Design Process and Issues

Obeidat and Jaradat found that it’s desirable to include human figures in digitally visualized architectural spaces.  More details: “The use of human figures throughout the design process enables designers to experience, communicate, and evaluate design concepts. . . . an experimental study was conducted with first-year architecture students, in which they experienced three architectural scenes (non-presence of VHR [virtual human representation], presence of idle VHR, and presence of animated VHR).

Lin investigated how illustrations are evaluated.  Findings from the completed study include: “Although the aesthetic experience of popular illustrations is frequent in modern life, no scientific research can fully explain its psychological structure so far. This study aims to develop an aesthetic model of perception, affection, and cognition, presenting an aesthetic psychological framework for contemporary popular illustration. Thirty representative illustrations were selected as experimental stimuli from design media. . . .

Researchers have learned that too much similarity among survey questions can lead to the collection of lower quality data.  A Li-lead team found that “Surveys that ask too many of the same type of question tire respondents and return unreliable data. . . . people tire from questions that vary only slightly and tend to give similar answers to all questions as the survey progresses. . .

Berger, Rocklage, and Packard studied the implications of communicating in different ways; their findings are broadly useful, for example, to people doing programming research.  The researchers report that “Consumers often communicate their attitudes and opinions with others, and such word of mouth has an important impact on what others think, buy, and do. . . .

How do virtual reality experiences stack up against those in the real world?  Jin and colleagues report that they “investigated how participant perceptions of a single interior environment varied among a real-world space (R) and two surrogate VR spaces (one made with 360° spherical photography and one made with 360° spherical digital rendering). A total of 42 undergraduate, interior design students were randomly assigned to one of two experiments, resulting in two groups of 21 students.