Sphere Window: Challenges and Opportunities of 360° Video in Collaborative Design Workshops

TL;DR

This paper examines the challenges and opportunities of using 360-degree video in Video Design Ethnography (VDE) through 16 designer workshops. It shows that 360-degree video broadens contextual understanding and empathy but makes sharing and collaborative sense-making harder, prompting two proposed avenues: designerly annotation tools for 360-degree video and 360-degree screenshots to facilitate sharing. The study situates these findings within existing VDE and 360-degree video literatures, highlighting device-specific viewing behaviors and a need for tooling that supports multi-device asynchronous collaboration. The work has practical implications for designing next-generation 360-degree video analytics tools in design research and across mobility-related use cases, while also outlining limitations and directions for future longitudinal studies.

Abstract

The increased ubiquity of 360° video presents a unique opportunity for designers to deeply engage with the world of users by capturing the complete visual context. However, the opportunities and challenges 360° video introduces for video design ethnography is unclear. This study investigates this gap through 16 workshops in which experienced designers engaged with 360° video. Our analysis shows that while 360° video enhances designers' ability to explore and understand user contexts, it also complicates the process of sharing insights. To address this challenge, we present two opportunities to support the use of 360° video by designers - the creation of designerly 360° video annotation tools, and 360° ``screenshots'' - in order to enable designers to leverage the complete context of 360° video for user research.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: The generalized model of Video Design Ethnography. The numbers for each step represent the stages described by nova_beyond_2014, and the breakdown of analysis into an iterative process of viewing and sense-making is based on ylirisku_designing_2007.
• Figure 2: Two ways to visualize a single frame of 360° video: either a stretched rectangle or two spherical projections.
• Figure 3: Participant 3 using both the affordances of time (by pausing and skipping forward) and perspective of the 360° video. This gave them the ability to understand a single interaction from multiple perspectives.
• Figure 4: 360° video allows viewers to understand complex interactions (\ref{['action-reaction']}); for example, the screenshots on the left show the action (top) of people carrying glass across the bike path and the reaction (bottom) of the cyclist who starts to brake.
• Figure 5: Examples of two ways participants used multiple screenshots to share insights that resulted from being able to change perspectives within a single frame of 360° video.