With the increasing mobility and connectivity of technological devices in smart cities, games are also used to address urban challenges like citizenship or equality. In my thesis, I argue that the design of many of these game solutions does not fit the challenge they try to address. For example, Pokémon Go ultimately became more a social facilitator than a pure for-profit app, while Geocaching for education purposes has proven ineffective. In order to assess the efficacy of the design of these solutions and suggest future improvements, I introduce an interdisciplinary method called ‘The Action Space Analysis’ which can be used to measure and judge how well the design fits with a challenge. First, I suggest a perspective on game design focused on the acceptance that whatever possible actions are contained in the game, some player will play them. Secondly, the city challenges are understood as the pursuit of a city model, an understanding of how you want the city to be. The action space analysis takes a game design and uncovers all possible actions of the game to check and score how well these actions fit the city model pursued. This checks how present the possibility is of players performing the desired actions from the city model. I check this for Geocaching, Ontdek Overvecht, Cities: Skylines, and Pokémon Go. The action space analysis works as validation method that allows designers to improve their games, critics to analyse city solutions better, and municipalities to pass informed judgment on suggested solutions.
Taking into account the lack of uniform guidelines for the design and classification of safety recommendations, a relevant framework was developed according to academic and professional literature. The framework includes nine design criteria for recommendations, it incorporates classifications of their scope and expected effectiveness, and it was used to perform a questionnaire survey across aviation professionals involved in the generation of safety recommendations. The goal of the survey was to capture (1) whether practitioners are knowledgeable about the design criteria, (2) the degree to which they apply those criteria along with corresponding reasons, (3) perceptions of the expected effectiveness of types of controls introduced through recommendations, (4) the frequency of generating each control type and respective explanations, and (5) the extent to which practitioners focus on each of the categories of recommendations’ scope and the relevant reasons. Overall, the results showed: an adequate level of knowledge of the design criteria; a strong positive association of the knowledge on a particular criterion with the degree of its implementation; a variety of frequencies the recommendations are addressed to each of the scope areas; a reverse order of perception of the expected effectiveness of control types compared to the literature suggestions. A thematic analysis revealed a broad spectrum of reasons about the degree to which the design criteria are applied, and the extent to which the various types of recommendations are generated. The results of the survey can be exploited by the aviation sector to steer its relevant education and training efforts and assess the need for influencing the direction safety recommendations are addressed. Similar research is suggested to be conducted by organizations and regional and international agencies of any industry sector by ensuring a larger sample.
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