Value-Based Adaptive Reuse: Design and Initial Testing of a Serious-Game Prototype

Adaptive reuse of heritage buildings requires stakeholders, and more specifically, architects to navigate interdependent questions of heritage significance, contemporary function, environmental performance, community benefit, financial feasibility, and approval of other stakeholders (developers, investors, and regulators). Process models can structure these questions, yet conventional validation methods reveal only part of how practitioners move between them under constraint. This paper presents the design and pilot testing of Architect's Design Challenge, a tabletop serious-game prototype developed to explore professional decision-making in adaptive reuse and to examine the practical legibility of the Effective Adaptive Reuse of Heritage Buildings (EARHB) process model. Players progress through six stations, allocate limited resources, select action cards, respond to stakeholder requirements, and construct a design proposition using four predefined project-value categories represented by coloured components. Two formative test rounds, involving students and architects, were organised around introduction, gameplay, and debriefing. The tests indicated that the prototype could stimulate explicit discussion of priorities, sequencing, resource allocation, and trade-offs. They also revealed a central design tension: abstraction supported strategic play but sometimes weakened correspondence with professional practice, particularly for expert players. The study contributes a transparent mapping between research constructs and game mechanics, identifies requirements for future validation, and shows how serious gaming could make selected moments of value recognition, translation into design choices, negotiation, and revision observable within a simulated decision pathway. The evidence is exploratory. It does not establish learning effects, behavioural validity, or transfer to real projects.