Design Charrettes

In recent years, gamification has become a popular strategy for engaging users and collecting data in various fields, including education, marketing, and healthcare. Gamification involves applying game design elements to non-game contexts, such as data collection and user feedback. This approach has proven to be effective in motivating participants to engage more actively and provide more accurate feedback. The game design incorporates several gamification elements, such as card-based thought provocation, prompt-based space identification, and random selection of engagement possibilities, to motivate participants to engage more actively and provide more accurate feedback.

The gaming board is based on a classic monopoly system you can find on the market. It is designed to accommodate 6-8 players ideally and is solely focused on user feedback collection for the library space. While designing this board, the core focus was to ensure that-

Every participant should be able to provide feedback on every round of action. So, restrictive activities of the classic monopoly system were taken out. Even when activities like “Go to Jail” come up, they are designed in a way where feedback is generated.
Rather than generating property, the focus here was to make students cover more possible activities, scenarios, and comfort levels for every activity. So, activities were used as monopoly blocks.
The cards were supposed to provide options and opportunities for the participants. While being open-ended for feedback collection makes the process open to newer possibilities, due to having some design vision from the clients themselves, being driven by previous research data, and making the exercise charrette friendly were also part of the process. That’s why the “Multiple Choice” process became the core of the gamification process.

HSL Library Project Design Charrette .pdf

This board was aided by 25 cards in three different categories and was used for the pilot study. Along with the board and cards- 4 different types of stickers and multicolored sticky notes were used to ensure various forms of user feedback were recorded efficiently and in a timely manner.

Testing the boards from the pilot Charrette.

The pilot charrette was carried out on students of “ARC 497 & ARC 597B: Health and wellbeing” on the College of Architecture, planning and landscape architecture. Some sound-based activities were carried out before to make the work familiar to the students.

The charrette context was as follows.

• Date: 6th April 2023

• Place: Triangle room, CAPLA, University of Arizona

• Time: 2:00 PM

23 Students were divided into three groups supervised by a “Charrette/Game Master” and were provided a contextual framework of the activity. The students participated in an hour-long exercise and provided feedback on the space and the activity itself.

The “Charrette masters” maintained a feedback sheet and collected feedback on activities around their tables. The summarized version of the observations

First design charrette

UA HSL Users

The objectives accomplished were:

Collect the user perspective from a random sample of 19 users from different HSL departments.
Have a randomized yet equal chance for all participants to speak by using dice and the options on the board.
Prevent people from controlling or overstepping and being too quiet since everyone needs to provide the same information.

Participants gave additional information we did not account for, but they did it in order and not as a limitation. The extra information showed interest in our research and how much they appreciated it when we asked their opinion.

Second design charrette.

UA HSL library stakeholders

In this phase, the feedback from the first charrette was viewed at the stakeholder level. From their feedback, every new idea that emerged from the first charrette went through a solitaire-type prompt card game. The game consisted of three phases.

Drachman HSL Design Charrette 2.pdf

First, each idea was pitched, and the stakeholders classified each topic according to their independent stance.

Then, via a solitaire model game, discussions were prompted, and unless any topic got a unanimous negative vote, every stakeholder's pros and cons were discussed.

Finally, via "mentimeter" an evolved feedback was collected for the decision-making process.

HSL Charrette 2 Final Result .pdf

According to the feedback, the stakeholders' opinions grant a viable action plan for the projects. The primary vision, therefore, will reflect both the user end feedback and pass through the viability agenda from the stakeholders and potential investors. This design process will mark the start of a proper user-centric design era.

With a two-stage charrette process, the vision is to enable the potential users and stakeholders to be involved in the decision-making of the core renovation points.

Page updated