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Despite broad adoption of Digital Human Models (DHMs) in other disciplines, the use of ergonomics in interior design heavily depends on design standards that offer rigid guidelines that do not adapt to design or human schemata. Digital ergonomic assessments and DHMs help designers predict and evaluate comfort for more human-centered designs. This paper proposes a framework to incorporate digital ergonomic evaluations to quantify and assess interior spaces’ ergonomic comfort using customized DHMs. The framework demonstrates a closed feedback loop connecting 3D models with Human Builder to perform quantitative ergonomic tests while offering real-time results with design recommendations. This implementation showed that individual physical capabilities affected the users’ comfort and design outcomes.

Previous studies have argued that a Multi-User Virtual Environment has the potential to foster creative collaboration, but empirical studies that examine this claim are rare. With a focus on architectural design, this study has investigated the affordance of Multi-User Virtual Environment for the production of novel and appropriate solutions in remote collaborative environments. Forty-four participants produced design solutions using Multi-User Virtual Environment and online sketching in remote collaboration. Four expert-judges assessed the novelty and appropriateness of the collaborative results, following the Consensual Assessment Technique. The results analyzed by paired samples T-test indicated that in remote collaboration, Multi-User Virtual Environment’s scores for both novelty and appropriateness were partially higher than those of online sketching. In remote collaboration, the immersion by avatars and co-presence with others in Multi-User Virtual Environment were perhaps more effective due to explicit communication cues used to share spatial information and collaborative procedure, compared to the two-dimensional, static representation of online sketching.