Rhetorical design game for expectation alignment

While the form of building construction delivery known as Integrated Design-Build (or Integrated Project Delivery) is necessary for handling the complexity of modern projects, it raises up a host of problems due to the amount and variety of stakeholders that are brought together to co-design. Namely, the difficulty in forming a shared mental model of expectations regarding the project can cause disappointment in the results, as well as time and cost overruns. This paper is about creating an intervention to alleviate those issues. Employing knowledge from the field of rhetoric in design, and of mental models, two Integrated Design-Build workshops were analyzed to extract a set of rhetorical topics (topoi) to all such sessions. A design game was formulated around the empirical data by an iterative design process, following established design game theory. The game was found to indeed more than double the alignment of a group’s individual mental models, though more testing is needed to validate this.