Stakeholder-driven Design and Exploration of Sociotechnical Systems using Virtual-Reality

With ever-shorter product and technology lifecycles, companies are pressured to shorten the time-to-market for new products. This requires faster and more agile design processes both in product development and in setting up new production environments. Technological advances in the field of immersive technologies, such as extended-reality, provide tools to address these challenges and increase process agility. One tool is virtual prototyping. Virtual prototyping enables the involvement of users and other stakeholders early in the development process. Currently, the use of virtual prototypes is largely limited to design reviews and assessments of existing system concepts. Inspired by the paradigms of creative collaboration (co-creation) and exploration, we have developed a participatory design method where users and other stakeholders can explore and directly adapt virtual prototypes within the virtual environment to find the optimal design concept. In this paper, we present an exploratory and stakeholder-driven design paradigm and its application in the context of two industrial use-cases in product development and production training. We illustrate how virtual exploration environments can be built, how the exploration and design process is orchestrated with the involvement of all relevant stakeholders, and how the results and findings can be utilized in later system development phases.