Using Games to Understand Tradeoffs in Designing Across Technology Domains

Design can be viewed as a process of exploration and exploitation in the space of technologies. Designers could leverage the technologies or technological knowledge that they have already mastered to create new applications in other technological fields, or draw analogical inspirations from other technologies to solve their current design problems. Designers need to balance between exploration across distant domains and exploitation across proximate domains in their learning, capability building and search for design opportunities, for tradeoffs in differentiated performance outcomes. However, such a performance tradeoff is often nonobvious, and the balancing is also generally challenging. We built a game to help designers consider the space of technology domains, their place in it, and strategies for moving across different domains, and 'see' possible performance outcomes.