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

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.