Design and Creativity

Measuring design performance for effective support of team coaching and redesign efforts has been difficult to near impossible. This is because design is context dependent and takes place in different environments. Virtual reality (VR) gives us as designers, the opportunity to construct and simulate different environments, as coaches, the opportunity to improve our effectiveness in different design scenarios, and as researchers, the possibility to measure design performance and factors that affect it. 

VHIL researchers have studied how virtual spaces influence synchrony in design tasks for triads, and outlined suggestions for designers of VR to support good collaboration. We have also leveraged the large-scale class dataset collected during the Virtual People class to study design behaviors at scale. We proposed a method for describing the VR design process, and leveraged it to analyze the relationship between design behaviors and contextual factors. More recently, we investigated the influence of virtual mobility on how individuals engage in creativity activities in virtual settings. 

Moving forward, we are interested in understanding individual differences in design behaviors, as well as how group-level differences may influence creative expressions in collaborative settings.