Making Things for People: An Iterative Design Procedure Informed by Human Behaviour
Technology inevitably evolves and develops rapidly in the modern era, industries and professions continue to strive in integrating, adapting and utilising these advancements to improve, optimise and improve the process of design to manufacture to the user experience. Although disruptive at first causing a reluctance of technological adoption within a workplace and ultimately progression of an industry, the eventual impact and benefits noticeably outweigh the initial time and cost within industry adoption, adaptation and development. Architecture and design is not immune to this phenomenon; from computational 2D and 3D modeling, BIM and cloud based data to physical prototyping with 3D printing, laser cutting and automated CNC routing, these are a few select examples that has forced the industry of design to rethink processes, possibilities and realistic opportunities where none existed prior. One such system that fits into this category is the advent of Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality. The numerous possibilities to which these visually and spatially immersive systems opportune for immense innovation often lacks direction or an ultimate goal thus rendering this piece of software to often be little more than a visualisation tool. This thesis recognises the unique position that VR allows and seeks to interrogate and deconstruct current, traditional design processes to better utilise VR in aiding and reinforcing the idea of partial testing of ideas and concepts throughout the design cycle. Different sciences such as psychology, processes and automation from computational design and considerations within software development will be employed and injected into the broader architectural context in which this research presides. In addition to the VR headset, external hardware that better capture human metrics such as EEG, eye tracking, GSR will be considered to developed a seamless tool and workflow that allows us, as designers to better interrogate clients behaviour within our designed digital representations which leads to validations, evaluations and criticisms of our actions within the architectural realm.