The extent to which designers can understand users often determines the quality of design outcomes. A deep understanding of users allows the designers to focus on the right problem and make optimal design decisions, which encouraged designers to empathize with users. However, the current imagination-based empathizing strategy appears to be too susceptible to their previous experience and knowledge, which has been questioned concerning effectiveness and accuracy. On the other hand, Virtual Reality (VR) technology provides an opportunity for designers to gain experience-driven empathy by immersing them in a virtual environment that mimics the users' surroundings as if they are seeing the world from users' eyes. While abundant studies covered empathy VR and empathy for design, limited attention has been paid to the chance of bringing VR, empathy, and design research together. Addressing this gap, this study explored literature across domains, identified major concerns about this approach, synthesized the evidence, and discussed the feasibility and validity of the VR-based empathic design research approach.
Adopting immersive Virtual Reality (VR) technology in the early stages of design appeals to designers, as research has shown that immersing people in a virtual environment can efficiently elicit empathy and facilitate deeper understanding of out-group members. However, after exploring and synthesis literature across the fields of design, psychology, and neuroscience, the present study found the opportunities VR opens to be accompanied by uncertainties. In this study, we (1) identified the benefits of adopting immersive VR in the early design stage, such as enhancing empathy and promoting design equity, (2) discovered previously unrealised problems that VR may bring to the design process, especially potential biases owing to emotional connections, and (3) determined a future direction for relevant research: gaining deeper knowledge about operators' mental activities to mitigate biases and uncertainties.
Without shared experiences, empathy gaps between designers and users are difficult to bridge. Advancing Virtual Reality (VR) has shed new light on this regard by enabling designers to simulate and experience their users' living scenarios in a virtual environment (VE). However, implementing VR-based empathetic design approach requires dealing with critical design questions, such as: (1) whether VR operators can develop empathy for unfamiliar user groups solely based on objective experience and (2) whether VR operators can utilize task-irrelevant contextual information in the VEs. To explore these issues, we designed an experiment based on two VEs with varying levels of detail that simulated the scenes viewed by people with red-green color vision deficiency (CVD). Participants were randomly assigned to either detail-rich or detail-simple VEs to complete neutral item-searching tasks. Results indicate that objective and neutral experience alone cannot elicit empathy towards users, and VR operating designers will utilize task-irrelevant contextual information.
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