(1) Background: As digital technology continues to reshape visual landscapes, understanding how design elements influence customer experience has become essential. Eye-tracking technology offers a powerful, quantitative approach to assessing visibility, aesthetics, and design components, providing unique insights into visual engagement. (2) Methods: This paper presents a systematic review of eye-tracking methodologies applied in design research. Thirty studies were selected for analysis from recognized academic databases using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) method. Employing the Population, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcomes (PICO) framework, this review focused on experimental studies in visual communication and new media design that utilized visual symbols for communication and leveraged new media technologies. (3) Results: The findings corroborated that eye-tracking technology offers in-depth insights into gaze patterns, visual perception, and attention, which can inform design strategies. This review shows that assessing visual designs based on eye-tracking data can enhance consumer-centered interfaces, better align with user preferences, and foster more engaged behaviors in both digital and physical environments. (4) Conclusions: This review deepens our understanding of the cognitive and emotional processes underlying visual engagement. It also suggests new avenues for integrating diverse eye-tracking metrics into design evaluation, offering practical applications for improving design strategies and advancing the field of design research.

With increasing demands on medical care services, one of the trends is the mixed patient room arrangement of single/double-bed and multi-bed rooms in a nursing unit on the same floor. This influences nurse-to-patient assignment and often causes an unbalanced workload and longer travel distances for nurses. The objective of this study was to investigate how floor configuration and room density influence nurse travel in the hospital's medical surgical units in Korea. This study presented a novel approach to measure nurse travel distances in eight existing nursing units. The agent-based simulation was conducted to model nurses' walking trails, and the distance of one nurse travel to assigned patient rooms was measured for each nurse. With revisions in the spatial arrangement of patient rooms, locating multi-bed rooms near the nurse station, symmetric room layout centering the nurse station, and planning both single/double-bed and multi-bed rooms on one side of corridors, nurse travel distance decreased more than 15%. This study contributed to the knowledge of agent-based simulation as an evaluation framework for spatial analysis. Apart from application to Korea, these results are particularly of interest in countries where private patient rooms are not commonly economically feasible.

Despite the benefits of virtual reality (VR), there has been limited exploration of how immersive VR can be implemented in interior design course content and how students perceive its use. For this study, we investigated how an immersive VR tool can be incorporated into the interior design studio to support second-year students’ ( n = 18) design process and outcomes and examined its perceived usability (i.e., measured as usefulness, ease of use, enjoyment, and intention to use) for accessible space design. We also explored VR’s impact on advancing the interaction with space, understanding spatial information and problem-solving (PS), and how students accept the use of this technology. The students used immersive VR throughout the design process for one semester and then participated in a questionnaire. We found that immersive VR is helpful by enhancing students’ interaction with the designed space, developing better spatial understanding, and advancing PS. VR was also perceived to be highly enjoyable and moderately improved job performance but was slightly less easy to use. Participants showed a high intention to utilize VR, and spatial interaction and perceived enjoyment were significantly associated with that intention. Our findings suggest that immersive VR has potential benefits for teaching and learning accessible design and can be used more generally in diverse contexts of interior design pedagogy. While these results are promising, continued research to more effectively adopt the use of this technology in the interior design studio is needed.

Walkability is a multidimensional construct shaped by the built environment, social context, and perceived safety. Yet, most empirical studies treat walkability as spatially independent, overlooking the spatial and contextual factors that influence its relationship with neighborhood crime. This study investigates how crime affects walkability across Detroit, Michigan. Using data from 2021–2023, we developed a cross-sectional dataset of 624 census block groups. Comparing ordinary least squares (OLS), spatial lag (SLM), and spatial error (SEM) specifications, the SLM consistently provided the best fit, indicating strong spatial spillover in neighborhood walkability. Results show that higher local crime densities are positively associated with walkability, likely reflecting denser, mixed-use areas with greater pedestrian activity and exposure. Built-environment characteristics, particularly intersection density, land-use diversity, and population density, emerged as the most robust predictors of walkability, while socio-demographic factors showed weaker effects. Moderation analyses further reveal that the positive crime and walkability association diminishes in neighborhoods with higher proportions of Black residents, suggesting that structural inequities and historical segregation shape the realized benefits of walkable environments. These findings underscore the importance of accounting for spatial dependence and neighborhood context when assessing the complex interplay between safety, equity, and urban form.