DEMOCRATISING VIRTUAL REALITY WITH CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, DESIGN AND MAKING

This article narrates the work in an undergraduate first-year project-based industrial design studio subject that started with unprecedented students' isolation in the Covid-19 pandemic. It focused on user experience and the exploration to democratize new technologies, such as virtual reality, with the design, development, and testing of three degrees of freedom controllers, interfaces, and games. The project was based on critical pedagogy, design and making. Heuristics promoted an evolutionary process of experimentation and testing with no fear of failure. A gaming approach promoted the learning of coding and trialling through play. E-Portfolios helped students to develop their own autoethnography and critical assessment. Students' Feedback on Subject surveys showed that the subject is popular among them. They finalized their semester analysing their designs and user experience by playing individually and against each other with their controller and game working prototypes. Two years on and back to face-to-face delivery on campus, outcomes might enlighten readers as these demonstrate reliability that survived the challenge of Covid-19 lockdowns and show strengths and shortcomings relating to our new digital-physical reality in education and the profession. As participants, students understood that their projects fitted to a more significant research framework where the authors intend to facilitate collaboration, co-habitation, and sustainability, to augment human intelligence through the exploration of extended realities and human-computer interaction, and to innovate traditional design process, that is ideally concurrent but mostly sequential, in today's scenario of globally distributed collaborations that are building new singularity workflows of simultaneous ideation, prototyping, testing, and production.