Faculty Receive Donghia Foundation Grant to Study Virtual Reality in Interior Design Education

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Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design

A demonstration showing how the interior design faculty is using virtual reality to teach the standards of the Americans with Disabilities Act so that students can learn to design spaces for everyone.

The Angelo Donghia Foundation has awarded a $ 49,000 grant to the Department of Interior Design at the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design to explore the potential benefits of using virtual reality technology in design education.

The grant funding will enable lead researchers Jisun Lee and Marjan Miri to implement virtual reality or VR into the design curriculum for interior design studios in year two, three, and four.

While VR is an emerging tool in the design fields, it is relatively new in design education – making this an exciting opportunity for Lee, an assistant professor of interior design, and Miri, an assistant professor of interior design.

The interior design department is using the grant to buy dozens of VR headsets, which means VR can be an integral part of the curriculum and learning experience.

“The interior design course has a very high placement rate for young professionals,” says Carl Matthews, professor and head of the interior design department. “Adding competency in virtual reality is another tool in students’ belts to place and keep them in top design firms.”

Lee said that while other schools are doing design research using VR technology, they will be one of the first departments to introduce the technology into their curriculum on this scale. While Lee and Miri are the primary investigators for the grant, implementing VR will be a department-wide effort.

“Everyone in the department is ready to work on it, and everyone is excited and interested,” said Miri.

With their research, the professors will lead semester projects that incorporate VR into the design process on various studio levels. You will examine the impact of VR on the learning experience of students in various interior design studios. You will empirically examine the effect of VR on students ‘improved understanding of objects and spaces, while also examining how VR affects students’ creativity.

“We want to find out how easy it is to use in the design studios and what empirical benefit our students can get from it,” Lee said.

Currently, Lee and Miri have found little research focused on VR technology in architecture and design education when compared to other areas such as gaming or the medical field where it has been a tool for education.

Learning this technology now makes students successful as professionals, Miri said, because VR is a tool that is more commonly found in businesses. She said she has friends in professional practices who show clients projects through VR.

“Instead of asking them to visit them in person and give a presentation, they can just send them the demo,” said Miri.

Lee hopes that experiencing things in VR will help students make decisions in the design process, as they can instantly see if something isn’t working or if something else is working better. You also want students to be creative in using the tool to solve design problems.

“We always say that the role of our designers is to creatively solve the problem and study multiple iterations to find the best solutions and meet the project goals,” said Lee.

Although there will be a learning curve for students, Lee and Miri hope that it will be relatively easy for students to adopt the VR programs. Rather than having to learn new software, VR integrates with the rendering programs students are already familiar with, such as Rhino and Revit, through a plug-in program.

Virtual Reality immerses users completely in a synthetic environment. You put on the headsets, calibrate them, and then navigate with handheld controllers and your own movements.

Lee said that being able to design the space and then experience the space on a real scale will help students understand design ideas – like the relationship between space and human behavior, materials, color and light – on a new level . It will help them better understand how people move around rooms, such as the experience of someone moving around a room in a wheelchair.

“We see the potential to use VR to expand students’ spatial and design skills,” said Lee.

Interior design students in different grades will focus on improving various skills thanks to VR. For sophomore students who have difficulty visualizing spatial constraints, this will help them understand the relationship between the space and themselves. They will also begin to incorporate the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) standards into their designs. The third year students concentrate on spatial planning, such as B. Pathfinding and circulation, and understanding customer inquiries. In the fourth year, students will integrate VR to improve the quality of their designs, as they focus on proportion and structure as well as holistic design.

One of the advantages of VR is the ability to peer-learn, as students can experience spaces designed by their classmates as well as their own designs.

“They can criticize each other more if they can go through each other’s models in VR and criticize each other,” said Miri. You can say, “This area is working great, or this area is not working. ‘”

Before submitting the proposal earlier this spring, Lee and Miri both had experience with VR as a design tool. Miri was introduced to VR during a studio project while completing her Masters of Interior Design at the University of Texas at Austin. Since her postdoctoral studies at Cornell University, Lee has done research that assesses the relationship between human behavior and environmental conditions – and controls the stimuli and conditions through VR.

“It is important to note that Professors Lee and Miri are new to our teaching team,” said Matthews. “This illustrates the effect of bringing fresh and diverse talent into our design and learning community.”

Lee and Miri plan to test the VR equipment with students in the fall and then fully implement it in the spring of 2022. After using the VR equipment in the studios for a few semesters, Lee and Miri plan to share their findings at national conferences.

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