Gamified Informed Decision-Making for Performance-Aware Design by Non-Experts: An Exoskeleton Design Case Study

AI summary

Overview

Research area: Human-Computer Interaction, specifically decision support systems (DSS) for design, gamification, and performance-driven architectural design. Technical level: Intermediate — the paper assumes familiarity with design decision-support concepts, game engines, and building-performance metrics (structural, environmental, fabrication), but the framing is accessible to designers rather than only to specialists. Scope: The paper presents and evaluates a gamified decision-making framework that pairs a game engine with real-time performance feedback, tested on non-expert designers carrying out an exoskeleton facade retrofit for an existing building.

What This Paper Is About

Non-expert designers often cannot meaningfully explore design spaces where many performance criteria — structure, energy, fabrication, material, cost — interact at once. Decision support tools are meant to bridge that gap, but open-ended generative tools may leave users without enough structure to make informed choices. This paper's goal is to build and test a gamified framework that gives non-experts real-time, multi-criteria performance feedback so they can iteratively refine a design and negotiate trade-offs themselves.

Key Contributions

1. A gamified decision-making framework that integrates game engines with real-time performance feedback for design exploration.
2. A multi-criteria performance model covering structural behavior, environmental parameters, fabrication, material, and cost considerations within one interactive environment.
3. An empirical evaluation with 24 architecture students and non-expert designers, who iteratively modified exoskeleton facade geometries for a building retrofit while receiving live feedback.
4. A contribution to pre-occupancy evaluation, showing how gamified environments can support stakeholder participation through informed decision-making and customized negotiation of performance criteria.

Main Findings

• Comprehension and decision quality improve under gamified feedback: The evaluation of participant interactions reveals that gamified feedback mechanisms significantly enhance user comprehension and informed decision-making across the criteria.
• Participants worked across three feedback categories: They received real-time feedback on (1) structural behavior — deflection, mass, and stress/strength ratio; (2) environmental parameters — solar gain and heating/cooling energy demands; and (3) fabrication considerations — fabrication and material costs, robotic machining, and material setup.
• Structured guidance beats open-ended tools: Participants' understanding of structural, material, and fabrication performance in relation to the iterative task suggests that curated design spaces and structured guidance improve efficiency compared to open-ended generative tools.
• Stakeholder participation becomes feasible: The gamified environment enabled stakeholder participation in the design process via informed decision-making and customized negotiation of performance criteria.
• What the abstract does not report: It gives no quantitative performance results, no comparison baselines, and no statistical detail — the findings are described qualitatively, apart from the participant count of 24.

Methodology in Plain English

The researchers built a design framework in which a game engine serves as the interactive front end and performance evaluation runs alongside it, feeding results back to the user as they work. Instead of asking people to invent geometry freely, the framework offers a curated space of possible design moves with structured guidance. The case study was a retrofit: an exoskeleton facade added to an existing building. Participants — 24 architecture students and non-expert designers — repeatedly adjusted facade geometry and immediately saw how their changes affected structural, environmental, and fabrication outcomes. The researchers then evaluated how participants interacted with the tool to judge whether the gamified feedback helped them understand and decide. The abstract does not specify the evaluation instruments or measures used.

Why This Matters

Research impact: The work reframes decision support for design as a gamified, feedback-driven experience rather than a purely computational optimization task, and it positions pre-occupancy evaluation as something stakeholders can participate in directly.

Real-world applications (as implied by the paper's framing):

• Retrofitting existing buildings with performance-aware facade systems such as exoskeletons.
• Early-stage design workshops where clients or community stakeholders weigh structural, energy, and cost trade-offs together.
• Design education, where students learn how structural, material, and fabrication decisions interact.
• Development of interactive design tools that give non-experts meaningful control instead of opaque automated output.

Industry relevance: Architecture, engineering, and construction workflows depend on trade-off decisions currently handled by specialists; a framework that lets non-experts reason about structural, energy, fabrication, and cost performance in real time could shorten feedback loops and bring stakeholders into decisions earlier. It also suggests a role for game engines as serious design infrastructure rather than only visualization.

Future Directions

• Testing whether the framework's benefits hold beyond this single exoskeleton facade case study, and with other building types or performance criteria.
• Measuring decision quality and learning outcomes quantitatively; the abstract reports qualitative improvement but no such measurements.
• Examining how curated guidance should be designed — how much structure helps versus how much restricts exploration.
• Studying how the framework performs in genuine multi-stakeholder negotiation settings, where different parties hold conflicting performance priorities.

Target Audience

HCI and decision-support researchers; computational design and building-performance researchers; architects and facade engineers interested in non-expert participation; developers of game-engine-based design tools; and design educators teaching performance-driven, iterative design.

Authors’ abstract

Decision Support Systems (DSS) play a crucial role in enabling non-expert designers to explore complex, performance-driven design spaces. This paper presents a gamified decision-making framework that integrates game engines with real-time performance feedback. Performance criteria include structural behavior, environmental parameters, fabrication, material, and cost considerations. The developed design framework was tested with architecture students and non-expert designers on the design of an exoskeleton facade to retrofit an existing building. Participants (N=24) were able to iteratively modify façade geometries while receiving real-time feedback across the three key criteria: 1) structural behavior, including deflection, mass, and stress/strength ratio; 2) environmental parameters, such as solar gain and heating/cooling energy demands; and 3) fabrication considerations, including fabrication and material costs, robotic machining, and material setup. The evaluation of participant interactions reveals that gamified feedback mechanisms significantly enhance user comprehension and informed decision-making across the criteria. Further, participants' understanding of structural, material, and fabrication performance in relation to the iterative design task suggests that curated design spaces and structured guidance improve efficiency compared to open-ended generative tools. This research contributes to pre-occupancy evaluations, demonstrating how gamified environments enable stakeholder participation in the design process through informed decisionmaking and customized negotiation of performance criteria. .