Design Research Gamified
To capture real-time data on design decision-making at scale, an open-source simulation traces how resource constraints shape new product development, decision by decision.
Written by Louise Poirier
RESEARCHERS HAVE A WIDE RANGE OF STRATEGIES when it comes to studying how design decisions are made, but these methods often require significant research burdens. One alternative data collection method that’s gaining ground is a serious game, which offers a controlled while still flexible way to study and collect data.
A team from Penn State developed The Incubator, one such serious game that mimics the product development process and provides a data-rich platform that analyzes how designers make decisions during new product development.
Jessica Menold, mechanical engineering professor and director of both the THRED group and the Center for Immersive Experiences at Pennsylvania State University (Penn State), and Cynthia Letting, a recent Penn State doctoral graduate now at Brooks Instrument, led this research, “The Incubator: A Serious Game to Study Decision-Making in Product Development,” which was published in ASME’s Journal of Mechanical Design in May.
Menold and Letting shared with R&D Pulse how the idea came together, what they learned about how individual traits shape resource allocation strategies, and where they see the platform heading next.
R&D: Can you talk us through the conceptual process of this research? How did the idea for the game first come about and what were some of your primary goals from the outset?
MENOLD & LETTING: The idea for The Incubator emerged from a challenge common in engineering design research: studying authentic decision-making behavior at scale. Traditional in-person studies can be time-intensive, difficult to recruit for, and often provide only a limited snapshot of the design process. We developed The Incubator as a serious game to create a realistic but controlled environment where participants could navigate the complexities of new product development while generating high-resolution behavioral data, including decision sequences, timing, and resource allocation choices. From the outset, our primary goal was to better understand how resource scarcity shapes decision-making in technology development and entrepreneurship, and ultimately how those decisions influence which innovations successfully make it to market.
R&D: You mention that design researchers often turn to surveys, in situ studies, interviews, controlled experiments, and simulations to understand the intricacies of design decision-making. Why did a game like the one you’ve developed make the most sense compared to these other options?
M&L: Each of these methods offers valuable insights, but they also come with important trade-offs. Surveys and interviews capture participants’ perceptions and reflections, but they cannot reveal the moment-to-moment decisions people make under real constraints. In-situ studies provide rich contextual data, but they are often difficult to scale and can be challenging to replicate across different teams and organizations. Because we had the opportunity to work with a large and diverse population of high-tech startup founders through programs such as NSF I-Corps, we needed a method that could capture detailed behavioral data from many participants in a consistent environment. A serious game offered that balance, allowing us to study authentic decision-making under resource constraints while collecting high-resolution data on every decision, action, and trade-off, participants made throughout the product development process.
R&D: At a high level, can you walk us through how The Incubator is played?
M&L: The Incubator places participants in the role of a startup founder tasked with designing and launching a new product under realistic constraints of time, money, and information. Players begin with a fixed budget and timeline and must navigate a series of decisions related to networking, funding, hiring, customer discovery, and product design, constantly balancing trade-offs between resource expenditure and product performance. The game culminates in a configuration design task where participants develop a product and launch it to market, allowing us to observe how perceptions of scarcity influence decision-making throughout the new product development process.
R&D: You mention the game is modular and reconfigurable. What’s involved in swapping out the design task? Are there any restrictions?
M&L: One of the strengths of The Incubator is that it was intentionally designed to be modular and reconfigurable. The codebase is open source, and researchers can modify the initial conditions of the game, adjust resource constraints, alter the information and opportunities available in each room, and even replace the product being designed. This flexibility allows the platform to be adapted to different research questions, industries, and levels of resource scarcity. The primary restriction is that the underlying framework is best suited for configuration design problems, where participants make selections and trade-offs among predefined design options, rather than completely open-ended design tasks.
R&D: What other uses could there be for The Incubator?
M&L: While we originally developed The Incubator to study decision-making in new product development, the platform has much broader potential applications. Because it captures how people allocate resources and make trade-offs under uncertainty, it could be used to study topics such as risk-taking behavior, behavioral economics, market dynamics, and the factors that influence which technologies ultimately succeed or fail in reaching the market. Looking ahead, one of the most exciting opportunities is extending The Incubator into a multiplayer environment, allowing researchers to study collaboration, competition between firms, team decision-making, and market-entry strategies in a controlled but realistic setting.
R&D: What were some of the most significant findings that you uncovered as you were developing the game? Were they mostly expected? Did anything surprise you?
M&L: Interestingly, we found that startup founders and designers appear to follow distinct patterns in how they acquire, allocate, and leverage resources, and that these patterns are strongly associated with individual traits such as entrepreneurial self-efficacy, entrepreneurial bricolage, risk propensity, and psychological safety. We identified different archetypes of founders that not only behaved differently in the game but also achieved different levels of efficiency and, in some cases, different real-world business outcomes. While we expected resource scarcity to influence decision-making, consistent with prior research, the extent to which these individual traits translated into different strategies and performance outcomes was surprising. The findings suggest that developing these traits may meaningfully affect how entrepreneurs and designers navigate constraints and ultimately influence the success of their ventures.
Configuration of the main lobby within The Incubator. Image: Letting, et al.
Jessica Menold, professor and director, the THRED group and the Center for Immersive Experiences, Penn State
An example of the game’s controls. Image: Letting, et al.
Cynthia Letting, management development program associate, Brooks Instrument
A researcher plays through a session of The Incubator. Photo: Jessica Menold
R&D: Why is studying design decision-making and design cognition important? And what impact do you hope that your creation will have?
M&L: Design decisions shape nearly every aspect of the world around us, from the products we use and technologies we rely on to the systems that influence our daily lives. Because these decisions are made by people, they are inevitably influenced by factors such as resource constraints, uncertainty, experience, and cognitive biases. By studying design decision-making and design cognition, we can better understand how these human factors influence outcomes and, ultimately, develop tools, training, and processes that help people make more effective decisions. Our hope is that The Incubator becomes a widely used research platform that enables researchers to study these behaviors at scale, generating new insights into how designers, entrepreneurs, and teams navigate complexity and helping us build more innovative, effective, and human-centered technologies.
R&D: You mention LLM-driven agents as a potential addition to the game. What would this enable?
M&L: Integrating LLM-driven agents into The Incubator would open up entirely new avenues for studying both product development and human-AI collaboration. Rather than interacting with static information, participants could engage in dynamic conversations with AI-powered customers, investors, mentors, or other stakeholders whose responses adapt in real time. This would allow researchers to examine how designers and founders evaluate and act on AI-generated information, how the quality and reliability of AI advice influences decisions, and how people choose to trust, challenge, or collaborate with AI systems. More broadly, it would provide a controlled environment for studying human-AI teaming in product development and entrepreneurship, helping us understand how AI may shape future innovation processes and decision-making outcomes.
R&D: Is there anything else you might like to add to the game at some point?
M&L: There are several directions we are excited to explore in future versions of The Incubator. One is the integration of LLM-driven agents that can serve as realistic customers, investors, mentors, or teammates, enabling richer studies of human-AI collaboration and decision-making. We are also interested in extending the game beyond a single product launch to examine longer-term startup outcomes, including how founders respond to post-launch challenges, changing market conditions, and evolving customer needs. Another promising direction is introducing market competition and iterative product development, allowing multiple firms to compete for market share while repeatedly refining their products. These additions would move the simulation even closer to the realities of innovation and entrepreneurship while creating new opportunities to study complex decision-making over time.
R&D: Any final thoughts you might like to share with our audience about your work?
M&L: What we find most exciting about this work is that it investigates rich decision-based data at the intersection of engineering design and entrepreneurship. We often focus research on the technologies and products that result from design and entrepreneurship, but the path to those outcomes requires many complex decisions that require designers to navigate uncertainty, constraints, and competing priorities. By studying these decisions, we can gain a deeper understanding of the human factors that influence innovation.
The development of The Incubator has demonstrated the value of serious games as a large-scale research tool. The Incubator provides a unique opportunity to study complex decision-making in a controlled environment, enabling the collection of rich behavioral data that can be difficult to capture in real-world startups, for example.
Louise Poirier is managing editor.
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