People like playing games and engaging themselves with gaming concepts on different media (e.g. mobile devices, computers and consoles). The economic size of the gaming industry has long surpassed the music and movie industries. However, games and gaming concepts are not just for fun. Many organisations have been successfully using the motives of game thinking to develop their business competencies. Game thinking encompasses a wide range of applications targeting the human factor, from developing serious desktop and digital games for enabling deep learning, developing skills, and changing behaviour to exploiting the concepts of gamification of work for creating friendly competition, raising motivation and engagement among work teams.
As a labour-intensive industry, the effective use of game thinking has also been on the agenda of construction. Games, simulations and mobile apps have been developed to motivate construction teams and to train construction stakeholders on best practices in product design, construction health and safety, quality, machine/equipment logistics, sustainability issues, and construction project management concepts and functions such as Lean Construction, scheduling, bidding and negotiation. The advent of BIM has also rendered many digital game thinking applications possible.
This one-day workshop is to bring together experts and leaders in the construction industry and researchers in construction management and serious games to explore and discuss the opportunities for collaboration on game thinking in construction.
Prof. Lauri Koskela, Professor of Construction & Project Management L.Koskela@hud.ac.uk
Prof. Minhua Eunice Ma, Professor of Digital Media & Games, m.ma@hud.ac.uk
Dr Algan Tezel, Research Fellow in Construction Project Management, A.Tezel@hud.ac.uk
School of Art, Design and Architecture
University of Huddersfield