Collaborative design, rooted in co-creation methodologies, has gained prominence for its role in enhancing user experiences. With XR technologies like VR and AR, design processes are evolving. These immersive tools allow for visual exploration and iteration of designs even before their production. The future of collaborative design is thus undeniably centered on immersive tools, promising heightened creativity, efficiency, and user satisfaction. Specifically, in the realm of architectural design, there’s a growing demand for immersive tools that facilitate visual exploration and collaboration.

Although considerable progress has been achieved in technology-driven collaborative design, especially accelerated by the recent pandemic, existing solutions have inherent limitations. While immersive tools powered by XR technologies already offer promising prospects for enhancing communication and collaboration in design processes, they are often in their nascent stages and may not consistently prioritize human-centered design principles.

 

To delve into the future of technology-facilitated collaborative design, it’s imperative to invite potential users to a workshop setting. Here, participants can actively engage with prototype systems, sharing their experiences and evaluations garnered from real design activities. Moreover, to ensure productive discussions and meaningful experiences, establishing a solid context is paramount for the design activities within the workshop.

 

Recognizing the impact of urbanization on the declining birth rates and the challenges it poses for parents raising their children, there is a pressing need to redesign interior spaces to better support young families. However, many parents lack expertise in design, making co-creation and collaborative design pivotal solutions in addressing this issue. Thus, the context for the design activities in this workshop is established as collaborating to design a living space tailored for parents to nurture and engage with their children. Rooted in human-centered design principles, the objective is to enhance the experiences of both children and parents within the designed environment.

In conclusion, during this workshop, participants will be introduced to a range of cutting- edge systems designed to enhance remote collaborative design processes and then explore the future of technology-facilitated collaborative design in discussions. Through hands-on activities facilitated by these technologies, participants will engage in architectural design tasks and collaborate with one another to create designs based on provided information. An example of a system that participants will be able to experience is given below in Figure 1. Here, a system for sharing attention information among several participants was developed in Augmented Reality, so that each participant can be aware of the other’s focus, in real-time.