Creating a Serious Game to Support Discussions about Cognitively Supportive Home Design.
How would you convince people with very different perspectives to see each other’s side of an argument?
How you answer that question will vary quite a bit depending on your experience. A teacher working with young students who are in conflict will use very different tactics to a UN representative trying to negotiate how different countries should come together to respond to a particular problem, for example.
Work Package 4 focuses on designing a tool that will help people from different backgrounds with different needs and priorities come together and explore the challenges associated with designing homes from healthy cognitive ageing from different perspectives.
The Serious Game will help players not only listen to different views, but put themselves in the shoes of different stakeholders to get a better understanding of how these different perspectives can shape every aspect of creating homes for healthy cognitive ageing, from design to use.
Designing the Game (led by Dr Vikki McCall)
What is a Serious Game?
A serious game is simply a game that is designed to be used as a tool help the players achieve a particular outcome. Serious games focus on achieving a particular goal, rather than entertaining the players. As a result, many serious games are designed to be educational, or to help players learn or improve a particular skill, or to help them develop a new habit.
If you’ve played a realistic flight or train simulator or used an app to make a game out of starting to run regularly, you’ve probably played a serious game.
What is DesHCA doing?
Work Package 4 will draw in all of the learning and information collected throughout all of DesHCA’s other activities to create a game that encourages players to put themselves in the ‘shoes’ of different stakeholders involved in creating homes that support healthy cognitive ageing to work together to achieve that goal.
Playing the game will help players see the idea of cognitively supportive housing and adaptations from different perspectives, and teach them about some of the different factors that influence how people in different industries, sectors, and positions think about supportive housing.
The game will draw on information gained from a wide range of groups, industries, and sectors to support players to get a realistic insight into the real world pressures that can shape how different people engage with and think about supportive design.
The game will be designed and tested in Work Package 4 before being used as a major component of the stakeholder workshops in Work Package 5.
Our goal is to design a tool that can continue to be used to facilitate discussions and find creative solutions to the problems involved in creating and maintaining cognitively supportive housing after the project ends in 2024.
