Using Collaborative, Game-Based Science-Fiction Prototyping to Develop Innovations in Sustainability.

What if every single researcher and developer contributing new technology to the next generations of factories did so with the goal of building a sustainable future? This study details the design and evaluation of a workshop format employed at a cross-organizational Research Campus focused on production, now expanding into sustainability-related research activities. The goal was to motivate interdisciplinary bottom-up engagement with the topic, in a way that enables participants to generate innovative solutions "for the day after tomorrow". Therefore, a novel combination of Science-Fiction Prototyping and storytelling game was developed, facilitating collaborative exploration of a "sustainable factory of the future" and the systems needed to make it work: ideas for new projects. The result is a stable and repeatable method (which still leaves the room necessary for meaningful participant agency, emergence and creativity) as well as observations of the communication patterns and explored themes in its first eight applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]