#506: Calling, Collecting, and Transformation: Playful Artifacts as Pivots for Joint Activity and Game Design in a Collaborative VR Design Studio

This paper examines how artifacts and environmental features mediate collaborative design in immersive VR. In a six-week VR collaborative studio, six designers co-created an LGBTQ+ mini-golf game. By triangulating video recordings with reflective journals, we found a stimulus-to-transformation design process that emerged from the perceptual noticing of collectibles, evolving into shared ideation and transforming game mechanics. Situated within activity theory, the study contributes process-oriented methods for researching collaborative VR design.