April 2025
·
9 Reads
Addressing sustainable development challenges in rural areas requires innovative solutions that effectively engage diverse stakeholders in collaborative co-design processes. This paper presents the development of a gamified phygital (physical and digital) co-design tool designed to foster active participation, enhance motivation, and enable the collaborative creation of Smart Innovation Packages (SIPs)—comprehensive solutions comprising technological and non-technological components aimed at addressing rural challenges. Unlike existing domain-specific tools, this approach uniquely combines gamified progress tracking, visual feedback, and recognition systems with a flexible, domain-agnostic framework, allowing its application across diverse co-design contexts. Furthermore, the tool integrates both digital efficiency and analog interpersonal strengths, a rarely combined approach in current tools, enabling broader accessibility for resource-constrained rural areas. A use case scenario in forestry management demonstrates the tool’s application, highlighting its ability to guide stakeholders through problem identification, solution ideation, and intervention refinement. While the tool shows significant promise in enhancing stakeholder motivation and collaboration, its current limitation lies in the need for further empirical validation, particularly regarding its scalability and adaptability in long-term multi-contextual scenarios. This paper contributes to the growing field of gamification in co-design by offering a versatile and inclusive approach to tackling sustainability challenges in rural areas.