SD&A 2023: Evaluating requirements for design education in a virtual studio environment
This presentation was delivered at the 34th annual Stereoscopic Displays and Applications conference (16-19 January 2023) held in San Francisco, CA USA. For more information see: http://stereoscopic.org
Title: Evaluating requirements for design education in a virtual studio environment, [SD&A-226]
Speaker: Bjorn Sommer, Royal College of Art (UK).
Abstract: Design education has special requirements on using virtual studio setups. The Zoom fatigue during the world-wide COVID pandemic let our institution to test new tools which can help improve digital design education by supporting features like idea sharing, collaborative making, serendipitous discussion and group forming. For this purpose, we tested different tools during our Master program Innovation Design Engineering and collected student feedback. We found that immersion is a key factor impacting the effectiveness of group work in distance learning. This paper presents our applications and analysis of different platforms and contributes insights on how to build a virtual studio environment for an interdisciplinary master programme in design engineering. In this work, we will focus on our studies on Gather.town, Meta Horizon Workrooms and Spatial.
Biography: Bjorn is Research Tutor and Year 1 Lead for Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) at the Royal College of Art (RCA) since 2019. IDE is a joint Master program between RCA and the Imperial College London with a 40-years history. Bjorn has a background in Media Informatics and Design (B. Sc.), Interdisciplinary Media Sciences (M.A.) and a PhD in Bioinformatics. He established the CELLmicrocosmos project, a cell visualization and modelling project, and applied his knowledge in data visualization, exploration, and analytics in various fields, such as molecular visualization, network exploration, ornithology, map visualization, etc. Bjorn was researching and teaching at Bielefeld University, Monash University in Melbourne, and the University of Konstanz before joining the RCA.
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