Gaming Approach to Designing for Maintainability: A light Fixture Example

Buildings are typically designed to be aesthetically pleasing and cost effective, leaving out maintainability. This is partly because existing tools do not permit the involvement of facility managers or their inputs in the design phase. This has often resulted in the design of buildings with components or systems that cannot be accessed or are too costly to maintain. Such non-functional building components affects the performance and often, satisfaction of building occupants. Maintenance of inaccessible buildings components have also been known to have implications on the safety of facility managers. Therefore, this paper presents an approach that uses a gaming platform to engage facility managers in the design phase, while capturing their knowledge and experience for the purpose of improving existing design tools and platforms. The functionality and usability of the developed approach is demonstrated.