Echoes of the Creator: Rehearsing Designer–User Asymmetry through Role-Shifting in VR

Co-creative design processes often involve asymmetriesbetween designers and users. Designers typically possessgreater expertise, access to design tools, anddecision-making authority, while users encounter theconsequences of these decisions through situatedinteraction. This separation between design authority andlived experience can make it difficult for creators toanticipate how their designs will be experienced. Wepresent Echoes of the Creator, a VR design probe exploringhow embodied role-shifting can make such asymmetriesperceptible during design. Participants alternate between acreator role constructing spatial structures from a macroperspective and an inhabitant role navigating them at humanscale. The system adopts a single-user rehearsal setting toisolate the experiential mechanisms of design asymmetry.Through two rounds of formative pilots (N=8, N=7), weexplore whether role transitions support reflectiveredesign. Rather than positioning VR as an empathy tool, wepropose role-shifting as a rehearsal mechanism fordesigner–user asymmetries in co-creative design.