Design review in immersive Virtual Reality: End-User involvement and Cognitive Fit

Doctoral thesis, 2026

Building design review brings together architects, planners, client representatives, and building occupants, such as healthcare staff or teachers. Identifying design solutions that work across different stakeholder priorities during design review is challenging. In part because end-users vary in their experience of interpreting typically used 2D drawings. Facility planners and client representatives are typically practiced in reading these types of representational formats, whereas building occupants' expertise lies in daily work practice. When the review format does not align with how building occupants understand space, work-practice knowledge cannot fully inform the design review, and design issues affecting daily operations risk going unnoticed. As a result, design decisions are made under uncertainty, increasing the likelihood of costly rework and facilities that do not fully support the daily work of those who use them. The representational format used during design review therefore shapes whether building occupants can evaluate the consequences of proposed design solutions for daily work practice and contribute their work-practice knowledge to design decisions.

This thesis investigates how alternative representational formats such as immersive Virtual Reality (VR) can support end-user involvement, including Co-Design, during building design review. Across four empirical studies in real-world building projects, such as healthcare and school settings, the thesis explores how immersive environments can support higher levels of involvement, how interactive features shape collaboration in design review, and how the alignment between representational format, task, and end-user expertise, Cognitive Fit, affects end-users' ability to interpret proposals and contribute to design decisions.

The findings show that immersive VR, combined with conventional 2D drawings and interactive features such as multi-user collaboration, object interaction, and multi-scale views, can shift end-user involvement from informative or consultative input toward more active forms of participation, including Co-Design. By making proposed designs experienceable at full scale, immersive VR enables building occupants to identify design issues that are difficult to identify in conventional 2D drawings. At the same time, immersive VR is not a universal solution. Rather, the right combination of immersive and overview-based representational formats depends on the task being evaluated and the expertise of the end-users involved. By extending Cognitive Fit theory beyond individual task performance to collaborative design review, the thesis shows when, how, and for whom immersive VR can support more active end-user involvement during design review. Such involvement, in turn, can create conditions for Co-Design to take place, where end-users help shape design proposals together with the design team rather than only reviewing them.