Investigating the Impact of Visual Representations during Ideation: Towards Immersive eXperience Design

Abstract

While there is a plethora of publications devoted to the benefits of visualization; its drawbacks, apparently, did not receive the same attention. Nonetheless, a list of potential drawbacks exists in the current body of knowledge, which, unfortunately, do not directly address the facilitation of ideas generation by different design stakeholders, including users. Beside introducing the longer-term goal of a series of planned studies, this paper presents a first empirical study for setting the baseground on immersiveness. The results show that the choice of a visual representation type must be made wisely as it has an impact on the way participants imagine a facility space and its furnishing layout. They also unveil that, for the same facility space, the layout suggested by the participants is likely to be different depending on whether they visualize a top, perspective or sectional view, or even an inspirational photo of the space.