Experiencing digital design: Developing interactive workspaces for visualizing, editing and interacting with digital design artifacts

To implement computational design applications into design education successfully, it is critical that educators consider the available facilities which allow students to develop, communicate, and experience their designs. A variety of media spaces can be used to facilitate greater interaction with digital content, along with the potential to foster greater collaboration on team focused activities. An interactive workspace can be designed to enhance authoring and interaction with digital content by using the INVOLVE framework, which includes seven elements: Interaction, Network, Virtual Prototypes, Organization, Layout, Visual Real Estate, and Existential Collaboration. This framework focuses on first identifying the fundamental uses and needs of the space, along with identifying the types of tasks to be performed within each physical space or room. For example, if a department has three different rooms available to students in a design studio or course, then the activities to be performed within the different spaces, e.g., design review, digital design authoring/modeling, fully immersive navigation of a model, collaborative brainstorming, et cetera, would suggest different displays and means of interaction. Once the use of each space is identified, then the framework guides the user toward the selection of fundamental space attributes, equipment and resources that should be available to students within each space. Exciting new technologies will allow future students to be more easily engaged in the digital content while gaining easy access to data and information which was previously difficult to generate.