Gamification as a Means to User Involvement in Decision-making Processes for Sustainable Buildings

User ownership, actors’ and stakeholders’ lack of knowledge is often identified as critical success parameters and barriers when evaluating how well sustainable buildings perform. Recognising that it is impossible to drive sustainable development without the people who pay for sustainable buildings, and the people who run and use these buildings, the development of a dialogue and prioritisation tool was funded by the Danish Ministry of Immigration, Integration and Housing. This paper presents the tool development process that is a result of a participatory research and development process where the tool was developed by a multidisciplinary group of stakeholders and actors from the Danish building and housing industry. The paper presents how gamification can be used to make complex and academic issues of sustainability available to decision-makers in housing organisations who are typically people from all walks of life.
Design thinking was used as method to develop a tool that focuses on how to make sustainable strategy development accessible to non-specialists during those critical stages of building design processes when goals and prioritisations are set. The tool is based on an open and editable platform and it will be available to the public in the early Summer of 2017. The paper presents how design thinking is used as an engaging research and development methodology, as well as, an introduction to the dialogue and prioritisation tool’s content and format.