DUCK | Delivering Useful Creative Knowledge

The Dutch creative industries develop innovative products, such as serious games, that use playful approaches to provide insight into societal challenges in areas such as healthcare, sustainability and digitalisation. Yet these innovations often end up on the shelf once a pilot project has been completed. They are frequently developed for a specific context or client, without considering scalability from the outset as part of the design and implementation process. As a result, there is often no sustainable business case for further development, and valuable knowledge and public resources are not used to their full potential.

Through DUCK, designers, researchers and societal partners are exploring how serious games can be designed and organised from the outset to make them more widely applicable and scalable. The project examines both decisions made during the design process and organisational choices by public and private clients that can support successful implementation and scaling.

To do so, the project combines existing knowledge and practical experience with insights from interviews and co-creation sessions involving designers, clients and users. These insights will inform the development of a practical framework for designing scalable serious games, including concrete steps, tools and success factors. An advisory group of companies from the creative industries and an academic advisory group contribute a range of perspectives and expertise.

The central case study is AI+Hospital, an educational game about artificial intelligence in healthcare that was originally developed as a board game. The framework will be applied, tested and further refined in practice during the development and testing of a digital version of AI+Hospital. In this way, the project not only explores what is needed to successfully scale serious games, but also puts this knowledge directly into practice through a concrete case.

The project will deliver practical knowledge and tools for designers, clients and policymakers, insights into the factors that contribute to or hinder successful implementation and scaling, and an overview of lessons learned and recommendations for future projects. In addition, a new digital prototype of AI+Hospital will be developed. The knowledge gained will be shared through presentations, workshops and an online publication featuring the framework and an evaluation of the project.

€124,940 in PPP-funding will be allocated to the project.