This paper presents a multisensory and low-cost virtual training simulator developed in Unity 3D, with the aim of improving the effectiveness of Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) training. The prototype system facilitates heat and smell feedback functions operated by an Arduino microprocessor and triggered based on the proximity of the avatar to receptive 4 within the Virtual Environment (VE). The prototype enables the creation of bespoke virtual representations using the 3D scanning function of the Google Tango device making multisensory VE OSH training a feasible and versatile approach in the short-term future.

This short paper summarizes a PhD research in progress as titled in the heading. The research investigates the effect that design tools have on the method of drawing and creativity in early stages of architectural design with an intention of contribution to the procurement of CAD tools. Currently into the second year of the PhD, pilot protocol studies have been executed and new propositions for coding schemes and method of analysis are being tested.

In studying cognitive activity in design it is common practice to use designers' verbalizations during a design process to elicit the reasoning behind design actions. These verbalizations are segmented in order to enable a quantifiable analysis of the cognitive processes. Researchers have shown how Shannon's entropy can be applied to coded verbal data to provide a measure of creativity of those processes. We applied this method to a pilot study, investigating the effects of different design tools on creativity in the context of architectural design. Participants had to design three tasks of isomorphic nature, each with a different tool, in one design session. As shown a significant number of verbal comments were repetitions of already established ideas. Such comments brought nothing new to the sequence of activities but affected the value of information carried within that process which biased the measure of creativity. The paper regards these utterance as verbal noise. It proposes the use of corpus linguistic tools together with a coding scheme that can depict the hierarchical relationship of cognitive patterns used in the process to eliminate verbal noise from analysis. The method was applied to one participant's data, which shows a promising step in increasing the veracity of using verbal data in analyzing cognitive activity.