. It seems a promising solution to facilitate remote co-design in terms of engagement. However, this is a topic that continues to pose challenges for designers and researchers. How to understand participant engagement? How to facilitate participant engagement in remote co-design through gamification? How to measure participant engagement if a gamification solution is proposed? The research actions follow the 'research through design' process. Start by formulating several structured design principles and hypotheses built on the review and analysis of literature. Various types of prototypes are continuously designed and developed based on the result of the literature review. Finally, the core hypotheses can be verified through the implementation of experiments or studies in the real field or a context-simulated lab. In order to gain a comprehensive understanding of participant engagement, we applied a systematic review scan across the design literature. The results suggest a dimensional and attribute-based interpretation, in which engaging participants can be understood as the promotion of intrinsic motivation, involvement, and empowerment. By scanning the literature in game studies and supported by the case studies, we introduced the framework of "game principles," in which fantasy, rules, challenge, meaningful choice, and lusory attitude are considered as the principles to shape gamification for participant engagement in co-design. Based on this, we designed a working prototype, 'ideaGardener ', as the instrument of design knowledge inquiry to test our theories. The ideaGardener metaphorizes gardening as the innovation process, providing an engaging and structured means to “preparing,” “seeding,” and finally “harvesting” the concepts that address a particular problem/challenge. Finally, we adopted ideaGardener in experiments and studies. A comparison experiment has been carried out foremostly. We investigated the effects of applying a gamification approach relative to using a non-game method. Based on the self-report data collected from 47 participants, we find that participants experiencing gamification conditions report significantly higher levels of engagement than the baseline group. Moreover, we invited five experts to rate participants' developed concepts regarding creativity. The results show the experts acknowledge more novelty in the concepts developed from the gamification workshops. The experiment confirms the tremendous impact of gamification on engagement in terms of intrinsic motivation, involvement, and empowerment. Afterward, by combining the qualitative data from the experiment and other implementations, we investigated participants' perceptions regarding ideaGardener and the game principles manifested. This in-depth insight supports the completion of the framework of game principles as the guideline for designing impactful gamification in remote co-design for participant engagement. The thesis contributes to the theory of design participation, co-design, and design innovation methods and practice, particularly for the participant engagement during remote or low-contact participation. By introducing and validating the 'game principles,’ this thesis extends the boundary of gamification in terms of facilitating and coordinating remote co-design, especially for innovation challenge organizers and facilitators. It also provides avenues for further research in the interaction of design, innovation culture, and gamification.