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This paper examines how students' ideas evolve into physical prototypes within a digital fabrication design course. Examining the materials used, customization approaches, iterations, and team dynamics of 26 student projects reveals interplays between ideas, available tools, materials and constraints. Findings show the predominance of techniques, design preferences, concept refinement, and teamwork challenges. The implications highlight the value of hands-on iteration for alignment with reality and the need to support collaboration skills alongside technical prototype development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relationship between culture and creativity has sparked the interest of researchers for decades. Although researchers have attempted to establish a connection between culture and creativity, the precise relationship between the two remains ambiguous. The current paper examined extant literature on the subject matter and synthesized the relations between culture and creativity in ideation over the past twenty years. The present study expounds upon the utilized samples, measures implemented to assess creativity and culture, and the study results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influence of culture on design is reflected in many aspects, such as design creativity, communication within design groups, and individuals' creative performance. Culture has a profound impact on design. For example, studies have identified the positive effect of a higher individualism-collectivism value on design team performance. To examine the influence of individual cultural values on the experience of creativity in ideation, we experimented by recruiting participants from different counties to complete two ideation tasks. Moreover, we collected their cultural values and experiences of creativity through two questionnaires. We also examined the connections between individuals' cultural values and their experiences of creativity in ideation. The results show five correlations between individuals' cultural values and their experiences of creativity when the country setting was a control variable. Recommendations based on the findings include that explorations of cultural influence and the relationship between culture and design or other fields irrelated to the country or society level have to measure individual cultural values (with the country setting as a control variable) instead of adopting country cultural scores. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the use of virtual reality (VR) has been a promising opportunity to improve the immersive experience in virtual environments. In this study, we explore the effectiveness of immersive VR experiences on an individual's creativity. To do this, we first identified the characteristics of VR that are closely related to creative performance. Considering these factors, we designed and implemented the interaction method and the three outdoor and indoor virtual environments (Wilderness, City Park, and Office). We evaluated the effectiveness of the virtual environments with 12 participants. The user study results show that outdoor and indoor immersive virtual experiences improved their creativity skills. We concluded by analysing how factors such as simulator sickness and perceived workload influence creativity levels. Moreover, our study showed the potentiality of using immersive virtual environments to enhance individuals' creative performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual reality (VR)-based rehabilitation has been widely implemented to maintain and increase patient motivation during therapy sessions. Researchers nowadays design VR-based rehabilitation by leveraging off-the-shelf VR devices for easy access and application. However, researchers need to implement additional custom hardware or incorporate a specific algorithm to perform a real-time evaluation of each therapeutic movement. This study aims to design and develop a system with features for recognizing and measuring the upper limb rehabilitation movement in VR using off-the-shelf VR devices such as VR headsets, controllers, and trackers. This system is bundled and distributed as a single toolkit to accommodate other researchers in providing the evaluation feature for their VR-based rehabilitation system. The user experiment was conducted to verify the usability of this proposed design system. The experiment results show that the system can recognize 16 upper limb movements and provide several measurement data that researchers can use in providing the evaluation feature based on their design requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital fabrication laboratories play a role as an educational environment in which different learning activities incorporate advanced technological developments. Digital fabrication design education often involves exploratory and scaffolded processes of materialising ideas into products. However, FabLabs poses multiple challenges for pedagogy and design learning. Based on a large-scale digital fabrication course in a higher education institution, we examine whether teamwork carried out in a digital fabrication environment improves creativity. Furthermore, we analyse if teamwork affects self-assessment of learning activities involving building tangible artefacts. Finally, we examine whether the type of produced prototype affects the team's overall performance. The results allow for digital fabrication design education recommendations, including interventions intended for improving the creativity of the outcomes, team performance, and learning of different digital fabrication issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]