A Human-Centered Design Approach: Design a New Evacuation Alarm System for Building Fire Emergency Considering the Influence of Pre-Emergency Activity

This study combined the Human-centered design (HCD) approach with the immersive VR techniques to design and evaluate a new evacuation alarm system with improved warning efficiency for building emergency evacuation, considering the negative influence of pre-emergency activity. Four main HCD design activities were performed, the context-of-use, user requirements were defined through a theoretical perspective, technology-based solution research, expert group meeting, and focus group were used to produce the final concept. A smart phone-based evacuation alarm system concept, consisting of a control center and a smartphone-based user interface, featuring warning redundancy and multimodality was proposed. A developed virtual environment (VE) was used to evaluate and refine the final design in an iteration manner. This study widened the application of the HCD approach by using alternative simulator methods for evaluation, and added a step for the validation of VR as an adequate tool for designing and evaluating products.