Unfolding Laypersons Creativity Through Social VR: A case study

Involving laypersons in collaborative design projects faces the challenge of having an adapted representational ecosystem. There is a lack of adequate representational tools for multidisciplinary actors to graphically and physically vizualize and externalize their ideas. Using VR is a promising way of renewing participatory design, but settings with VR raise the difficulty to express ideas on the model, and to support collaboration since using VR headsets eventually hinder design communication between participants wearing them. In this paper we present the a case study of one workshop involving non-designers as participants, based on collective 3D sketches using a Social VR system (without headsets), in which several users simultaneously and immersively sketch using handheld tablets, operating a 3D model as contextual background. The workshop was supported by a representational ecosystem containing: (1) Traditional freehand sketching on paper and working with pre-cut physical components used as boundary objects to represent a scaled model; and (2) immersive 3D model allowing collective life-sized visualization, 3D sketching and interaction. The paper describers the case study and provide insights about layperson's collaborative design.