Incidence de la représentation contextuelle immersive sur l’activité de co-idéation

The ideation phase constitutes the first great iterative steps in the design process. Holding a launch position in the process, this phase encompasses developments that can have a strong influence on the creative directions of the core conceptual propositions and their subsequent refinements. Thus, one can foresee the possibility of revisiting some of the common tools and practices ideation adheres to as an access-point to foster participation from people of varied backgrounds beyond a passive stance of providing input on propositions conceived upstream. Yet, the forms of representation traditionally put in place throughout the ideation process induce a significant gap between the way we live environments in our daily experiences – at their reception – and the way they are reflected upon, grasped and imagined during their conception, a shift that tends to bear with it a rupture from the pre-existing contexts of projects. We propose to explore the use of immersive photogrammetric representations of contexts in virtual reality (VR) – where photogrammetry implies visuo-spatial scanning, or digitization, of actual environments to produce textured 3D models – as a means to overcome these problems of traditional representations. One can then ask: what influence does headset-free social VR have on the design cognition of collaborators during co-ideation when coupled with the immersive photogrammetric representation of the design project’s context? Viewing the design process as an inherently social one where takes place a collaborative negotiation, we identify verbal expression as the primary tool of designers and graphical expression, through the production of sketches, as a complementary mode of communication and reflection. However, moving to a cognitive view of the design activity, more specially under the lens of embodied cognition, gesturing emerges as a third fundamental mode to in a quest to depict a more detailed portrait of the role of immersive contextual representations in design. This research is structured as a comparative study contrasting three studio conditions observed during the sessions of an undergraduate level industrial design studio: (i) the traditional pen and paper design studio, (ii) collaborative VR without context, and (iii) collaborative VR with 3D immersive context. A total of 21 audio-video recordings (around 15 to 20 minutes each) were analyzed, corresponding to one per condition for each of seven teams of three collaborators. Verbal-wise, the observed session recordings were segmented and coded according to the design conversations framework. Gesture-wise, every occurrence of co-speech gesturing was defined and organized according to the dominant dimension among the types commonly established in literature (organisational, deictic, iconic, and metaphoric) before being coded with various intra-gestural characteristics including their deixis of enaction. Through this characterisation of gestures’ deixis, operationalized as the independent or joint anchoring of gestural imagery with the graphical representation at hand, we reveal the instances of dissociation or symbiosis of the participants’ design cognition with the different representational setups. Results indicate that, despite similar co-ideation processes in terms of verbal dynamics, sketching is least used in VR with context, yet in this same condition spontaneous iconic gestures were observed to be representation-dependant (anchored) nearly three times (64%) the proportions observed in VR without context (24%) and pen and paper (20%). We interpret these results as highlighting a creative process that is, at its foundations, notably more often wed to the experience of the represented environment when an immersive contextual model is used. Furthermore, our analysis of deictic gestures also confronts us with the idea of greater affordance for supporting what appears to be a form of “augmented” perception, where participants more frequently project mentally imagined elements in the representation when in VR with context.

Keyphrases: Design cognition, Virtual reality, Contextual representation, Gestures, Verbal exchanges, Sketching