The First Virtual Environment Design Studio

Since 1993 schools of architecture all over the world conduct in various forms of Virtual Design Studio (VDS). They have become an established part of teaching design within the digital realm. They vary in task and structure, are purely text-based or include various forms of interactive, synchronous or asynchronous collaboration. However, ‘virtual’ always refers to the method of communication and exchange of design and ideas. Students have never designed within immersive virtuality. This paper describes the first successful attempt to conduct a Joint Design Studio, which uses Virtual Environment (VE) as tool of design and communication between the remote partners. This first VeDS focused on how architectural students make use of this particular different approach to design within immersive three-dimensional VEs. For example, the students created 3D-immersive design proposals, explored dependencies to textual description of initial intentions and communicated between local and remote team-partners in immersive VE as well as text-based communication-channels. The paper subsequently describes the VeDS, its set-up, realization and outcome. We discuss frameworks and factors influencing how architectural students communicate their proposals in immersive VeDS, and how this new approach of design studio enables new forms of design expressions.