Ph.D. Dissertation Final Defense
School of Building Construction
Georgia Institute of Technology

Ph.D. Student: JaeHoon Ma
Date: Thursday, April 3, 2025
Time: 9:00 – 11:00 AM (EST)
Location:
•    In-person: Dissertation Defense Room (Price Gilbert Library, Room 4222, 4th floor)
•    Zoom: https://gatech.zoom.us/j/94398919994

Committee Members:

Dr. Ece Erdogmus, Advisor and Chair
School of Building Construction
Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Eunhwa Yang, Co-advisor
School of Building Construction
Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Javier Irizarry
School of Building Construction
Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Baabak Ashuri
School of Building Construction/ Civil & Environmental Engineering
Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. James Roberts
School of Psychology
Georgia Institute of Technology

Dr. Seung Hyun Cha
Graduate School of Culture Technology
Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology (KAIST)

Title: User-Centered Building Design Using Immersive Virtual Reality and Discrete Choice Modeling

Summary:
User-centered design (UCD), which aims to create building spaces that align with the specific needs and preferences of end-users, is one of the crucial objectives in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) projects. To achieve this goal, it is essential to engage end-users in the design process, enabling them to evaluate space designs and provide feedback that design practitioners can incorporate into their decision-making. Nevertheless, two persistent challenges exist in this design approach. First, end-users often struggle to provide reliable design feedback due to the difficulty of accurately evaluating space designs before construction. Second, incorporating design feedback from multiple end-users with diverse preferences into design decisions is challenging. This dissertation addresses these challenges by introducing a UCD approach that applies immersive virtual reality (IVR) and discrete choice modeling (DCM) to the end-user-engaged design process. The dissertation comprises two studies. The first study examined the effectiveness and applicability of IVR as a design review method for enhancing end-users’ accurate design evaluations. A controlled experiment was conducted to compare end-users’ design evaluations using IVR, two-dimensional visualizations, and physical design reviews while investigating their acceptance of IVR design review. The results validated that IVR can lead to more accurate design evaluations by end-users compared to conventional two-dimensional visualizations and confirmed their positive acceptance of IVR design review. The second study formulated an implementation framework for the UCD approach, which gathers design feedback from multiple end-users through choice simulations using IVR design review and quantitatively predicts their design preferences using DCM to enhance design decisions. The proposed UCD approach was successfully validated based on its accuracy in predicting end-users’ design preferences under hypothetical design scenarios for a university learning space, with undergraduate and graduate students as the target end-users. In addition, various design decision cases utilizing the proposed UCD approach were presented to illustrate its potential for enhancing design decisions. With future work for improving its practical applicability, the UCD approach proposed in this dissertation is expected to promote UCD in AEC projects by enabling design practitioners to create building spaces that align with end-users’ preferences.