The Effect of Virtual Environment and User/Designer Collaboration on the Creative Co-design Process

Users have been for a few decades recognized as precious contribution to the creative design process. However, the gap of knowledge and motivation between users and designers may weaken the collaboration between participants of co-design meetings. With the emergence of new technologies, design meetings inside virtual environments are developing. This study aims to determine whether virtual environments enhance the creative performance and the quality of collaboration inside co-design workshops. Besides, we tried to determine whether user-designer collaboration inside a virtual environment was more or less effective than " only-user" collaboration. Thirty teams of three participants each took part to creative design workshops whose purpose was to create a new solution to improve mobility in Paris. The teams were distributed into 3 experimental conditions: mixed teams in virtual environment, user teams in virtual environment and user teams in real environment. The workshops consisted in a 10-min step of idea-generation followed by two 10-min steps of solution-selection (one short-term and one long-term solution). In the idea-generation step, user teams produced more ideas in the virtual environment than in the real one. In the solution-selection step, teams in real environment performed a better time management than teams in virtual environment. Finally, mixed teams produced more useful solutions than user teams, and teams in real environment produced more useful solutions than teams in virtual environment, while no effect of the conditions has been evidenced on the level of originality of the produced solutions.