Learning innovation and design process is a necessity of the coming decade and games are a potential tool to do so. This paper proposes an extended taxonomy for categorising innovation and design games. The intent is to understand the essential, the similar and the different categories not only for development, but also for evaluation of innovation and design games, and in turn, help educators identify appropriate games for their learning objectives and curricula.
The Bologna declaration states that, "successful learning and studying in higher education should involve students in deep learning". However, a survey of faculty across institutes in Nepal and Bhutan highlights that the undergraduate students in engineering and management lack skills needed to be industry-ready. They face difficulty in getting employed after graduation and if placed, then struggle during their employment due to insufficient practical experience, lack of good communication skills and unawareness of larger socio-economic contexts. The Erasmus+ funded project, "Strengthening Problem-based learning in South Asian Universities"(PBL South Asia) is an endeavour to address these pressing concerns in education quality, employability and overall sustainable development of the region and to imbibe deep learning capabilities. Therefore, as an empirical study to clarify and in turn, inculcate PBL in South Asian undergraduate education, the young faculty of the inexperienced institutes from Nepal and Bhutan, alongside the students from the experienced institutes from India and Europe, were mentored by faculty and researchers from the latter to undertake multidisciplinary case studies. The strategy of 'Design Thinking' was employed to methodologically guide the cases and keep it consistently problem-based, i.e., the learning is driven by the problem with no one correct solution. Results showed that the participants reflected improvement in problem-solving skills and increased motivation, apart from enhanced collaboration and improved communication ability. Based on these findings, further development of curricula to imbibe PBL in its existing courses and guidelines to train the trainers for implementation of the same, is currently in progress.
Design is a decision-making process for which knowledge is a prerequisite. Most decisions are taken at the conceptual stage and have pronounced influence on the final design. The literature, therefore, recommends the incorporation of sustainability criteria, such as environment, at this stage. Difficulty in performing life cycle assessment (LCA) due to low availability of information at the conceptual stage for evaluation and highly abstract nature of solutions, inadequate incorporation of DfE (Design for Environment) guidelines and LCA reports into the design process, and a lack of effective communication of the same to the designers for prompt decision-making are major motivations for the development of a support. This paper discusses a “conceptual Tool for environmentally benign design” – concepTe – that supports designers in decision-making during the conceptual design stage, by offering environmental impact (EI) estimates of abstract solutions with associated uncertainty, for evaluation and selection of the most environmentally benign solution as concept. The EI estimates are calculated by a module in the tool based on a proposed EI estimation method, which requires the support of a knowledge base to fetch appropriate LCA information corresponding to the design element being conceptualized. This knowledge base is grounded in the domain-agnostic SAPPhIRE model ontology, allows semantic operability of the knowledge, and offers the results to the designers in a familiar domain language to aid decision-making. A “proof of concept” of the tool is developed for application in design of building in the AEC (Architectural design, Engineering, and Construction) domain. Further, empirical studies are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the “proof of concept” to support decision-making and results are found favorable. The paper also discusses the future scope for further development of the tool into a holistic design decision-making platform.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.