Sphere Window: Challenges and Opportunities of 360° Video in Collaborative Design Workshops

The increased ubiquity of 360{\deg} video presents a unique opportunity for designers to deeply engage with the world of users by capturing the complete visual context. However, the opportunities and challenges 360{\deg} video introduces for video design ethnography is unclear. This study investigates this gap through 16 workshops in which experienced designers engaged with 360{\deg} video. Our analysis shows that while 360{\deg} video enhances designers' ability to explore and understand user contexts, it also complicates the process of sharing insights. To address this challenge, we present two opportunities to support the use of 360{\deg} video by designers - the creation of designerly 360{\deg} video annotation tools, and 360{\deg} ``screenshots'' - in order to enable designers to leverage the complete context of 360{\deg} video for user research.