Co-Designing in Social VR. Process awareness and suitable representations to empower user participation

Emmanuel Beaudry Marchand; Sana Boudhra\^a; SPE); St\'ephane Safin (SES; Tom\'as Dorta

arxiv: 1906.11004 · v1 · pith:NE7H5AB7new · submitted 2019-06-26 · 💻 cs.HC

Co-Designing in Social VR. Process awareness and suitable representations to empower user participation

Tom\'as Dorta , St\'ephane Safin (SES , SPE) , Sana Boudhra\^a , Emmanuel Beaudry Marchand This is my paper

Pith reviewed 2026-05-25 15:22 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.HC

keywords co-designsocial VRprocess awarenessnon-designersuser participationvirtual realityverbal exchangescreative process

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The pith

Social VR systems paired with structured verbal exchanges allow non-designers to participate more actively in co-design by building awareness of the creative process and enabling collective immersion.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper claims that standard co-design restricts non-designers to simple brainstorming ideas. To address this, the authors created two social VR co-design systems and a verbal exchange methodology aimed at increasing awareness of the co-creative process. These tools help participants understand the workflow and immerse together, leading to easier co-creation. Feedback from three workshops supports that this setup empowers broader participation from multidisciplinary users. This approach could transform how design projects involve diverse teams beyond just experts.

Core claim

We developed two social virtual reality co-design systems, and a co-design verbal exchange methodology to favour participants' awareness of the co-creative process. By using such representations and verbal exchanges, participants could co-create with more ease by benefiting from being informed of the process and from the collective immersion, empowering their participation. This paper presents the rationale behind this approach of using Social VR in co-design and the feedback of three co-design workshops.

What carries the argument

Social VR representational ecosystem combined with structured verbal exchanges that provide awareness of the creative process.

If this is right

Non-designers move beyond basic idea proposals to active co-creation.
Participants gain ease in co-creating through process information.
Collective immersion in VR supports empowered participation.
The methodology enhances multidisciplinary collaboration in design.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

Applying the VR systems to remote or distributed teams could reduce barriers to participation.
The verbal methodology might generalize to other creative domains like software development.
Long-term use could reveal how process awareness affects design outcomes over multiple sessions.

Load-bearing premise

Feedback from three co-design workshops is sufficient to show that the VR representations and verbal methodology empower non-designer participation.

What would settle it

A direct comparison study where the same group of non-designers performs co-design tasks with and without the social VR systems and verbal methodology, measuring the depth and quality of their contributions.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 1906.11004 by Emmanuel Beaudry Marchand, Sana Boudhra\^a, SPE), St\'ephane Safin (SES, Tom\'as Dorta.

**Figure 1.** Figure 1: HIS, individual immersive sketching + model making; Hyve-3D, multi-user immersive 3D sketching. We have previously studied the characteristics of the representational ecosystem that support or enhance the co-design processes (Dorta et al. 2016). Four main required elements were found: it has to (1) be hybrid, mixing analog (made by hand) and digital representations; (2) allow project visualization using se… view at source ↗

**Figure 2.** Figure 2: (Right) Space to be redesigned and the sub-spaces of the workshop for each group (Left) Social VR displaying a virtual model and digital sketches combined with a scaled model. The workshop we conducted consists in the re-design of an existing teaching space in the building of the business school, underused and inappropriate ( [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p007_2.png] view at source ↗

**Figure 3.** Figure 3: (Left) Life-sized immersive view on HIS of the rough physical model using the 360° camera (Right). 7.3. COLLECTIVE 3D SKETCHING: UNIVERSITY’S LIBRARY [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p008_3.png] view at source ↗

**Figure 4.** Figure 4: Hyve-3D allowing collective 3D sketching; and rough scaled physical models. This last example took place in another university (in another country) where, this time the Hyve-3D was transported and installed. The participants were again users and employees of the the library and 1 design accompanists per team (2 teams of 6). Concerning the representational ecosystem, once again scale model pieces were pre-c… view at source ↗

read the original abstract

To allow non-designers' involvement in design projects new methods are needed. Co-design gives the same opportunity to all the multidisciplinary participants to co-create ideas simultaneously. Nevertheless, current co-design processes involving such users tend to limit their contribution to the proposal of basic design ideas only through brainstorming. The co-design approach needs to be enhanced by a properly suited representational ecosystem supporting active participation and by conscious use of structured verbal exchanges giving awareness of the creative process. In this respect, we developed two social virtual reality co-design systems, and a co-design verbal exchange methodology to favour participants' awareness of the co-creative process. By using such representations and verbal exchanges, participants could co-create with more ease by benefiting from being informed of the process and from the collective immersion, empowering their participation. This paper presents the rationale behind this approach of using Social VR in co-design and the feedback of three co-design workshops.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Desk Editor's Note private letter to a colleague

Two social VR co-design systems plus a verbal method, backed only by positive impressions from three workshops.

read the letter

The paper's concrete addition is the pair of social VR platforms and the structured verbal exchange approach meant to give non-designers better process awareness during co-design. The authors lay out why standard brainstorming sessions keep participants at a surface level and describe how the VR setups plus the talk protocol aim to change that. They then report feedback from three workshops where people said the immersion and shared view helped them contribute more easily. That part is straightforward and gives readers something they can actually picture trying. The limitation is the evidence. The claim that these features empower participation rests on workshop impressions without participant numbers, coded transcripts, contribution counts, or any comparison condition. Nothing isolates the VR representations or the verbal structure from novelty, group dynamics, or facilitator effects. In HCI this level of qualitative report is common, but it leaves the attribution soft. The work is aimed at researchers and practitioners already doing co-design workshops who want to experiment with VR. It is not trying to shift broader theory. I would send it to peer review. The systems are described in enough detail to be useful, and the workshops supply initial data; referees can ask for tighter evaluation without the paper being a non-starter.

Referee Report

2 major / 1 minor

Summary. The paper claims that social VR co-design systems combined with a structured verbal exchange methodology can empower non-designer participation by increasing process awareness and enabling collective immersion, allowing participants to co-create with more ease than in traditional brainstorming-based co-design; this is supported by feedback collected from three co-design workshops.

Significance. If the qualitative observations hold under more rigorous scrutiny, the work could provide useful guidance for HCI researchers on integrating immersive representations with process-oriented verbal scaffolding to broaden participation in design. The focus on both representational and methodological elements is a constructive step beyond purely technical VR co-design studies.

major comments (2)

[Abstract] Abstract: the central claim that the VR representations and verbal methodology 'empower their participation' rests entirely on feedback from three workshops, yet the abstract (and by extension the evaluation) supplies no participant counts, no description of feedback collection or coding procedures, no objective measures of participation quality or quantity, and no comparison condition, so the benefits cannot be attributed specifically to the proposed features.
[Evaluation / workshop results] Workshop feedback description: without disambiguation of whether reported ease of co-creation stems from the VR elements, the verbal structure, facilitator guidance, or simple novelty effects, the evidence remains insufficient to substantiate the empowerment claim at the level required for the paper's conclusions.

minor comments (1)

[System descriptions] The two social VR systems are introduced but their differing representational affordances are not contrasted in sufficient detail to allow readers to map specific features to the reported process-awareness benefits.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 1 unresolved

We thank the referee for the constructive feedback on the evaluation and claims. We agree that the abstract and results section require additional detail and a more explicit discussion of limitations. We will revise accordingly while preserving the exploratory qualitative nature of the work.

read point-by-point responses

Referee: [Abstract] Abstract: the central claim that the VR representations and verbal methodology 'empower their participation' rests entirely on feedback from three workshops, yet the abstract (and by extension the evaluation) supplies no participant counts, no description of feedback collection or coding procedures, no objective measures of participation quality or quantity, and no comparison condition, so the benefits cannot be attributed specifically to the proposed features.

Authors: We agree the abstract should be more informative. The full paper reports three workshops involving 12 participants total, with feedback gathered via post-session questionnaires and facilitated discussions that were thematically coded. No objective metrics or control condition were employed, as the study was exploratory. We will revise the abstract to state the participant count, note the qualitative feedback basis, and flag the absence of controls as a limitation. revision: yes
Referee: [Evaluation / workshop results] Workshop feedback description: without disambiguation of whether reported ease of co-creation stems from the VR elements, the verbal structure, facilitator guidance, or simple novelty effects, the evidence remains insufficient to substantiate the empowerment claim at the level required for the paper's conclusions.

Authors: We will expand the evaluation section with additional participant quotes that explicitly connect reported ease to the VR representations and verbal methodology. We acknowledge that facilitator guidance and novelty cannot be fully isolated without a comparison arm. The revised manuscript will temper the conclusions, add an explicit limitations subsection addressing these confounds, and avoid over-attribution. revision: partial

standing simulated objections not resolved

Absence of a comparison condition or objective quantitative measures of participation, which would require a new controlled study beyond the scope of the current exploratory work.

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity; empirical claims rest on workshop observations without definitional or self-citational reduction

full rationale

The paper advances an empirical argument: two social VR co-design systems plus a verbal exchange methodology were developed to support process awareness and collective immersion, with the central claim that these features empower non-designer participation supported solely by qualitative feedback from three co-design workshops. No equations, fitted parameters, uniqueness theorems, or ansatzes appear in the provided text. The derivation chain consists of design rationale followed by direct reporting of participant impressions; nothing reduces by construction to its own inputs. Self-citations, if present in the full manuscript, are not load-bearing for the core claim. This is a standard non-circular empirical HCI paper.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The work rests on the domain assumption that collective immersion in social VR combined with process awareness directly empowers non-designer participation; no free parameters or invented entities are introduced.

axioms (1)

domain assumption Social VR immersion and structured verbal exchanges increase process awareness and thereby empower non-designer participation in co-design
This premise is invoked to justify development of the systems and interpretation of workshop feedback.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5705 in / 1114 out tokens · 22666 ms · 2026-05-25T15:22:16.770670+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

Forward citations

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Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

2 extracted references · 2 canonical work pages · cited by 1 Pith paper

[1]

Arias, E

Achten, H.: 2002, Requirements for collaborative design in architecture, 6th Design & Decision Support Systems in Architecture & Urban Planning Conference , Eindhoven, 1-13. Arias, E. G. and Fischer, G.: 2000, Boundary objects: Their role in articulating the task at hand and making information relevant to it, International ICSC Symposium on Interactive & ...

work page 2002
[2]

Mattelmäki, T

Lehtovuori, P.: 2016, Experience and conflict: The production of urban space , Routledge. Mattelmäki, T. and Sleeswijk Visser, F.: 2011, Lost in Co-X: Interpretations of Co-design and Co-creation, Diversity and Unity, Proceedings of IASDR2011 . Safin, S., Lesage, A., Hébert, A., Kinayoglu, G. and Dorta, T.: 2013, Analyse de référents de l’activité de co-d...

work page 2016

[1] [1]

Arias, E

Achten, H.: 2002, Requirements for collaborative design in architecture, 6th Design & Decision Support Systems in Architecture & Urban Planning Conference , Eindhoven, 1-13. Arias, E. G. and Fischer, G.: 2000, Boundary objects: Their role in articulating the task at hand and making information relevant to it, International ICSC Symposium on Interactive & ...

work page 2002

[2] [2]

Mattelmäki, T

Lehtovuori, P.: 2016, Experience and conflict: The production of urban space , Routledge. Mattelmäki, T. and Sleeswijk Visser, F.: 2011, Lost in Co-X: Interpretations of Co-design and Co-creation, Diversity and Unity, Proceedings of IASDR2011 . Safin, S., Lesage, A., Hébert, A., Kinayoglu, G. and Dorta, T.: 2013, Analyse de référents de l’activité de co-d...

work page 2016