Mediating Presence

Mediating Presence: Immersive Experience Design Workbook for UX Designers, Filmmakers, Artists, and Content Creators provides the foundation for a broader understanding of the impact of XR as the next medium. The methods presented draw from a wide range of disciplines and professional practice to provide a practical guide to design methods, production techniques, best practices, and terminology that provides an effective road map for developing immersive experiences using augmented reality, virtual reality, augmented virtuality, and other emerging immersive media forms. In this book, media designers Peter (Zak) Zakrzewski and David Tamés present a comprehensive framework for XR media experience design (XRXD) that will allow UX designers, filmmakers, artists, and content creators to connect their audiences to rich, multimodal, immersive experiences for entertainment, learning, creating, and healing. This book guides the reader through a 12+1-step design-based model for creating XR experiences. Each step is accompanied by specific media design methods expressly created for or adapted to XR content creation. The theoretical concepts and methods covered address the specific context and meaning aspects of the XR media environments being created.

Peter (Zak) Zakrzewski is a design strategist, researcher, and design and innovation coach who advocates for applying transformative design thinking and participatory design methods to the creation of media, experiences, and social change. He is an assistant professor of communication and visual arts at Thompson Rivers University. He is a former creative director of the emerging technologies conference EmTech at MIT. Before that, Peter's design consulting career included 15 years of working on user experience (UX) design, retail, and branding programs for organizations, including global brands, start-ups, non-profit groups, and educational institutions such as MIT, Astra Zeneca, Glad, Kraft, and Loblaws. He is a recipient of the MIT President's Citation Award for his research, design, and strategy work for the MIT Enterprise Forum. Peter's current research explores the design of human+computer systems, immersive experiences, and the application of participatory design methodology to media making. He holds a doctoral degree in Technology in Practice (Communication and Culture), an MFA in Documentary Media from Ryerson University, and a Bachelor of Design from OCAD University. David Tamés is a media maker working in traditional and immersive media forms. His creative practice focuses on media co-creation and immersive media production. David recently completed an MIT Open Documentary Lab Fellowship, conducting research for this book. He is a teaching professor in the Department of Art + Design at Northeastern University with a joint appointment in communication studies. He teaches extended realities, video, documentary, and narrative filmmaking courses. David is on the board of directors of Filmmaker's Collaborative (supporting media makers through fiscal sponsorship and educational services) and serves on the advisory board of MedVR (a community of medical XR innovators exploring immersive technologies in healthcare and life sciences). David has produced award-winning short films and recently co-directed and co-produced Reality's Fugue: Genesis, a virtual reality experience that provides a new take on the Genesis origin story to suggest how we create a shared world. He holds an MFA from the Dynamic Media Institute at MassArt and an MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab.

Introduction Section I: What is Immersive Media? Section II: What is XRXD: Designing Immersive Experiences Section III: Discovery and Pre-Suasion Chapter 01 Your Purpose: Developing Your Project Vision Chapter 02 Understanding Your Audience Chapter 03 Developing Your Value Hypothesis Section IV: Ideation and Inscription Chapter 04 Creating the Context Scenario Chapter 05 Engineering the Magic: The Feasibility of Immersive Experiences Chapter 06 Building the Proof of Concept Section V: Planning and Building the Immersive Platform Chapter 07 Designing the System Prototype Chapter 08 Building the Functional System Prototype Chapter 09 Playtesting the Prototype Section VI: Launching and Learning from System in Play Chapter 10 Attracting the Audience Chapter 11 Immersing the Audience Chapter 12 Extending Play Section VII: Iterating Immersive Systems