Emma Westecott

Co-Director of game: play Lab, OCADU | Toronto

As feminist, black, and queer discourses have repeatedly emphasized, bodies matter, but have frustratingly been deprioritized in technology development and discourse. To address this, we need a more substantive focus on embodied experience, particularly within interaction design and expressive creation.

Extended Reality is an embodied experience, often both physically limiting a player within a restrictive technological apparatus as well as offering a creator more freedom in imagining ways to express and extend their identity without real world reference. What if we could use spatial media technologies to re-imagine and re-empower ourselves by being in control of how we represent ourselves in virtual worlds?

This talk presents an applied research project recently completed at OCAD University that brought together academic, cultural and community practitioners to co-create knowledge towards more inclusive and innovative design practices.