Omnidimensional Sensographies
- Julienne DeVita, Phil Balagtas
- 4 days ago
- 8 min read
Updated: 4 days ago
An immersive and embodied futures experience at AIGA 2025
Written by Julienne DeVita and Phil Balagtas
"The body is a sensing-feeling organ. Feeling is the language of the body. Embodiment practices invite us to be present, to listen to the body, to feel, and to be in our experience with a nonjudgmental, friendly attitude of mind.” –Arawana Hayashi
Making sense of the divide between present and future is one of the largest challenges presented in foresight work. When an audience is invited to engage with a future world or scenario, they are simultaneously being asked to mentally accept this future as real while physically existing in the present moment. Audiences are often asked to imagine the future via limited media such as words, images, or video. These formats rely on visual and cognitive interpretation rather than embodied experience and other forms of sensing and knowing. We propose that the difficulty many individuals face in understanding and practicing futures arises from this gap: audiences are asked to mentally construct the future without access to the embodied cues we rely on to navigate environments in real life. The challenge of jumping from present to future stems from the tension between mental and physical world-building.
The experience of a future world may be fundamentally different from our present reality. If policies, attitudes, environments, socio-cultural behaviors, vocabulary, scents, and textures of a future differ from the present reality, we can understand why suspending disbelief is so challenging. Which poses the question: How might we design more accessible pathways for audiences to practice futuring? We suggest foresight practitioners have a responsibility to activate future imagination in ways that engage not only the mind—but the body and spirit.
The Methods: Immersive Theater and Social Presencing Theater
This case study and article showcases how we (Phil Balagtas and Julienne DeVita) designed an experiential environment at the AIGA 2025 conference that engage participants in unexpected and emergent ways. Our shared background in design futures revealed complementary interests in embodied methods. Phil’s immersive theater practice and Julienne’s Social Presencing Theater (SPT) practice created interesting overlaps for exploration. These theater-based methods became the starting point for our collaboration.
In immersive theater, the audience is part of the story. The boundary between actor and audience dissolves, and the audience becomes the play. Blurring traditional roles requires all participants to become necessary for the story to move forward and expand. This has been popularized by shows like Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, escape rooms, or audio safaris where the narrative plays out on your headphones as you walk about a city. Immersive experiences provide a wealth of narrative devices that introduce audiences to a new world (real life world building,) taking them on a journey where they might have to interact with actors, solve puzzles, or rummage through set pieces to expose the rest of the story. Phil has been experimenting with these techniques for a few years and produced his own events such as ERA, an immersive food experience where he turned the audience into asteroid farmers and locked them in a restaurant to fend for themselves as they learned what space travel and cosmic food might taste like.
Social Presencing Theater (SPT), is an embodied social arts-based change methodology. It is not a form of theater or performance in the traditional sense, but a practice that uses small movements, bodily positions, and spatial awareness to visualize the present reality and exploring the emerging future. The method was developed by Arawana Hayashi and activates the Theory U methodology. It has been used formally in business, government, and educational settings across Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the United States for the past 20+ years.
Julienne has practiced SPT independently and alongside a global community of creative practitioners and educators since 2022. Her research uses SPT methods to study the overlap between presencing and futuring. Julienne's recent work explores how activating the body in the present moment can surface insights that inform future action and reveal transtemporal connections across past, present, and future.
Through our conversations in 2024—25, we realized that the overlap between immersive theater and Social Presencing Theater opened a generative space for exploration. Drawing from concepts and methods of both theater practices, we designed an experience for the AIGA 2025 Design Conference in Los Angeles on Oct 11, 2025. This year’s theme, Design and Performance, created an opportunity to design a world-building experience allowing participants to inhabit future possibilities in embodied ways, narrowing the divide between present and future that so often limits foresight practice.
The Experience: OmniDimensional Sensographies
“Welcome to LA in the year 2040. The city feels both familiar and strange. Streets hum to a slightly different rhythm. New smells mingle with the old. And some cues slip just beyond your grasp. In 2040, the over-reliance on AI has necessitated the need for a more human approach to design. New creative processes and roles have emerged over the past two decades to counter an over-reliance on technology and restore humanity at the center of design. A movement emerges called, Human-first design (HFD), an approach that leverages the human body and its all of its senses to translate and originate ideas. HFD looks for inspiration and meaning through tapping into human senses—not just the eyes and ears, but also the skin, the breath, and the memory. This process-driven practice generates ideas that machines cannot produce on their own. – Introduction to Omnidimensional Sensographies, AIGA Conference, 2025.
The above scenario set the stage for our AIGA 2025 Design Conference immersive experience. This narrative vignette invited participants into a future where creative practice had evolved in response to decades of heavy reliance on AI. In this imagined 2040, AI systems are so central to the design process that much creative work risks becoming predictable and homogenized. As a result, designers return to embodied and sensory methods as a way to recover elements of the creative process that AI cannot easily replicate.
We described this shift as a movement toward Human-First Design—not as a claim of human dominance over non-humans or as a dismissal of technology, but as a reorientation of where inspiration begins. Human-First Design places the body, senses, and lived experience at the center of the creative process. It suggests designers look first to sensation, memory, intuition, and emotional texture before turning to AI tools. This framing established the foundation for the exercises that followed.
Within the constraints of a hotel ballroom, a limited budget, and seventy-five minutes, we crafted a world that could be embodied rather than merely described. The environment became part of the provocation: How might creative practice shift when an AI system delivers the instructions and facilitators become anonymous? How might embodiment interrupt a fully automated design workflow? These questions shaped the narrative and structure of the experience. Rather than rely on elaborate props or staging, we used simple, sensory prompts and embodied exercises, drawing our inspiration from immersive theater and Social Presencing Theater.
Our aim? To help participants access the imaginative space between present and future through their bodies.
The Journey: New Imaginative Pathways
Participants imagined they were working for Replete, a future company developing sensory-based solutions for communities facing climate-related health challenges. Their task was to generate a new creative vocabulary using embodied and sensory practices (rather than algorithmic tools). This narrative anchor helped contextualize the exercises without overexplaining or constraining their interpretations.
Before entering the room, participants signed a fictional NDA and put on “sensory deprivation appendages,” narrowing their field of vision. Once inside, they encountered three different activations, each following a short sequence: Prompt → Response → Action.
Prompt: Each activity began with a sensory prompt or trigger to introduce a small rupture in familiar experience.
Response:Participants noted the memories, emotions, or images that arose, creating a first-order translation of the prompt.
Action: They then transformed those reflections into a new creative expression, forming a second-order translation.
This layered translation was intentional. By moving from sensation to synthesis and then into physical or visual expression, participants moved from familiar cognitive patterns and into embodied modes of imagination. In the 2040 scenario, creative work becomes saturated by AI and increasingly shaped by predictable patterns. Our activations were designed in response to this: asking designers to create from lived, embodied experience beyond what AI can codify.
The sequence gave us a flexible structure to design different exercises:
Drawing Scent:One activity used envelopes filled with scents to convey what this future world might smell like.
Molding Sound: Another invited participants to shape clay in response to the imagined sounds of 2040.
Gesturing Images: A third asked participants to form bodily gestures using images from Better Images of AI, a resource dedicated to human-created depictions of AI that challenge visual tropes in AI-generated visuals.
These prompts aligned with our Human-First framing and served as a subtle critique of the homogenization that can occur when AI becomes the dominant creative instrument.
Participants moved, drew, smelled, shaped, and translated impressions into new forms. Some created contour line drawings inspired by scent. Others formed expressive postures based on memories triggered by an image. The activities were intentionally playful and strange, yet they revealed a deeper insight: When the body is activated, imagination expands in ways that foresight has long acknowledged but rarely operationalizes in practice. By narrowing vision, introducing unexpected sensory cues, and asking participants to translate impressions into gesture or mark-making, they generated ideas that could not be reached through language alone.
Photos by Frank Aymami
Contents within the Omnidimensional Sensographies Boxes, provided to each participant.
Our Learnings: What Emerged in the Prototype
Small details matter.
Designing an immersive experience requires careful attention to detail. From the moment participants enter the room, there is an opportunity to guide them into an alternate reality. How this is accomplished is subtle and requires preparation, especially without the resources to build a full theatrical environment. We used light narrative cues and minimal marketing language to draw participants in without revealing too much, allowing a sense of mystery and uncertainty to support their willingness to enter the story.
Always plan for the unexpected.
A fire alarm interrupted the first minutes of the session, costing us valuable time. Although we planned tightly and reserved time for sharing at the end, the disruption meant that our 50 participants had limited space to reflect collectively. Interestingly, several participants assumed the interruption was intentionally designed, revealing the extent to which they bought into the experience. Lesson learned: Immersive experiences depend on strong design and adaptability when the unexpected occurs.
(Many) people love surprises.
Embodied and immersive futuring methods are relatively new in the design and foresight communities. Participants familiar with immersive theater or escape rooms often enjoy the sense of discovery and puzzle-solving that comes with navigating an unfolding narrative. The event description was intentionally kept minimal to leverage surprise as an entry point. Not knowing what would happen next encouraged participants to release assumptions and engage openly with the exercises.
Speculative Design plays an important role.
We invested significant thought into the sequence of the activities. We intended to keep the experience simple while challenging conventional ways of exploring the future. Rather than simply tell participants they arrived in 2040, we designed a process that felt slightly unfamiliar—something that required them to navigate the world differently. Disorientation, when used intentionally, can shift participants into a perceptive, imaginative state. The exercises, narrative frame, and constraints worked together as a form of speculative design, offering an additional layer through which participants could interpret and perform each task.
Toward more inclusive futuring
Foresight practice is strengthened when people can access futures through approaches that move beyond analytical reasoning. One of the ongoing challenges in futures work is enabling audiences to imagine the future while remaining in the present moment.
Embodied and experiential methods provide accessible pathways into that imagination by inviting people to sense and feel possibilities—not simply conceptualize them.
Our AIGA prototype highlighted how minimal embodied interventions disrupt habitual thinking and activate new imaginative possibilities. Simple activations like smelling, moving, and listening illustrate how the body becomes a conduit for futuring, rather than relying on cognitive processes alone. By drawing from concepts in immersive theater and SPT, these exercises show how futures work expands through experimentation, play, and nontraditional forms of engagement.
The methods we choose shape who is able to access and participate in imagining the future. Embodied and experiential approaches broaden access by inviting people to enter futures through sensation, intuition, and lived experience. Our work at AIGA was one prototype among many emerging efforts to diversify how people engage with futures. As the field continues to evolve, the practices we design must invite wider participation, accommodate different ways of knowing, and create more inclusive pathways into futuring. Ultimately, the responsibility of foresight practitioners is not only to explore and speculate what may happen, but to ensure that more people can meaningfully take part in shaping it.
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