The PER Team met with Springboard Fund awardees Dr Martino Luis (Lead Applicant) and Co-Applicant, Rongxu Liu to discuss their recent workshop. This event provided members of the public with the opportunity to learn about sustainable interior design, and the benefits of using digital technologies to support this.
Amount of award: £3000
Our research examines how stakeholder interaction improves interior design sustainability. By engaging with the public, we can acquire varied viewpoints from stakeholders – including end-users, designers, and sustainability specialists. Our digital platform, SIMHOME, with interactive elements like 3D modelling and Virtual Reality (VR), needs this involvement to raise sustainability awareness, influencing consumers and giving sustainable interior design options.
With the support from Public Engagement with Research (PER) Springboard Funding, we organised a workshop where 12 participants interacted with the digital platform. The activities included demonstrations of the platform’s features – such as sustainability indicator analysis, 3D modelling, and VR immersive experiences. We engaged with a diverse group of participants recruited from Eventbrite, including interior design professionals, sustainability advocates, and interested members of the public. Questionnaires and in-depth interviews with participants were also conducted.
Project management has been the biggest lesson from this venture. The project involved building a digital platform, recruiting participants, setting up a location equipped with computers and supplied equipment, and coordinating a workshop. Each phase needed collaboration with finance and IT departments. Dr Dreolin Fleischer, Engaged Research Manager leading the Fund and the Engineering Department helped to overcome challenges including smoothing procurement processes, providing a computer lab facility, and organising a workshop. The workshop with interactive activities kept participants interested and gave us real-time feedback, which worked wonderfully. We will use similar interactive components in our future projects.
The greatest benefit to us was to gain insights on how different stakeholders perceive and interact with sustainable interior design tools. For our research, this feedback was invaluable in refining SIMHOME to better meet user expectations. By enhancing its usability, future research in this area can use, and be based on, this platform. For the public, the workshops increased understanding of sustainability in interior design and demonstrated the practical benefits of using digital technologies for making informed decisions.
Moving forward, we plan to incorporate the feedback received into further development of this digital platform SIMHOME, focusing on enhancing user experience and expanding the platform’s capabilities – such as an automatic layout design and a more accurate approach to quantifying sustainability indicators. The current work has positioned us well to seek additional funding and collaborate with industry partners for wider implementation. In the long term, we anticipate that our engagement efforts will lead to greater adoption of sustainable practices in interior design, benefiting consumers, industry, and the environment.