Sarah Lugthart accepted for PhD in Porto

PhD Digital Media
Proposal Research Project

Developing immersive XR experiences means foregrounding the experience of the participant, and engaging yourself as a designer with the complex conditions that come into play. As Simonsen et al. (2014) make clear, to acknowledge the complexity of the design practice and its relational nature, it is vital that designers develop methods that engage with the environment, context and participants that are implicated. For example, when developing an augmented reality game, mapping out the relevant locations, and testing with an audience within these locations make the designer aware of the complex factors that are involved.

In recent years, immersive XR experiences have gained attention because of their ability to make participants empathize with, feel present in and engaged with scenarios – whether documentary, fictional or speculative – that challenge their perspective on a subject. ‘Synthetic situations’, as these mediated immersive experiences have been coined, offer their own specific complexity because of their unique ‘glocal’ conditions: global and local data folding into each other through the flow of data, images and interactions (Knorr Cetina, 2009). As Verhoeff & Van der Tuin (2022) explain, research into such synthetic situations require situational analysis: the tracing of “how a work interacts with the world around it and a cartographic mapping of the entanglements that give rise (and shape) to the object/work itself, which in turn situates and (thus) implicates the engaging spectator/subject.” This goes for researchers as well as designers of media artifacts. My research therefore encompasses a plea for developing situated design methods with and for – in this particular case – the context of immersive XR experiences.

This plea is based on the conjecture that designing XR experiences entails more than designing an affective experience for an embodied participant. Designers ought to also negotiate the specific social, political and technological circumstances under which these experiences take place. Acknowledging this complexity is to engage in a design process that matches this complexity. While standard XR design methods, like UX studies including prototyping, can mean there are gaps in stakeholders’ involvement between design phases (Alabood et al., 2023) , literature suggests that a situated design approach may better accommodate for the specific social, political and technological factors at play (Simonsen et al., 2014).

However, until now the value of a situated approach to XR design practice has not been sufficiently explored. Research on the subject could make clear where the blind spots (e.g., relating to inclusivity) are when designing them and bring to light other limitations of existing approaches to XR design that are used in the professional field. These insights may also turn out relevant to other media design practices and related research domains. Besides its envisioned impact on professional practice, the research ultimately also informs design curriculum development at Avans UAS, the University of Porto and beyond, as I firmly believe that current digital media design demands that aspiring designers learn how to take implicit contextual information into account in the design of digital media experiences (Van Dartel, 2016).

In summary, my aim as a candidate to the PDMD is to provide XR designers with a situated framework to understand the complex factors that come into play when developing immersive XR experiences. Ultimately, by doing so, I wish to advance the emerging domain of XR and the impact XR-experiences have. Because after all, it’s about what interactive works do, not what they represent (Massumi, 2009).