Virtual Design Workspace: Immersive Design Fiction for Creative Collaboration

Immersive design fiction is a novel approach that embeds speculative interactions within a rich virtual reality (VR) storyworld. Immersive design fictions use VR to translate new design opportunities into story-driven, embodied experiences by positioning the participant as a character in a narrative world. This research develops a case study of an immersive design fiction that depicts a fictionalized reimagining of an industry partner’s work practices. This VR experience explores speculative interfaces for creative work and collaboration in the context of a fictional workplace environment. By placing design fictions within rich immersive contexts such as room-scale VR, researchers and practitioners can go beyond prototyping imagined interfaces to also speculate about the interaction rituals and surrounding social context within an experiential storyworld. This approach makes methodological and theoretical contributions to design fiction research by demonstrating a toolkit for exploring and reflecting upon the intersections between speculation, embodiment, and narrative context.

• We designed a series of design fiction scenarios in room-scale VR and explored new interfaces and workflows for creative collaboration in VR & AR. We focused in particular on how immersive interfaces could reshape practices of ideation, sketching, modeling, annotation, and prototype-review. We developed a methodology called immersive design fiction that helped us to reimagine the lived experiences of these practices in VR. Immersive design fiction enables interaction designers to go beyond the simple prototyping of interfaces to also model the interaction rituals and surrounding social worlds that might envelope these experiences.

• We developed a sketching environment we called Playground specifically tailored to support ideation during the initial phases of concept development.

• We also designed an experience called Model Manipulation, which enabled us to explore speculative interfaces and social rituals for manipulation, annotation, and collaboration. Of particular interest here was our ability to represent NPCs as social actors within this world. As a design “fiction” this project was quite unique in that it included fully operational UI features in a world occupied by non-player characters (NPC)s. VR users can watch NPC characters demonstrate unfamiliar modes of use before handing over the controls to the user to try it out themselves. And beyond demonstrating tools, NPCs were also able to model new speculative forms of social interaction.

• We made the strategic choice to fashion NPCs as simple hands (represented by tool tips) and eyes (represented by a colored binocular shape). The rationale for this choice was so that our NPC-action recording tool could drive NPC actions without us also having to resort to a full Mo-cap solution. This decision enabled us to be nimble and continue to adapt the immersive design fiction as the NPC narrative scenarios informed our design process.
• For the final scene, we developed a scene that depicts the final review of a chair model. The chair presented mapped onto a trackable chair in physical space, so that when a user in VR touches the virtual chair they also feel the physical analogue. Accordingly, one can sit in the physical chair and roll or rotate while simultaneously seeing the virtual model respond accordingly.

Sponsors: 

• Steelcase Workspace Futures

Team: 

• Joshua McVeigh-Schultz - Lead
• Michael Koslowski
• Max Kreminski
• Keshav Prasad
• Perry Hoberman

Advisors: 

• Scott Fisher

Associated Publications: 

• Joshua McVeigh-Schultz, Max Kreminski, Keshav Prasad, Perry Hoberman, Scott S. Fisher: Immersive Design Fiction: Using VR to Prototype Speculative Interfaces and Interaction Rituals within a Virtual Storyworld. DIS '18,  ACM Proceedings of the 2018 Designing Interactive Systems Conference on Designing Interactive Systems 2018: 817-829 (PDF)