Expressing Visual Preferences Through Interactive Parametric Virtual Environment to Inform Early Stage of Learning Space Design

The design of learning spaces is characterised as a social-creative process in which designers initiate a partnership with prospective users to identify the space’s attributes that may support learning activities. This thesis investigated the efficacy of a method on enabling such a large-scale partnership in the early stage of a design process. The survey method is designed to initiate participation from anyone anytime anywhere, and on the other hand, to collate the visual preferences expressed as user data for professional designers to work with iteratively. An interactive online 3-D Parametric Virtual Environment platform was developed to implement the survey method and was used in carrying out a two-stage experiment. During the first-stage experiment, 186 multi-national participants accessed the 3-D platform to express their visual preferences through a set of parameters altering how a learning space may look like preferably. The visual preferences collated from the first stage were analysed and presented as visual analytics to participants in the second stage in which 18 design practitioners took part. The experiment reveals how the participants perceive-usability of the proposed method and how the design practitioners responded to the visual preferences collected through it.