The Incubator: A Serious Game to Study Decision-Making in Product Development

The study of design decision-making, specifically, and design cognition, more broadly, is dependent upon the researcher’s ability to balance the authenticity of the research task and the level of intervention needed to accurately measure the construct of interest. They must either commit to ethnographic long-term studies of design teams, which require extensive time and resources and are not feasibly scaled, or commit to smaller, more controlled studies that often sacrifice the authenticity of the design task itself. To mitigate some of this research burden, researchers have explored alternative methods for data collection, one of which is serious games. Serious games have emerged as a novel way to study human decision-making and provide a controlled yet flexible environment to conduct studies and automate data collection. Little work has explored the use of serious games as a platform for design studies. The objective of this technical brief is to introduce a novel simulation environment, “The Incubator,” a serious game that mimics the product development process under controlled conditions. The Incubator provides a data-rich platform for analyzing how designers allocate resources, negotiate trade-offs, and adapt to changing constraints during new product development. The goal of this technical brief is to describe the theoretical and computational underpinnings of the game and encourage the use of The Incubator as a platform to study design decision-making at large scales.