Abstract
When designing a complex building, such as a hospital, architects have to meet a variety of regulatory and user-centered requirements. With the introduction of participatory methods, architectural design can incorporate end-user requirements, ultimately facilitating end-user processes in the built environment. However, current means of communication, such as paper plans and rendered images, lack the proper form of presentation to discuss, document, and display user requirements, let alone experience the prototype. Often, blueprints, renderings, and animations are not suitable for non-architects to develop a thorough and mutual understanding of the volumes, dimensions, and clearances to assess a design’s ultimate usability. A full-scale physical mock-up is usually not feasible. Instead, virtual reality (VR) is sometimes used as a substitute to provide a more realistic impression of the subject under discussion. However, most VR software does not allow for interaction to evaluate the prototypical environment. In addition, neither VR software nor traditional methods are suitable for documenting the results of large-scale surveys without enormous effort. It is usually left to designers to manually document and qualitatively evaluate the results of participatory approaches for a final design decision. This paper presents a software that could enrich current participatory design methods and overcome their shortcomings. The software's immersive, interactive, responsive, and networked prototyping environment documents design decisions and makes them immediately experiential. An integrated evaluation tool generates a three-dimensional, human-readable representation of the collected quantitative data. Architects can then discuss or integrate the quantitative data with qualitative observation or end-user interview data in a mixed-methods approach. This new prototyping opportunity could lead to a more congruent understanding of communicated imagination and materialized experiential knowledge, while reciprocally generating networked experiential knowledge during its usage. End users could become more like architects themselves.
Keywords
Participatory Design; Data Triangulation; Architectural Planning; Human Readable Filter; Networked Experiential Prototyping
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2023.103
Citation
Jurk, L.(2023) Documenting End User Needs in an Interactive Virtual Reality Prototyping Environment for a VR-PD Approach in Architecture, in Silvia Ferraris, Valentina Rognoli, Nithikul Nimkulrat (eds.), EKSIG 2023: From Abstractness to Concreteness – experiential knowledge and the role of prototypes in design research, 19–20 June 2023, Milan, Italy. https://doi.org/10.21606/eksig2023.103
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Documenting End User Needs in an Interactive Virtual Reality Prototyping Environment for a VR-PD Approach in Architecture
When designing a complex building, such as a hospital, architects have to meet a variety of regulatory and user-centered requirements. With the introduction of participatory methods, architectural design can incorporate end-user requirements, ultimately facilitating end-user processes in the built environment. However, current means of communication, such as paper plans and rendered images, lack the proper form of presentation to discuss, document, and display user requirements, let alone experience the prototype. Often, blueprints, renderings, and animations are not suitable for non-architects to develop a thorough and mutual understanding of the volumes, dimensions, and clearances to assess a design’s ultimate usability. A full-scale physical mock-up is usually not feasible. Instead, virtual reality (VR) is sometimes used as a substitute to provide a more realistic impression of the subject under discussion. However, most VR software does not allow for interaction to evaluate the prototypical environment. In addition, neither VR software nor traditional methods are suitable for documenting the results of large-scale surveys without enormous effort. It is usually left to designers to manually document and qualitatively evaluate the results of participatory approaches for a final design decision. This paper presents a software that could enrich current participatory design methods and overcome their shortcomings. The software's immersive, interactive, responsive, and networked prototyping environment documents design decisions and makes them immediately experiential. An integrated evaluation tool generates a three-dimensional, human-readable representation of the collected quantitative data. Architects can then discuss or integrate the quantitative data with qualitative observation or end-user interview data in a mixed-methods approach. This new prototyping opportunity could lead to a more congruent understanding of communicated imagination and materialized experiential knowledge, while reciprocally generating networked experiential knowledge during its usage. End users could become more like architects themselves.