Design Approaches for the Gamification of Production Environments. A Study Focusing on Acceptance Oliver Korn University of Stuttgart, VIS Pfaffenwaldring 5a, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany oliver.korn@acm.org Markus Funk University of Stuttgart, VIS Pfaffenwaldring 5a, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany markus.funk@vis.uni-stuttgart.de Albrecht Schmidt University of Stuttgart, VIS Pfaffenwaldring 5a, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany albrecht.schmidt@acm.org ABSTRACT Gamification is an ever more popular method to increase motivation and user experience in real-world settings. It is widely used in the areas of marketing, health and education. However, in production environments, it is a new concept. To be accepted in the industrial domain, it has to be seamlessly integrated in the regular work processes. In this work we make the following contributions to the field of gamification in production: (1) we analyze the state of the art and introduce domain-specific requirements; (2) we present two implementations gamifying production based on alternative design approaches; (3) these are evaluated in a sheltered work organization. The comparative study focuses acceptance, motivation and perceived happiness. The results reveal that a pyramid design showing each work process as a step on the way towards a cup at the top is strongly preferred to a more abstract approach where the processes are represented by a single circle and two bars. Author Keywords Gamification; assistive technology; computer-assisted instruction; augmented reality; human machine interaction ACM Classification Keywords I.2.1 [Applications and Expert Systems]: Games; Industrial automation; K.3.1 [Computer Uses in Education]: Computer assisted instruction; H.5.1 [Multimedia Information Systems] Artificial, augmented, and virtual realities; Evaluation/methodology; K.4.2 [Social Issues]: Assistive technologies for persons with disabilities; H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Interaction styles; User-centered design; Evaluation/methodology; H.1.2 [User/Machine Systems]: Human factors, Software Psychology INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION A common definition of gamification is: the use of gaming elements to improve user experience and user engagement in non-game services and applications [4]. Figure 1. Gamified workplace. The visualization of the production process is projected in front of the worker. However, gamification is just a new term for an established process where methods from gaming are adapted and used in other areas. The results have been called “edutainment” in the nineties, later “serious games” or “applied games”. This long tradition, especially in education and health (see background section) can be used if gamification is applied in industrial production. The concept of gamification is broader than its predecessors as it potentially includes non-digital processes – a system of adding up points for sales, creating a leaderboard and then providing an incentive for “top performers” can be seen as gamification. However, here we focus on a form of gamification using not only use a computer but also motion sensors to generate automated real-time feedback. Such rapid feedback is important because gamification in production needs to be integrated in existing assistive systems that generate other benefits more closely linked to the production domain (see requirements section). The setup for providing projected real-time feedback based on motion recognition in production environments has been described in previous work [12, 13]. For this reason this work focuses on the description of how the gamification was realized (see implementation section). Thus our work’s contribution to the topic of gamification in production environments has three components: Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. PETRA '15, July 01 - 03, 2015, Corfu, Greece Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM 978-1-4503-3452-5/15/07…$15.00 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2769493.2769549