Chapter 5: Extended Reality Experience Design: The Multimodal Rhetorical Framework for Creating Persuasive Immersion

Our unique human ability to pursue, by disruptive technological means, a will-to-transcend the human condition through the creation of the artificial has been and will continue to be a source of potential conflict due to competing interests and visions by different stakeholder groups. The steady buildup of technologies propelling the unfolding Anthropocene age has the potential to both enrich and undermine the social fabric of our local and global communities. The potentially coercive nature of advanced technology necessitates the reevaluation of the concepts of participation and rhetoric as means of non-violent conflict resolution. By suggesting the rhetorical framework outlined in this chapter, I pragmatically acknowledge and embrace the persuasive, transformative power of design as a meta-discipline that can help us to negotiate between the rational efficiency of the “intelligent” machines and the “irrationally” rational humanity of their users. I believe that such an explicit stance will encourage H+C immersion design practitioners to grapple with many still unexplored challenging ethical questions of co-creating, building, or proposing sociotechnical systems of extended reality (XR). Such systems will be defined by their function or the social purpose they serve. The emergent nature of their outcomes will be a product of an irreducible web of dynamically unfolding interactions among various human actors a n d non-human system components. Immersive H+C system designers will be well served to see their practice as not that of designing individual interactions but that of building immersive environments where meaningful and purposeful interactions can happen.