The goal of this research agenda is to develop a comprehensive framework for Multispective Experience Design (MiXeD), presented as an open-access textbook complemented by a digital toolbox named InSituEx.
Multispective derives from Latin and means "seen in many ways." This concept contrasts with the notion of a single perspective and aims to foster analytical and ethical agility, allowing one to shift one's position (in situ) and understand situations from other viewpoints (ex situ).
InSituEx will help to explore and design not only individual user experiences but experiential settings involving diverse human and nonhuman actors.
The primary research question of this agenda is: How can media experiences be understood, described, and visualized from multiple human and nonhuman perspectives with the support of computer systems? This includes considering different hardware components and software solutions.
The research is grounded in the following theoretical approaches:
- Post-Phenomenology (Ihde 2009): defining "media experience" as technically mediated interaction of an embodied being with its environment in everyday life.
- Actor-Network Theory (Latour 2005): analyzing the associations of human and nonhuman actors under ethical, narratological, and design-related aspects.
The research question is addressed in three subprojects:
Based on the results of these subprojects, we will establish a set of practical operations that allow designers and users to better understand, describe, and visualize media experiences from diverse positions.
This methodology will be elaborated in an open-access textbook on Multispective Experience Design (MiXeD) and translated into a prototype of the digital toolbox InSituEx, which we aim to implement in an applied follow-on project.
The concrete forms and target groups of this web-based collection of techniques and technologies to practice MiXeD remain open-ended, but we have two particular use cases in mind:
- As a research and development tool: assisting media scholars, interaction designers, and computer scientists in analyzing and shaping experiential settings.
- As an educational tool: enabling students to create multimodal accounts of media experiences as interactions between human and nonhuman entities.