Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) project, 2023-2027
Midterm Meeting
Tuesday, 30th June & Wednesday 1st July 2026, Immersive Arts Space
Since November 2023, the SNSF-funded project Probing XR’s Futures: Design Fiction, Bodily Experience and Critical Inquiry has brought together an interdisciplinary team of researchers at the Immersive Arts Space (IAS). The project has informed complementary lines of inquiry in and across perceptual experiments, design fiction, and interaction analysis, as well as transversal interest in breaching experiments and engagement with critical disability. In the process, the research team has probed form, fiction, and interaction in various configurations of collaboration and across contrasting settings (the studio lab, street corners, bars, and more). On this basis, many conference presentations and publication projects have seen the light of day, including a several CHI papers, a forthcoming special issue of New Media & Society, and a coedited volume entitled Sensing XR: Bodies, Technology, Interaction (Salter, Mondada & Sormani, in preparation).
This two-day midterm meeting will take stock of the running project, its empirical results and multiple insights, while identifying next moves and promising crossovers for project finalization (until 31 October 2027, the scheduled closing date of Probing XR’s Futures). The meeting program may thus be summarized in three familiar questions: “What have we done? What have we learned? And what’s next?”. In answer to these questions, Day I invites its participants, and the research team members in particular, to assemble and revisit their principal results, insights, and pending questions, be it in terms of form [1], fiction [2], and/or interaction [3], if not breaching experiments, critical disability, and more [4]. On this basis, Day II invites discussion on epistemic implications, aesthetic possibilities, and crossover experimentation – that is, in and across form, fiction, and interaction, the project’s main strands of interdisciplinary inquiry so far.
Find the full program below in the document. Researchers and interested colleagues are invited to participate.
Project abstract
“Extended reality (XR) devices like Apple’s recently announced Vision Pro or Meta’s Oculus Quest 3 enable new possibilities for mixing the real world with a computationally generated one, promising to “change interaction as we know it.” Yet, there is little research on exactly how XR might reshape bodily subjectivity and experience. Probing XR’s Futures utilizes a critically-historically informed, practice-based design approach to examines how XR technologies reimagine bodily subjectivity, interaction and experience, on the one hand, and how bodily experience could reimagine XR, on the other. The 4-year project employs critical, creative, conceptual and empirical approaches to address three questions: How is everyday interaction in XR achieved? How will XR change interaction and what social reciprocity and mutual access will be enabled? What concrete effects and forms of discipline will be enacted on disabled bodies interacting in XR? The objective is to use design fiction, a design research method that prototypes objects and scenarios to provoke new ways of thinking about the future, as a form of critical inquiry to probe the present and future of social interaction in XR in three different settings and contexts: the lab, public space and in collaboration with disabled researchers and communities. Situated at the Immersive Arts Space at the Zurich University of the Arts, the project is at the interdisciplinary intersection of Critical VR studies, Science and Technology Studies (STS) and experimental media design. It will constitute one of the first in the context of Swiss and German speaking design research to develop alternative thinking and experimental aesthetic-design analysis, reflection and critique of XR directly in situated action and use with the general public.
Team:
Christopher Salter (Project Lead)
Philippe Sormani (Senior Researcher)
Puneet Jain (PhD Candidate)
Chris Elvis Leisi (Researcher)
Oliver Sahli (Researcher)
Stella Speziali (Researcher)
Pascal Lund-Jensen (Researcher)
Project Partners:
Andreas Uebelbacher (Access for All Foundation)
John David Howes (Concordia University Montreal, Sociology/Anthropology)
Sabine Himmelsbach (Haus der elektronischen Künste Basel, HeK)
Pilar Orero (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Transmedia Research Group)
Lorenza Mondada (Universität Basel, Institut für Französische Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft)
