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EFFECTS OF EMBODIED AND SELF-REFLECTED VIRTUAL REALITY ON ENGINEERING STUDENTS’ DESIGN COGNITION ABOUT NATURE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 June 2023

Josh Trump  and
Tripp Shealy
Josh Trump
Affiliation:
Virginia Tech
Tripp Shealy*
Affiliation:
Virginia Tech
*
Shealy, Tripp, Virginia Tech, United States of America, tshealy@vt.edu

Abstract

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The study presented in this paper investigated the impact of embodied and self-reflected virtual reality (VR) experiences on engineering design students' cognition and perception of nature-relatedness during the early conceptual design phase. Results showed that students who explored the design environment as a bird (embodied) or human (self) avatar were significantly more likely to explore a larger design space indicated by more semantically unique design concepts compared to students without the VR experience. Network graphs of the syntactic connection of design concepts revealed notable differences among the three groups. The bird avatar group showed more connections to nature-related and social concepts, while more technical concepts were central for the human avatar group, and concepts about money were more central to the control group. Finally, students who embodied the bird avatar had a significantly stronger perception of connection to nature compared to the human avatar and control group, with a small to medium effect size. The results suggest that embodied (as a bird) and self-reflected (as a human) VR experiences can enhance engineering students' design thinking and perception of connection to nature.

Keywords

SustainabilityVirtual realityDesign engineeringDecision making
Type
Article
Information
Proceedings of the Design Society , Volume 3: ICED23 , July 2023 , pp. 1575 - 1584
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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