Sustainable Development Goals are currently universal objectives in all domains of engineering. Nevertheless, design for this global mission is exceedingly intricate and nearly surpasses the limits of human capability. Industrial and academic communities have devoted considerable of effort to developing new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), as new design tools. Generative AI is the latest advancement among these tools, which can empower human designers with its capability to process massive amount of data from diverse sources and recast it in a comprehensible form. Despite the heated discussion on the relationship between creative innovation and frontier technologies, little attention has been paid to empowering young designers with the new skills of the AI era. Therefore, this study conducted a two-week design workshop to explore the interaction between generative AI tools and novice designers, especially in shaping their AI self-efficacy and design thinking process of novice designers.

Interacting with out of reach or occluded VR objects can be cumbersome. Although users can change their position and orientation, such as via teleporting, to help observe and select, doing so frequently may cause loss of spatial orientation or motion sickness. We present vMirror, an interactive widget leveraging reflection of mirrors to observe and select distant or occluded objects. We first designed interaction techniques for placing mirrors and interacting with objects through mirrors. We then conducted a formative study to explore a semi-automated mirror placement method with manual adjustments. Next, we conducted a target-selection experiment to measure the effect of the mirror’s orientation on users’ performance. Results showed that vMirror can be as efficient as direct target selection for most mirror orientations. We further compared vMirror with teleport technique in a virtual treasure hunt game and measured participants’ task performance and subjective experiences. Finally, we discuss vMirorr user experience and present future directions.