Creating meaningful bodily expression in virtual worlds : Inquiring methods for designers.

This research develops a co-design framework, co-design methods and generative tools for new creation of expressive behaviour by avatars. Influenced by Argyle's (1990) encoding-decoding paradigm of nonverbal communication, a decoding-encoding-decoding paradigm for co-design was proposed. This co-design framework consists of four stages: 1. designers and users decode (analyse) existing examples of nonverbal communication; 2. designers and users encode (co-create) new nonverbal communication; 3. designers reflect on the process of co-creation and encodes (designs) new non-verbal communication in avatar behaviours; 4. the new non-verbal communication is decoded by end-users in decoding.The detail of the co-design framework, including co-design methods and generative tools, has been developed and evaluated in the two workshop studies that were conducted in Sheffield and Taipei. Workshop Study 1 aimed to look into and refine the co-design methods and generative tools in working with designers and users. Workshop Study 2 aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of two novel generative tools (the video experience note and the video self-recording device) I developed in Workshop Study 1. The result of the two workshop studies indicates that the co-design process appeared to be helpful and suitable for designers of avatar behaviours. In particular, the activity of encoding stage enables designers to learn about users' needs and experience for designing new creation. The contributions in this thesis to knowledge are: 1. a co-design framework for the creation of expressive behaviours by avatars, supported by 2. methods for the selection of stimulus film clips and non-design participants; 3. two novel generative tools for the co-creative work; 4. a quantified evaluation of the generative tools in action.