This paper presents a novel application of gamification for collecting high-level design descriptions of objects. High-level design descriptions entail not only superficial characteristics of an object, but also function, behavior, and requirement information of the object. Such information is difficult to obtain with traditional data mining techniques. For acquisition of high-level design information, we investigated a multiplayer game, “Who is the Pretender?” in an offline context. Through a user study, we demonstrate that the game offers a more fun, enjoyable, and engaging experience for providing descriptions of objects than simply asking people to list them. We also show that the game elicits more high-level, problem-oriented requirement descriptions and less low-level, solution-oriented structure descriptions due to the unique game mechanics that encourage players to describe objects at an abstract level. Finally, we present how crowdsourcing can be used to generate game content that facilitates the gameplay. Our work contributes towards acquiring high-level design knowledge that is essential for developing knowledge-based CAD systems.
Supporting Creative Mechanical Design
