Joshua A Fisher | Ball State University (original) (raw)

Papers by Joshua A Fisher

Deleted Journal, Apr 5, 2024

Prompt: "A mixed-initiative co-creative interface between an AI and a human creator. The image sh... more Prompt: "A mixed-initiative co-creative interface between an AI and a human creator. The image should demonstrate that the human has a more robust sense of agency in the relationship." 1 Discovering the Necessity for Digital Humanism In 2022, before the winter holidays, OpenAI released its Generative AI (GenAI) tool, ChatGPT. As an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media in a School of Journalism and Strategic Communication, I scrambled for a philosophy, pedagogical or otherwise, that I could rely on as I explored integrating the tool into my courses. My initial approach was Posthumanist, presenting GenAI as a synthetic collaborator for students: an equal partner in their creative efforts. My background in Human-Computer Interaction and knowledge of Beyond-Human Computer Interaction encouraged my belief in the ideals of Posthumanism and creativity (Harris & Holman Jones, 2022). As an educator, I believed that if I encouraged a sympoiesis (Haraway, 2016) making with the AI, I could expand their creative agency, relationships, ecologies, curiosity, and humility (Harris & Holman Jones, 2022). The strategy was a

Frontiers in Virtual Reality

The turn to Interactive Digital Narratives to understand complexity offers a new model for creati... more The turn to Interactive Digital Narratives to understand complexity offers a new model for creating, developing, and maintaining knowledge. At the same time, storytellers have turned their attention to Virtual Reality (VR). The confluence of these trends draws attention to how non-fiction practitioners can use the technical and aesthetic affordances of VR to create knowledge about complex subjects through the IDN form. This article explores the epistemic rhetorical nature of using narrative discourse in VR to create knowledge about a non-fiction subject. The IDN community has not addressed this rhetorical aspect in their proposed epistemological process. Clarifying the epistemic rhetorical aspect inherent in producing knowledge on complex subjects through IDN provides insights into practitioners’ persuasive and political design and development choices. These intentional choices, in turn, impact the kind of knowledge produced. This rhetorical approach to knowledge production can be g...

Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Conference Proceedings, Jun 21, 2023

Though ubiquitous, the design and development of loading interfaces and processes has not receive... more Though ubiquitous, the design and development of loading interfaces and processes has not received the critical attention in games studies that their presence deserves. As interfaces, they illustrate a designer and developer's desire to create game experiences that push the technical limits of available computing hardware. While loading screens are well known, loading interfaces span myriad forms. From an archaeogaming perspective, this paper examines how the design of video game loading interfaces and processes is a response to ever-increasing demands for higher fidelity gaming experiences on the behalf of players and designers in the face of hardware limitations. This histography of loading interfaces and processes is one of technical and design innovations that demonstrate the ethos and telos of designers. Through an Interface Study, the following design qualities of loading screens were derived: hypermediacy and transparency, diegetic and non-diegetic, passive and interactive, and pedagogic and misdirection. We conclude the paper by looking at case studies that exemplify the derived design qualities of loading interfaces and processes.

Revista FAMECOS

This work explores the ethical and moral limits of practicing realism in immersive nonfiction. To... more This work explores the ethical and moral limits of practicing realism in immersive nonfiction. To establish these practices, the nonfiction media ecosystem is analyzed from traditional to emerging immersive forms. Four significant forms of nonfiction works are discussed that reflect different ethics of realism: documentary, journalism, education, and cultural heritage. Through the description and presentation of each form, a provisional set of elements, variables, indicators and parameters that impact practices and ethics of realism are presented. These compositional elements can be implemented in the design, development and production of experiences for audiences that respect social, cultural, political, physical, and material realities.

To achieve Sense of Presence (SOP), 1920's Bauhaus scenography is presented as inspiration fo... more To achieve Sense of Presence (SOP), 1920's Bauhaus scenography is presented as inspiration for a design language for immersion in virtual environments (VE). The discipline's tradition of immersion, raumempfindung, is the construction of space to facilitate a tangible experience. It is mapped into five categories for VR: movement, externals, tone, time, and topology. This language informed the design of Ares, a room-scale VR experience. A user study assessed the approach and results indicated that the Bauhaus methodology benefits immersion to support SOP.

2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), 2021

Through an archaeogaming framing and an objectinventory method, the purposes and meanings of vide... more Through an archaeogaming framing and an objectinventory method, the purposes and meanings of video game bathrooms are put forward with a framework. The framework assesses each video game bathroom based on its immersive qualities, ludic affordances, and ideological commentary. By analyzing games and establishing the framework, this article addresses how designers employ these affordances to use bathrooms as representative spaces. While bathrooms in video games contribute to a sense of place through environmental storytelling, they also represent situated perspectives on privacy, cleanliness, dirt, gender, and other ideological concepts. This article places video game bathrooms in a larger history of bathroom representations in media. However, unlike other media, video games enable players to view themselves in different bodies within bathrooms, engage in potentially taboo behavior, and interrupt conservative or traditional understandings of bathroom use. This enables designers to take spaces that are political, in some cases even dangerous and antagonistic, and make them playful.

Interactive non-fiction uses the affordances of emerging media to educate and persuade audiences.... more Interactive non-fiction uses the affordances of emerging media to educate and persuade audiences. Practitioners of the form aim to create knowledge, and then to persuade others to act upon this constructed knowledge. However, the historical propensity of practitioners to use emerging media has resulted in uneven access and literacy. Privileged communities and groups have access to the technology and get to tell stories first. Communities without access to these media are slow to gain literacy and are unable to express themselves in an emergent digital culture fully. Compared to their privileged peers, these groups are unable to use the rhetorical affordances of these emerging media for their ends. This inequity puts them at a distinct disadvantage. Community workshops for interactive non-fiction can be established to democratize this didactic use of emerging media. These workshops are both pedagogical and a site for social action. To put this theory into practice, I developed a workshop based on historical cases of practitioners using emerging media to create non-fiction with communities as a form of social action. The emerging media chosen for my workshop was mixed reality. The workshop was part of a devised theater class on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Students gained media literacy through participating in the development of a mobile app that uses mixed reality, and by using that app to create knowledge about safety on campus through performance activities. The knowledge they created came from the students’ personal stories and documentary material. Combining the workshop tactics and the app, students were able to create rhetorically effective and didactic scenes. The ability to use physical space as a canvas to create a digital-visual-spatial argument about how an event should be represented was impactful. Particularly effective was a shared gaze that enabled all of the users to see and create in a shared mixed reality. Evaluation of the workshop showed that students believed that they were able to create compelling mixed reality scenes about their community through the app and that the scenes they created could encourage social action.

Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts, 2018

Culture and Computing. Design Thinking and Cultural Computing, 2021

Beginning with the 2009 publication of Michael Massimi's Dying, Death, and Mortality: Tow... more Beginning with the 2009 publication of Michael Massimi's Dying, Death, and Mortality: Towards Thanatosensitivity in HCI, researchers have been exploring how to design UX and UI for end-of-life systems and memorials. This work has resulted in the design of interactive posthumous personhoods memorializing those who have lived by utilizing the data the deceased produced while they were alive. HCI designers and researchers have implemented Natural Language Processing (NLP) to create interactive posthumous personhoods in the form of chatbots. Over the last five years, Mixed Reality (MR) has been integrated by practitioners to create posthumous personhoods that they claim offer a greater fidelity with the departed when they were alive than previous technologies. How MR intersects with those previous technologies, cultural, personal heritage, and memorialization to achieve this greater fidelity requires further exploration if the media is to be used to elevate the evidentiary status of these posthumous personhoods. Insights from HCI end-of-life literature, death and dying studies, and interactive non-fiction are used to explore the ontology of these interactive posthumous personhoods to discover what MR is doing. This paper elucidates connected ethical, ontological, and thanatological issues that the HCI field needs to address as this alternative practice of mourning and memorialization becomes a mainstream practice. The paper argues that MR increases the social and spatial presence of an MR posthumous personhood's identity and subjectivity with greater fidelity than previous technologies, and that this supports an audience's active creation of belief in the agent as being evidentiary of a posthumous personhood.

Interactive Storytelling, 2018

A number of VR storytelling experiences transport their users to representations of real world si... more A number of VR storytelling experiences transport their users to representations of real world sites in which there has been death, pain, suffering, and tragedy. Much of the current scholarship regarding these VR experiences grapples with their technical success or failure. Less explored are the philosophical and ethical implications of transporting users to such dark sites. In an effort to fill in a knowledge gap, research from the field of dark tourism studies will be used to inform how VR stories might morally construct their representations. For over two decades, the field of dark tourism has grappled with the ethical planning, managing, and facilitating of tours at sites where atrocities, crimes, disaster, tragedy, and death have occurred. Dark tourism tour guides, interactive storytellers in their own right, have negotiated these dark narratives for centuries. This paper proposes that visits to dark tourism sites in VR should not just parallel current models of dark tourism but utilize the affordances of the medium to facilitate new opportunities for ethical compassion and understanding in the mediation of mortality. A foundational step toward an ethics for these kinds of dark VR experiences is put forward for future discussion.

2018 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct), 2018

There are a number of Augmented Reality (AR) experiences that are situated or related to sites of... more There are a number of Augmented Reality (AR) experiences that are situated or related to sites of pain, suffering, and death. The ethical design, development, and facilitation of these experiences has not been addressed by the current AR scholarship. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper presents foundational principles for how AR can be ethically designed to facilitate a respectful experience. A niche form of tourism studies, dark tourism is used as a universal term for any form of tourism that is related to death, suffering, atrocity, tragedy or crime. Based on this research, the paper proposes some suggestions for creating ethical AR experiences at dark tourism sites before, during, and after a visit. AR can become an ethical and powerful extension of reflecting upon mortality if spectacle is moderated at these dark sites. The paper concludes with design suggestions for ethical AR experiences at dark tourism sites already engaged in the commodification and consumption of the macabre.

Interactive Storytelling, 2017

This paper seeks to formalize the language of empathy surrounding Virtual Reality (VR). The immed... more This paper seeks to formalize the language of empathy surrounding Virtual Reality (VR). The immediacy of VR documentaries has been claimed to be so vivid that users are more capable of empathizing than through previous media. This is a laudable but ambiguous claim. Empathy’s multiple definitions complicate how designers use the term. Further, the relationship between users, designers, and subjects in reality needs clarification if claims of empathy are to be made. This paper proposes that VR does not facilitate a direct relationship between a user and an experience’s subject in reality to achieve empathy. Instead, VR designers establish role-plays to achieve an empathic actuality—an emotionally charged interpretation of life—which may result in compassion or sympathy. Users end up empathizing directly with a VR designer and their presented representations, not their subjects in lived reality. A review of existing experiences is discussed to clarify claims of empathy and put forward a foundational taxonomy.

Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Multimedia Alternate Realities, 2016

In this paper, a framework describing the potential affordances of mixed reality (MR) for interac... more In this paper, a framework describing the potential affordances of mixed reality (MR) for interactive documentary (ID) is presented. While progress has been made in defining and understanding the methodologies of the ID, the main objective of this work is to explore the potential affordances of MR for the genre. The history of IDs is presented, with a focus on audience interaction, from its origins in traditional documentary to existing situated augmented reality documentaries (SARD). Outlining MR as a new interaction paradigm for ID aligns the platform's affordances with established practices. MR is presented as a logical progression in the integration of increasingly more immersive interactions that marks the evolution of the ID genre. A framework is then put forward to guide and inform future research for the development of mixed reality interactive documentaries (MRID). Each aspect of the framework is described and used to evaluate a short survey of existing AR and MR examples.

Devised performances are produced through improvisations and theater games in order to develop a ... more Devised performances are produced through improvisations and theater games in order to develop a story. Devising has a tradition of using supplementary media. However, its collaborative storytelling process presents design challenges when using Reality Media (XR). We present a series of challenges and design insights derived from the production of a devised performance with XR, The Safety Show. This novel performance utilized 20 mobile devices networked to a stage manager running a shared XR experience with live actors. The work sketches a rich space for research and creative expression.

Augmented and Mixed Reality for Communities

Unplugged: an augmented reality part of poetry, prose, and music" (2015).

Deleted Journal, Apr 5, 2024

Prompt: "A mixed-initiative co-creative interface between an AI and a human creator. The image sh... more Prompt: "A mixed-initiative co-creative interface between an AI and a human creator. The image should demonstrate that the human has a more robust sense of agency in the relationship." 1 Discovering the Necessity for Digital Humanism In 2022, before the winter holidays, OpenAI released its Generative AI (GenAI) tool, ChatGPT. As an Assistant Professor of Emerging Media in a School of Journalism and Strategic Communication, I scrambled for a philosophy, pedagogical or otherwise, that I could rely on as I explored integrating the tool into my courses. My initial approach was Posthumanist, presenting GenAI as a synthetic collaborator for students: an equal partner in their creative efforts. My background in Human-Computer Interaction and knowledge of Beyond-Human Computer Interaction encouraged my belief in the ideals of Posthumanism and creativity (Harris & Holman Jones, 2022). As an educator, I believed that if I encouraged a sympoiesis (Haraway, 2016) making with the AI, I could expand their creative agency, relationships, ecologies, curiosity, and humility (Harris & Holman Jones, 2022). The strategy was a

Frontiers in Virtual Reality

The turn to Interactive Digital Narratives to understand complexity offers a new model for creati... more The turn to Interactive Digital Narratives to understand complexity offers a new model for creating, developing, and maintaining knowledge. At the same time, storytellers have turned their attention to Virtual Reality (VR). The confluence of these trends draws attention to how non-fiction practitioners can use the technical and aesthetic affordances of VR to create knowledge about complex subjects through the IDN form. This article explores the epistemic rhetorical nature of using narrative discourse in VR to create knowledge about a non-fiction subject. The IDN community has not addressed this rhetorical aspect in their proposed epistemological process. Clarifying the epistemic rhetorical aspect inherent in producing knowledge on complex subjects through IDN provides insights into practitioners’ persuasive and political design and development choices. These intentional choices, in turn, impact the kind of knowledge produced. This rhetorical approach to knowledge production can be g...

Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA) Conference Proceedings, Jun 21, 2023

Though ubiquitous, the design and development of loading interfaces and processes has not receive... more Though ubiquitous, the design and development of loading interfaces and processes has not received the critical attention in games studies that their presence deserves. As interfaces, they illustrate a designer and developer's desire to create game experiences that push the technical limits of available computing hardware. While loading screens are well known, loading interfaces span myriad forms. From an archaeogaming perspective, this paper examines how the design of video game loading interfaces and processes is a response to ever-increasing demands for higher fidelity gaming experiences on the behalf of players and designers in the face of hardware limitations. This histography of loading interfaces and processes is one of technical and design innovations that demonstrate the ethos and telos of designers. Through an Interface Study, the following design qualities of loading screens were derived: hypermediacy and transparency, diegetic and non-diegetic, passive and interactive, and pedagogic and misdirection. We conclude the paper by looking at case studies that exemplify the derived design qualities of loading interfaces and processes.

Revista FAMECOS

This work explores the ethical and moral limits of practicing realism in immersive nonfiction. To... more This work explores the ethical and moral limits of practicing realism in immersive nonfiction. To establish these practices, the nonfiction media ecosystem is analyzed from traditional to emerging immersive forms. Four significant forms of nonfiction works are discussed that reflect different ethics of realism: documentary, journalism, education, and cultural heritage. Through the description and presentation of each form, a provisional set of elements, variables, indicators and parameters that impact practices and ethics of realism are presented. These compositional elements can be implemented in the design, development and production of experiences for audiences that respect social, cultural, political, physical, and material realities.

To achieve Sense of Presence (SOP), 1920's Bauhaus scenography is presented as inspiration fo... more To achieve Sense of Presence (SOP), 1920's Bauhaus scenography is presented as inspiration for a design language for immersion in virtual environments (VE). The discipline's tradition of immersion, raumempfindung, is the construction of space to facilitate a tangible experience. It is mapped into five categories for VR: movement, externals, tone, time, and topology. This language informed the design of Ares, a room-scale VR experience. A user study assessed the approach and results indicated that the Bauhaus methodology benefits immersion to support SOP.

2021 IEEE Conference on Games (CoG), 2021

Through an archaeogaming framing and an objectinventory method, the purposes and meanings of vide... more Through an archaeogaming framing and an objectinventory method, the purposes and meanings of video game bathrooms are put forward with a framework. The framework assesses each video game bathroom based on its immersive qualities, ludic affordances, and ideological commentary. By analyzing games and establishing the framework, this article addresses how designers employ these affordances to use bathrooms as representative spaces. While bathrooms in video games contribute to a sense of place through environmental storytelling, they also represent situated perspectives on privacy, cleanliness, dirt, gender, and other ideological concepts. This article places video game bathrooms in a larger history of bathroom representations in media. However, unlike other media, video games enable players to view themselves in different bodies within bathrooms, engage in potentially taboo behavior, and interrupt conservative or traditional understandings of bathroom use. This enables designers to take spaces that are political, in some cases even dangerous and antagonistic, and make them playful.

Interactive non-fiction uses the affordances of emerging media to educate and persuade audiences.... more Interactive non-fiction uses the affordances of emerging media to educate and persuade audiences. Practitioners of the form aim to create knowledge, and then to persuade others to act upon this constructed knowledge. However, the historical propensity of practitioners to use emerging media has resulted in uneven access and literacy. Privileged communities and groups have access to the technology and get to tell stories first. Communities without access to these media are slow to gain literacy and are unable to express themselves in an emergent digital culture fully. Compared to their privileged peers, these groups are unable to use the rhetorical affordances of these emerging media for their ends. This inequity puts them at a distinct disadvantage. Community workshops for interactive non-fiction can be established to democratize this didactic use of emerging media. These workshops are both pedagogical and a site for social action. To put this theory into practice, I developed a workshop based on historical cases of practitioners using emerging media to create non-fiction with communities as a form of social action. The emerging media chosen for my workshop was mixed reality. The workshop was part of a devised theater class on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Students gained media literacy through participating in the development of a mobile app that uses mixed reality, and by using that app to create knowledge about safety on campus through performance activities. The knowledge they created came from the students’ personal stories and documentary material. Combining the workshop tactics and the app, students were able to create rhetorically effective and didactic scenes. The ability to use physical space as a canvas to create a digital-visual-spatial argument about how an event should be represented was impactful. Particularly effective was a shared gaze that enabled all of the users to see and create in a shared mixed reality. Evaluation of the workshop showed that students believed that they were able to create compelling mixed reality scenes about their community through the app and that the scenes they created could encourage social action.

Proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts, 2018

Culture and Computing. Design Thinking and Cultural Computing, 2021

Beginning with the 2009 publication of Michael Massimi's Dying, Death, and Mortality: Tow... more Beginning with the 2009 publication of Michael Massimi's Dying, Death, and Mortality: Towards Thanatosensitivity in HCI, researchers have been exploring how to design UX and UI for end-of-life systems and memorials. This work has resulted in the design of interactive posthumous personhoods memorializing those who have lived by utilizing the data the deceased produced while they were alive. HCI designers and researchers have implemented Natural Language Processing (NLP) to create interactive posthumous personhoods in the form of chatbots. Over the last five years, Mixed Reality (MR) has been integrated by practitioners to create posthumous personhoods that they claim offer a greater fidelity with the departed when they were alive than previous technologies. How MR intersects with those previous technologies, cultural, personal heritage, and memorialization to achieve this greater fidelity requires further exploration if the media is to be used to elevate the evidentiary status of these posthumous personhoods. Insights from HCI end-of-life literature, death and dying studies, and interactive non-fiction are used to explore the ontology of these interactive posthumous personhoods to discover what MR is doing. This paper elucidates connected ethical, ontological, and thanatological issues that the HCI field needs to address as this alternative practice of mourning and memorialization becomes a mainstream practice. The paper argues that MR increases the social and spatial presence of an MR posthumous personhood's identity and subjectivity with greater fidelity than previous technologies, and that this supports an audience's active creation of belief in the agent as being evidentiary of a posthumous personhood.

Interactive Storytelling, 2018

A number of VR storytelling experiences transport their users to representations of real world si... more A number of VR storytelling experiences transport their users to representations of real world sites in which there has been death, pain, suffering, and tragedy. Much of the current scholarship regarding these VR experiences grapples with their technical success or failure. Less explored are the philosophical and ethical implications of transporting users to such dark sites. In an effort to fill in a knowledge gap, research from the field of dark tourism studies will be used to inform how VR stories might morally construct their representations. For over two decades, the field of dark tourism has grappled with the ethical planning, managing, and facilitating of tours at sites where atrocities, crimes, disaster, tragedy, and death have occurred. Dark tourism tour guides, interactive storytellers in their own right, have negotiated these dark narratives for centuries. This paper proposes that visits to dark tourism sites in VR should not just parallel current models of dark tourism but utilize the affordances of the medium to facilitate new opportunities for ethical compassion and understanding in the mediation of mortality. A foundational step toward an ethics for these kinds of dark VR experiences is put forward for future discussion.

2018 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality Adjunct (ISMAR-Adjunct), 2018

There are a number of Augmented Reality (AR) experiences that are situated or related to sites of... more There are a number of Augmented Reality (AR) experiences that are situated or related to sites of pain, suffering, and death. The ethical design, development, and facilitation of these experiences has not been addressed by the current AR scholarship. To fill this knowledge gap, this paper presents foundational principles for how AR can be ethically designed to facilitate a respectful experience. A niche form of tourism studies, dark tourism is used as a universal term for any form of tourism that is related to death, suffering, atrocity, tragedy or crime. Based on this research, the paper proposes some suggestions for creating ethical AR experiences at dark tourism sites before, during, and after a visit. AR can become an ethical and powerful extension of reflecting upon mortality if spectacle is moderated at these dark sites. The paper concludes with design suggestions for ethical AR experiences at dark tourism sites already engaged in the commodification and consumption of the macabre.

Interactive Storytelling, 2017

This paper seeks to formalize the language of empathy surrounding Virtual Reality (VR). The immed... more This paper seeks to formalize the language of empathy surrounding Virtual Reality (VR). The immediacy of VR documentaries has been claimed to be so vivid that users are more capable of empathizing than through previous media. This is a laudable but ambiguous claim. Empathy’s multiple definitions complicate how designers use the term. Further, the relationship between users, designers, and subjects in reality needs clarification if claims of empathy are to be made. This paper proposes that VR does not facilitate a direct relationship between a user and an experience’s subject in reality to achieve empathy. Instead, VR designers establish role-plays to achieve an empathic actuality—an emotionally charged interpretation of life—which may result in compassion or sympathy. Users end up empathizing directly with a VR designer and their presented representations, not their subjects in lived reality. A review of existing experiences is discussed to clarify claims of empathy and put forward a foundational taxonomy.

Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Multimedia Alternate Realities, 2016

In this paper, a framework describing the potential affordances of mixed reality (MR) for interac... more In this paper, a framework describing the potential affordances of mixed reality (MR) for interactive documentary (ID) is presented. While progress has been made in defining and understanding the methodologies of the ID, the main objective of this work is to explore the potential affordances of MR for the genre. The history of IDs is presented, with a focus on audience interaction, from its origins in traditional documentary to existing situated augmented reality documentaries (SARD). Outlining MR as a new interaction paradigm for ID aligns the platform's affordances with established practices. MR is presented as a logical progression in the integration of increasingly more immersive interactions that marks the evolution of the ID genre. A framework is then put forward to guide and inform future research for the development of mixed reality interactive documentaries (MRID). Each aspect of the framework is described and used to evaluate a short survey of existing AR and MR examples.

Devised performances are produced through improvisations and theater games in order to develop a ... more Devised performances are produced through improvisations and theater games in order to develop a story. Devising has a tradition of using supplementary media. However, its collaborative storytelling process presents design challenges when using Reality Media (XR). We present a series of challenges and design insights derived from the production of a devised performance with XR, The Safety Show. This novel performance utilized 20 mobile devices networked to a stage manager running a shared XR experience with live actors. The work sketches a rich space for research and creative expression.

Augmented and Mixed Reality for Communities

Unplugged: an augmented reality part of poetry, prose, and music" (2015).

Dissertation, 2019

Interactive non-fiction uses the affordances of emerging media to educate and persuade audiences.... more Interactive non-fiction uses the affordances of emerging media to educate and persuade audiences. Practitioners of the form aim to create knowledge, and then to persuade others to act upon this constructed knowledge. However, the historical propensity of practitioners to use emerging media has resulted in uneven access and literacy. Privileged communities and groups have access to the technology and get to tell stories first. Communities without access to these media are slow to gain literacy and are unable to express themselves in an emergent digital culture fully. Compared to their privileged peers, these groups are unable to use the rhetorical affordances of these emerging media for their ends. This inequity puts them at a distinct disadvantage. Community workshops for interactive non-fiction can be established to democratize this didactic use of emerging media. These workshops are both pedagogical and a site for social action. To put this theory into practice, I developed a workshop based on historical cases of practitioners using emerging media to create non-fiction with communities as a form of social action. The emerging media chosen for my workshop was mixed reality. The workshop was part of a devised theater class on the campus of the Georgia Institute of Technology. Students gained media literacy through participating in the development of a mobile app that uses mixed reality, and by using that app to create knowledge about safety on campus through performance activities. The knowledge they created came from the students’ personal stories and documentary material. Combining the workshop tactics and the app, students were able to create rhetorically effective and didactic scenes. The ability to use physical space as a canvas to create a digital-visual-spatial argument about how an event should be represented was impactful. Particularly effective was a shared gaze that enabled all of the users to see and create in a shared mixed reality. Evaluation of the workshop showed that students believed that they were able to create compelling mixed reality scenes about their community through the app and that the scenes they created could encourage social action.

CCC through Design Fiction in VR Workshop at DIS2020, 2020

Augusto Boal’s Applied Theater inspires processes for developing participatory design fictions in... more Augusto Boal’s Applied Theater inspires processes for developing participatory design fictions in Virtual Reality (VR). Applied theater’s practice of embodied and future-action oriented storytelling encourages participants to envision potential futures and work toward them. This parallels the work of design futuring, which explores and critiques futures to potentially change the present. Augusto Boal used his theater games, Image and Forum Theater, to create fictions that identify contemporary issues to participatorily explore diverse futures. These games are rehearsals for future actions and consequences. VR enables a community of participants to envision and be embodied within these potential futures as they co-create them.

Edited Collection on Interactive Digital Narrative Syllabi with a Global Focus, 2024