The Five Design Affordances of Immersive Media
These are notes and quotes from the book Mediating Presence by Peter Zakrzewski and yours truly that presents a methodology and principles of design for the collective effort of maximizing the expressive power of the five affordances of immersive media. This handout is provided as a follow-up to the guest lecture given on January 26, 2026 in Celia Pearce’s course, EXRE 5030 Designing Extended Realities, Department of Art + Design, Northeastern University. Contact me if you have any questions — David Tamés.
What are affordances?
“The concept of affordances was first proposed by the American psychologist James J. Gibson in his 1966 book, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. It was later adapted to UI/UX and popularized by the cognitive scientist Don Norman. Gibson defined affordances as signals objects in the environment offer living organisms to help them identify whether an object might offer utility or pose danger (Gibson, 1983). In modern psychology, affordances refer to the action potential of objects present in the environment. In design, products are created to deliberately suggest their intended function to users. For instance, door handles suggest that a door needs to be pulled, while a metal plate installed on the surface of the door would suggest that the door needs to be pushed. As affordances, interaction touchpoints can create the foundational aspects of the environment that spawn the bond that emerges between the audience and the XR media application. Immersive experiences are not just about what we see or hear but, in large part, about what we can do within the XR environment. Besides serving as functional affordances, touchpoints can become props that help to define the participants’ immersive journey. Psychologist Jerome Bruner considered particularity of places and objects to be an essential feature of narrative transportation. Narratives are built out of ostensible references to particular happenings in particular locations, carried out with particular props. Narrative particulars are tokens of broader story types (Bruner, 1991)” (Zakrzewski and Tamés, 2025, p. 194-195).
How do we design for these affordances?
“While we cover the technological feasibility in this book, we focus on the human experience first. Every novel technology offers media designers certain unique affordances that can shape the user experience in creative ways. This was true for film, radio, television, personal computers, and mobile phones. This is why this book is concerned primarily with form rather than the specific content. We leave the creative challenge of sharing meaningfully immersive experiences to the reader. What we present here is the comprehensive process that includes a suite of principles, methods, tools, and building blocks uniquely suited to creating XR content. We hope that the guidelines we propose, like grammatical syntax, while grounding the form of expression based on the realistic affordances of XR, will allow content creators near-infinite communication creativity in this new and exciting medium. The disciplined framework we propose will offer XR media makers a solid foundation of a clear and explicit strategy for their work. The magic in media design comes from the empathic co-creation between the designers and their audiences. The structure we propose aims to support the kind of magic that happens at the subjective moment of presence. By focusing on conceptual tools and methods enabling immediate exploration, we hope to encourage broader participation in the co-creation of the emerging XR medium. Our focus on immersive experience design highlights the critical importance of ensuring that the new XR medium is, above all, a humane one” (Zakrzewski and Tamés, 2025, p. 24).
“XR substantially expands the repertoire of design affordances from the past HCI and GUI paradigms. XR media is defined by the possibility of creating entire virtual environments populated by AI agents and the ability to map real environments and overlay them with information. The sensor technology mixed with multimodal inputs and outputs and paired with advanced AI algorithms significantly broadens the range of possible interactions over the previous computational media. The multimodality of XR media allows for the levels of coherence that bring us ever closer to the goal of immersive presence or near complete simulation of conscious sensory experience of the world. We will expand on these fundamental dimensions of XR media and the interrelationships between them when we discuss the alignment between the XR technologies and the subjective immersive experiences they can foster” (Zakrzewski and Tamés, 2025, p. 45).
XR systems are moving us toward the world of human+computer immersion in which computers, unlike their predecessors, use sensors and artificial intelligence (AI) to adapt to the human users, rather than forcing them to learn how to navigate the newest version of the underlying operating system. We have identified five design affordances of immersive media. We build on a variety of taxonomies including Peter’s work on transformative design-thinking-based knowledge systems (Zakrzewski, 2022), Janet Murray’s four affordances that make up the designer’s palette for representation in any digital format or genre (Murray, 2012), and Brenda Laurel’s eight core characteristics of Virtual Reality (Laurel, 2016).
1. Computational World-Making (Environmental Control)
The XR continuum from augmented (AR) to mixed (MR) and virtual reality (VR) is the first type of media in history to allow its makers to engage in computational-based world-making. This allows participants to enter synthetic experiences that appear real to the human nervous system.
“Computational world-making might be the aspect of XR that is most appealing to media makers exploring the design of immersive experiences. The uniquely human ability to function in what Yuval Noah Harari calls “dual reality” makes our cultural and media environments function as invisible psychological grids that shape our perceptions, habits, and behaviors (Harari, 2015, p. 34). The birth of representation marks a dramatic turn in the history of humanity. The cognitive revolution has turned our fortunes around from surviving as the “naked apes” hunted by stronger species to becoming the rulers of the planet mapping out the course of our own Anthropocene age. We have accomplished this feat by representing complex ideas in the abstract form of mathematics, language, and art and by mediating the flow of our ideas to think and dream together” (Zakrzewski and Tamés, 2025, p. 45).
Artwork example discussed: Manic VR (Kalina Bertin, Sandra Rodriguez, and Fred Casia), installation at Sheffield Doc/Fest, 2018.
See Mediating Presence, pages 45-46; 421-422; 350-353; 378-380; for a more detailed discussion of this affordance.
2. Multimodal Composition (Full Sensory Integration)
XR content makers accomplish immersivity by practicing multimodal composition based on designing for our eight sensory channels.
“No medium in history has ever been able to rhetorically address the entire human nervous system and the deepest layers of consciousness as comprehensively as XR promises to do. Even though the mediation of the gustatory, olfactory, and tactile channels is still in its infancy, the basic experimental work has already given researchers access to those communication channels. Immersive neuro- and biofeedback systems have opened new avenues of therapy for such conditions as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and sensory processing disorder (SPD). Extended reality experience design (XRXD) will affect more than just the narrative transportation of movie audiences and gamers. Common daily activities, such as shopping, working, cooking, staying healthy, or traveling, will undergo a disruptive transformation to become immersively augmented. While immersive experience design builds on human–computer interaction and traditional UX design, XR offers system designers several unique creative mediamaking affordances. XR designers have an unprecedented opportunity to create entire virtual universes that immerse users in the world of computer code by reintegrating the eight senses and the three layers of consciousness fragmented by the previous iterations of media technology. Not since early humans interpreted social and environmental signals in the natural world could all the senses and all layers of consciousness come together in a single communication environment. The fact that XR spaces are sensorially experienced environments which are a product of intentional human activity makes the premises of the XR research problem and design opportunity quite different from the concerns of HCI. Interaction designers did not have nor could they ever address the entire nervous system that connects us to the outside world. As we will explain later in the book, the partial mediation offered by traditional and computational media could not go far beyond the extended layer of consciousness” (Zakrzewski and Tamés, 2025, p. 53).
Artwork examples discussed: Tree (Milica Zec and Winslow Porter, 2017); TreeSense, Xin Liu and Yedan Qian, MIT Media Lab Fluid Interface Group.
See Mediating Presence, pages 73-76; 96-100; 122; for a more detailed discussion of this affordance.
3. Bio and Neuro Feedback Mechanisms (Designing for Behavior Change)
XR environments can offer users unprecedented bio- and neuro- feedback, hence giving design teams an opportunity to customize XR experiences and even elicit meaningful behavioral change.
“Maria Sanchez-Vives and Mel Slater argue that immersion is best defined by the overall sensory experience an XR system can deliver, the number of sensory channels it can simulate, and the quality of rendering in each channel (Sanchez-Vives & Slater, 2005). Designing both compelling and humane artificial environments requires a solid understanding of the subtleties of how humans experience the world. In the so-called real world, we dwell in organismic space and time defined by our biochemistry” (Zakrzewski and Tamés, 2025, p. 73).
Virtual reality therapy example discussed: BRAVEMIND (Project Leaders: Albert “Skip” Rizzo, Arno Hartholt & Sharon Mozgai, 2004 - Present), USC Institute for Creative Technologies.
See Mediating Presence, pages 53-54; 88; 250; 252; 256-257; 359-362; for a more detailed discussion of this affordance.
4. Social Physics (Designing for Collective Intelligence)
Based on advances in computational social science and social physics, XR media systems can be expressly built for enhancing collective intelligence.
“Social physics addresses several design issues concerning immersive systems. The first one is the impact of the social context on individual behavior. The second one is the power of computational social science to observe, evaluate, and tweak the emergent behavior within immersive systems. The social phenomena of our connected world emerge out of countless microtransactions between individuals who trade not only goods and currency but also information, ideas, and even gossip. Social actors make decisions that are always a blend of individual search and social information. When the personal information obtained from individual searches is insufficient, people tend to rely more on social information. In situations in which decisions have to be made under conditions of uncertainty, social learning has a confidence-enhancing effect. Designers interested in leveraging the persuasive power of social rhetoric can learn a lot from closely studying insights from social physics” (Zakrzewski and Tamés, 2025, p. 129).
“In his book Social Physics, Alex Pentland focused on the potential of computational social science to study influence and emergent behavior within social networks and communities of peers in order to refine policy-level decision strategies (2015). Pentland rejects the idea of people as independent decision-makers. He argues for the importance of factoring in the dynamic social effects as the true driving forces behind such social phenomena as economic bubbles, political revolutions, social media memes, and the entire economy of Web 2.0. These social phenomena are outcomes of billions of micro-interactions occurring between individuals trading not only goods and money but, maybe even more importantly, worldview shaping ideas that affect their individual and collective behavior” (Zakrzewski and Tamés, 2025, p. 446).
Multi-participant artwork discussed: Encounters (Mathieu Pradat), installation at Museum of Science, Boston, November 2-17, 2024
See Mediating Presence, pages 307; 309-310; 316-317; 362; 445-447; for a more detailed discussion of this affordance.
5. Purposeful Emergence (Designing for the Ecology of Socio-Technical Systems)
Immersive media systems can be designed for collective action and purposeful emergence within the ecologically balanced socio-technical systems that offer humane intelligence augmentation.
“XR media environments give system designers the power to not only structure the initial conditions of socio-technical systems but also iterate and recalibrate the system in response to data obtained from the system and user behavior. […] Gregory Bateson argued that interactive systems always demand thinking in terms of ecology (Bateson, 1972). The art of designing purposeful yet ecologically sound immersive systems lies in finding the right balance between the system’s inherent ability to self-organize and the designers’ task to keep the system on track towards its intended function. An attempt to exert too much control over the XR system can lead the design team to engage in a heavy-handed form of social engineering. Like the best games, the most engaging immersive experiences allow participants to move freely within a system of well-thought-out constraints. No one is going to enjoy an immersive experience run like a Victorian boarding school. Hey! Designers! Leave them kids alone! As a class of system stakeholders, designers are but one element contributing to an overall emergence. […] Within multi-minded systems such as democratic societies and XR systems optimized for collective intelligence, self-organization is directly linked with the agency exercised by the human actors. Audience members’ agency, along with the system’s external environment, falls within the two system dimensions over which designers cannot exert direct control. This leaves the design team with the five system dimensions they can control” (Zakrzewski and Tamés, 2025, p. 449).
Artwork example discussed: Symbiosis/\Dysbiosis (Tosca Terán, Brendan Lehman, Andrei Gravelle, Sven Steffens, 2024), virtual reality live performance, FIVARS 2025.
See Mediating Presence, pages 196; 426-429; 447-450; for a more detailed discussion of this affordance.
References
Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Ballantine Books, 1972, https://search.worldcat.org/title/5923361.
Bruner, Jerome. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry 18:1–21, 1991, https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~cavitch/pdf-library/Bruner_Narrative.pdf
Gibson, James J. The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Greenwood Press, 1983, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/mono/10.4324/9781315514413-15/gibson-senses-considered-perceptual-systems-thomas-lombardo.
Laurel, Brenda. “What is Virtual Reality?,” Medium, June 15, 2016, https://blaurel.medium.com/what-is-virtual-reality-77b876d829ba
Murray, Janet H. Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice. The MIT Press, 2012. http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhjgg.
Pentland, Alex. Social Physics: How Social Networks Can Make Us Smarter. Penguin, 2015, https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/**881093149.
Sanchez-Vives, Maria V., and Mel Slater. “From Presence to Consciousness through Virtual Reality.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 6(4):332–39, 2005, doi:10.1038/nrn1651.
Wall Street Journal. Yuval Noah Harari on AI and Human Evolution | WSJ Leadership Institute, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki5hosohNtQ.
Zakrzewski, Peter. Designing XR: A Rhetorical Design Perspective for the Ecology of Human+computer Systems. Emerald Publishing Limited, 2022, http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/9781802623659.
Zakrzewski, Peter and David Tamés. Mediating Presence: Immersive Experience Design Workbook for UX Designers, Filmmakers, Artists, and Content Creators. Focal Press, 2025, https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781003442462
Book excerpts © 2025 Peter Zakrzewski and David Tamés, all rights reserved; used under fair use guidelines for educational use.