The intersection of serious games, advanced technologies, and culture offers new paths for fostering social inclusion and sustainability. This position paper presents i-Game, an EU project dedicated to transforming the relationship between cultural heritage and the gaming industry. By creating an open-source platform for inclusive game development, i-Game integrates tools such as Explainable AI (XAI) and virtual reality to enable diverse stakeholders—including underrepresented groups—to co-create games that address societal and cultural challenges. Through pilot projects in museums and the textile industry, i-Game explores the potential of gamification to enhance learning, creativity, and collaboration while advancing sustainable practices. The project highlights how interdisciplinary methodologies and ethical-design principles can reshape the cultural heritage landscape, democratizing access to innovative tools and fostering a deeper connection between technology and heritage.

Civic online participation platforms offer valuable opportunities to involve citizens in local governance and benefit from collective intelligence. Yet, vulnerable groups, such as older adults, people with disabilities, and the less educated, are often underrepresented in online political engagement. Aiming to empower these citizens to raise their voice online, we conducted two studies using an inclusive-by-design approach for developing an online civic engagement platform. In the first study, 39 individuals from two digitally low-performing European countries were surveyed about functions and features that would motivate and support their online participation. In the second study, focus groups with 13 digital and AI experts identified technical and informational requirements for effective use of the features desired by citizens. Our findings show the wishes for accessible, unbiased and secure AI-driven civic engagement platforms with transparency and user education about AI tools. In particular, chatbots require clear disclaimers and user guidance. Once citizens have been involved in the technical design process, both technical and informational feature preferences must be taken into account to avoid access and usability barriers or misunderstandings during the platform’s use. This is important to facilitate participation, especially for citizens from vulnerable groups.

Digital systems are almost universally designed under the assumption of environmental and user ability stability, often being built for the “ideal” user. Yet, the reality of everyday interaction often using multiple devices (desktop and mobile) is a chaotic mix of needs and abilities, disruption, multitasking, and shifting constraints, emotions and situations. System failure during these moments of friction reveals fundamental misalignment between design theory and the lived experience of the user. In this paper, we argue for a paradigm shift from designing for the assumption of capacity and stability, to designing for the reality of all users, their diversity and variability, and the dynamic real-life contexts. Instead of treating accessibility and inclusion as a secondary compliance measure, we position shifting variability as the core condition of design. We argue that by designing for a “variable” user, we inherently create an inclusive system. To operationalize this perspective, we integrate a set of variability-oriented design principles into the Unique Centered Design (U*CD) framework, a practical toolkit that helps design teams identify potential functional mismatches and anticipate exclusionary design decisions early in the development process. The usability of the proposed framework is assessed in a game design case study, which is conceived as a multi-stakeholder semi-automated co-creation process. The use case demonstrates how the toolkit stimulates discussion and supports comprehension around user variability and encourages design of games that reflect social and cultural diversity.