VR-Enabled Participatory Design of Educational Spaces: An Experiential Approach

Classrooms can have an impact on enthusiasm towards learning and aid teaching; given the day-to-day experiences and difficulties teachers endure, they possess a unique perspective on how to better facilitate the tutoring experience in their classrooms. Existing review of literature indicated clear areas for improvement in classroom design using participatory design (PD) approaches where virtual reality (VR) technologies can be utilized as an effective tool to facilitate this collaborative process. To address some of the existing knowledge gaps in this area, a study was designed to gauge teachers’ views on the teaching environment of their classrooms to be used to develop a collaborative design tool in VR. Considering the conventional nature of classroom design, the feedback collated from the survey was used to provide designers with the end-users’ input they were otherwise less likely to be able to incorporate into their design. These findings were used to design a VR experiment to facilitate teacher’s participation in the design process. The findings indicated that the teachers showed a surprising level of awareness of the design elements in educational spaces and the approach of this study. It was also noted that some of the teachers' implicit knowhow regarding the design and layout of their classroom was very difficult, if possible, at all, to capture and apply using more conventional collaborative approaches to design, hence the significance of the current study.