Beyond IoT: Gamified Crowdsourcing for Heritage Building Maintenance Reporting

Maintaining heritage buildings can be challenging owing to age-related deterioration and restrictions imposed by conservation regulations. Several digital systems and platforms have been developed to enable the detection and reporting of maintenance issues in heritage buildings. However, automated IoT-based systems are limited in detecting issues that are only perceivable through human lived occupancy and fail to interpret contextual experiences (e.g., smell and user discomfort). Furthermore, existing digital reporting platforms that rely on occupant reporting largely overlook the integration of gamification elements and incentives that can encourage occupants to continue reporting. This paper presents a gamified crowdsourcing platform to empower inhabitants of heritage buildings to report energy inefficiencies and maintenance issues through gamification and incentivised engagement. The study draws on two complementary methods: a literature review and a focus group with 13 industrial professionals with expertise in digitalisation and sustainability in the built environment. Both are conducted to provide a complementary mapping of heritage building maintenance challenges, energy-related issues, the scope of functionalities of the intended platform, and, finally, the advantages of inhabitant-driven reporting over IoT-based detection. The paper presents this mapping and uses it to inform a platform architecture that integrates issue reporting and real-time tracking, and a gamification layer with redeemable rewards. The platform design presented here constitutes a first-stage, exploratory design artefact; it is intended to be extended and empirically evaluated in actual heritage settings in future work. The findings have implications for community-driven building management strategies and the design of human-centric systems for heritage preservation.