Game-Inspired Engineering Design: Processes and Case Studies

摘要

Game and game elements have been taken as inspiration while their principles and patterns have been used in non-gaming contexts to enhance user engagement and collaboration which in return to improve productivity in the applied setting. Recently, the game-inspired design has been emerging in the engineering industry where engineering products are being developed based on game element concepts. However, there have not been any systematic and general step-by-step process for utilizing the game-inspired design to develop engineering artefacts. In this paper, we put forward a so-called Game-Inspired Engineering Design (GIED) process which is a systematic design methodology using analogies of games or game elements to figure out solutions for resolving existing engineering problems. The whole design process consists of five steps, which are 1) engineering problem definition, 2) engineering problem reformulation, 3) game solution search, 4) principle extraction from the game-based solution, and 5) principle application & implementation. The individual steps are discussed in details and a case study of a cleaning robot capable of reconfiguration has been presented which was developed through following the GIED process. The design and development of the robot exhibit its inspiration from one of the oldest tile-matching puzzle video game, Tetris, invented by the Russian game designer, Alexey Pajitnov in 1984.