This research focuses on the design and use of
serious/simulation games to support diverse stakeholder in exploring ways to improve
climate resilience. We are seeking a highly motivated PhD candidate to develop a serious/simulation game on sand nourishment strategies in support of maintaining and shaping resilient, multifunctional coastal landscapes, particularly in the context of sea level rise. This PhD position will be embedded in the Human Centred Design (HCD) chair, within the Faculty of Engineering Technology (ET).
This research position is part of the NWO-funded
SOURCE program:
Sand n
OURisment strategies for sustainable
Coastal
Ecosystems. The SOURCE philosophy is that carefully planned sand nourishments in the present will create the required and desired resilient and dynamic multifunctional coastal landscapes of the future. SOURCE will deliver the scientific knowledge, models and design tools to develop and evaluate nourishment strategies in a multi-stakeholder co-creation process. You will join a team of 12 PhD, Post-Doc and other researchers at 8 academic institutes in total. You will collaborate closely with 25 partners from government organizations, research institutes, nature organizations and industry.
Within the SOURCE program, your project aims to design, use and evaluate a serious/simulation game that enables stakeholders, as players, to collaboratively explore sand nourishment strategies from an integrated perspective of flood safety, socio-economic benefits and natural values. You will first engage with partners to elicit specific needs that the game should meet. From there, you will iteratively design and test the game, its mechanisms and interactions. Within designing and testing the game, a few key things you will work on include: (1) establishing a sense of safety to collaboratively explore and experiment with sand nourishment strategies; (2) including current and possible future (climatic) conditions; and (3) incorporating indicators of coastal ecosystem services, visualizations and other feedback mechanisms of in-game actions in collaboration with partners and other SOURCE researchers.
Within this project, you will focus on two distinct areas for scientific contributions. Firstly, from an interaction design perspective, you will focus on the beneficial combination of tangible components and digital information in games. The HCD chair has a lab environment around a tangible interaction-based game table, which uses a physical game board that is automatically translated into digital information and which is available to you as part of this project. Secondly, from a gaming perspective, you will advance our knowledge on using games in multi-stakeholder decision-making by researching to what extent the game enables stakeholders to co-develop and assess sand nourishment strategies and facilitates social learning.
Being part of the SOURCE team implies close interaction with your UT supervisors as well as fellow researchers within the consortium. Regular consortium meetings will accommodate knowledge exchange with our partners, increasing the relevance and impact of our research. Furthermore, you will present your work at (inter)national conferences and publish your findings in journal papers and a PhD thesis.