BRIDGING DESIGNER-USER GAP WITH A VIRTUAL REALITY-BASED EMPATHIC DESIGN APPROACH: CONTEXTUAL INFORMATION DETAILS

Xinhui Hu, Hernan Casakin, Georgi V. Georgiev

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

3 Scopus citations

Abstract

Without shared experiences, empathy gaps between designers and users are difficult to bridge. Advancing Virtual Reality (VR) has shed new light on this regard by enabling designers to simulate and experience their users' living scenarios in a virtual environment (VE). However, implementing VR-based empathetic design approach requires dealing with critical design questions, such as: (1) whether VR operators can develop empathy for unfamiliar user groups solely based on objective experience and (2) whether VR operators can utilize task-irrelevant contextual information in the VEs. To explore these issues, we designed an experiment based on two VEs with varying levels of detail that simulated the scenes viewed by people with red-green color vision deficiency (CVD). Participants were randomly assigned to either detail-rich or detail-simple VEs to complete neutral item-searching tasks. Results indicate that objective and neutral experience alone cannot elicit empathy towards users, and VR operating designers will utilize task-irrelevant contextual information.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)797-806
Number of pages10
JournalProceedings of the Design Society
Volume3
DOIs
StatePublished - 2023
Event24th International Conference on Engineering Design, ICED 2023 - Bordeaux, France
Duration: 24 Jul 202328 Jul 2023

Keywords

  • Design methods
  • Empathy
  • Experience design
  • User centred design
  • Virtual reality

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