Inside the sensing house: reflections from a transdisciplinary xR design studio

1 Introduction

Extended Reality (xR) is increasingly entering design education not only as a technical toolset but also as a means of challenging disciplinary boundaries, established pedagogical models, and traditional ways of acquiring knowledge through direct experience (Abrahamson and Lindgren, 2014; Lindgren and Johnson-Glenberg, 2013). In particular, xR enables students to engage with perspectives that ‘depart from naturalistic ways of being in the world’ (Abrahamson and Lindgren, 2014, p. 2), making abstract concepts physically experienceable. The term xR is used here to emphasize the experiential focus over specific technological details, building upon the ‘xReality framework’ proposed by Rauschnabel et al., suggesting that ‘XR should not be used to connote extended reality, but as a more open approach where the X implies the unknown variable: xReality’ (Rauschnabel et al., 2022, pp. 1, 4). Teaching xR, therefore, often involves navigating uncertainty on multiple levels: technological, methodological, and collaborative, especially when spanning across disciplines.

This paper reflects on The Sensing House, a transdisciplinary design studio conducted over the course of one summer semester at Bauhaus University Weimar in 2025, in which 18 students with nine different nationalities spread across three disciplines including product design, media art and media architecture at both BA and MA levels collaborated to develop an inhabitable xR installation (Figures 1–3).¹ The studio brief drew on sci-fi author James G. Ballard's concept of the ‘psychotropic’ house, in which the built environment morphs and responds emotionally to its inhabitants (Ballard, 2010, p. 186). Rather than treating xR as a stable medium or closed discipline, the studio thus approached it as an emotionally charged, relational practice exploring the interplay between bodies, objects and spaces and how they shape one another, drawing on physicist Karen Barad's concept of ‘intra-active’ entanglement (Barad, 2007, pp. 33–34). This relational understanding of bodies, objects, and spaces builds on Strunden's prior artistic research and experiments on multisensory spatial perception in xR (Strunden, 2023, p. 53). On the one hand, the research is informed by the theoretical contributions of early female VR pioneers, including artist Char Davies's exploration of ‘full-body immersion’, in which participants, or ‘immersants’, engage the virtual environment through bodily interaction rather than passive observation (Davies, 1998, pp. 65–74), as well as literary critic N. Katherine Hayles's analysis of ‘embodied virtuality’, which contributes to the ‘common goal of forcing a reexamination of physicality in an age of virtuality’ (Hayles, 1996, pp. 4, 15). On the other hand, the experiments build on her own artistic practice, including the xR installation Rhetorical Bodies: An xR Dance Performance, performed with dancer and choreographer Tu Hoang at MU Hybrid Art Space, Eindhoven, 2023, and subsequent movement workshops co-developed with dancer and choreographer Viviana Defazio, 2023–24.² Finally, this paper examines how complexity, openness, and embodied practice functioned as pedagogical resources. As such, it contributes to current discussions on xR education, transdisciplinary design teaching, and the role of embodied and emotional knowledge in emerging technological contexts.

2 Methods

This paper uses a discursive format: an open-ended conversation between the two studio tutors, Paula Strunden (PS) and Mira Müller (MM), followed by a summary of learnings and self-assessments. This format reflects the pedagogical ambitions of the studio itself, iterating through discussions and open negotiation rather than predefined outcomes. The conversation took place six months after completion of the semester project and is complemented by reflections drawn from student feedback, observations, and written commentaries gathered throughout as well as after the semester.³ Instead of presenting solutions and proposing a replicable teaching model, Strunden and Müller reflect on how a shared learning environment gradually formed as they learned to respond to virtual technologies, not through mastery or control, but through situated experimentation, bodily practice, and shared non-hierarchical inquiry.⁴ Strunden, for whom this was a first-time teaching experience at this scale, approached the studio as an experimental, open-ended practice, while Müller brought hands-on workshop expertise (wood, metal, textile, and digital fabrication) as well as institutional knowledge of the Bauhaus University. The semester was structured across 13 weeks in four phases (Figure 4), following a body/object/space trajectory through foundational workshops with external experts where seven groups formed across the diverse and differently levelled student body. During the initial conceptual phase and the final exhibition preparation, desk crits were conducted jointly. In the in-between development phase, guidance was split: Müller advised on physical making techniques and tested built prototypes with students, while Strunden guided spatial narrative and interaction design, testing virtual prototypes first-hand in the headset. At key moments, Defazio guided body movements and performative experiments. Throughout, guidance was hands-on and experiential, tutors worked alongside students and participated in workshops, iterating through trying, making and testing rather than instructing alone (Figure 4). The technical setup was defined from the start, inviting all groups to work within a single shared physical space, each developing one distinct xR experience around hacked everyday objects that collectively formed The Sensing House (Figures 1 and 5). The technical infrastructure, including the spatial tracking setup and the software interaction pipeline, was provided by the tutors; what the objects and virtual responses were, and how they linked together through the body had to be designed by the students and constituted the core task of all groups (Figures 6, 7).

3 Open-ended conversation

PS: I'm glad we finally found the time to talk about our first shared transdisciplinary teaching experience. Since I was new to the Bauhaus University, I'd like to start with your perspective: how did our project brief and teaching ambitions fit within the Bauhaus context, its history and infrastructure?

MM: Yes, the institutional structure played a crucial role. Lucius Burckhardt, the founder of the Bauhaus University's Faculty of Arts and Design, reformulated the Bauhaus in 1993. He introduced a fundamental shift from discipline-specific instruction toward open studio structures that enabled cross-media and cross-method collaboration, framing design as a process-based practice rather than a fixed profession (Burckhardt, 2017, pp. 287–313). Therefore, the Bauhaus University enables interdisciplinary study: students from related degree programs can enrol in projects and studios in other disciplines. In our case, although the studio we taught was based in product design, students from media architecture and media art were able to participate. This was largely due to your thematic focus on xR, which overlapped with their fields of study.

This created a very diverse teaching environment, which we only partially anticipated. It was astonishing how working methods and activities developed along the lines of the students’ respective disciplinary backgrounds. This became both a challenge and a strength and, at the same time, it reflected our own backgrounds and interests.

PS: Exactly. You come from product design with a background in carpentry; I come from architecture and later developed artistic research methods in xR, leaning into performance studies and media art. It was exciting for both of us to combine and connect our experience and visions, creating an xR assignment together from scratch; it felt like a wildcard from the beginning.

It's important to say upfront that this was an experiment not only for the students but also for us: figuring out what it means to work together across disciplines and to develop a studio brief without knowing precisely what the students’ experience, collaboration dynamics, or skill sets might be. It required a great amount of mutual trust and, above all, openness to failure. How did we arrive at this concept, among all the possibilities we discussed?

MM: The Sensing House was a playground for us, but at the same time, it was also a challenge. Not the least because we worked as a team, and our respective identities were intertwined in the process. We are two female educators whose conceptual framework is mostly based on feminist writings, in a field that is still male-dominated, especially in the university context. It needs to be clarified here that design and architecture continue to be shaped by gendered power structures, particularly in senior and academic positions. Even if a majority of designers and architects identify as women, leadership and professorial roles remain disproportionately occupied by men (Bolt, 2018). This structural imbalance was also evident in the local institutional context of the studio at the time of our teaching: all permanent professorships in product design at the Bauhaus-University were held by men. In light of these circumstances, I was pleasantly surprised by your appointment as acting professor, and by how strongly our values aligned. Of course, there were aspects we had to negotiate, but there was a common ground from the very beginning, a shared basis which was central to the entire setup. We went on a journey together; full of uncertainty, but we kept working things out together. I thought of it like a Venn diagram: Where do we overlap, where do we intersect, and what are the spaces we can shape together?

We formulated the brief by merging your expertise in extended spatial practices with my craftsmanship in furniture design. It quickly became clear that designing a completely new object would be too ambitious. Instead, we decided to work with existing wooden objects on a furniture scale (Figure 8). These objects became the starting point for the spatial arrangements, which grew into a fluid process in which we continuously rebalanced our respective contributions (Figure 9).

3.1 Embodied virtuality

Beginning with body-based workshops led by a dancer, before introducing any digital tools, established embodied practice as the foundation for the entire design process.

PS: We started by developing a speculative framework, which we called The Sensing House, because we wanted to inspire a house that can sense, perceive, and react to its inhabitants. Rather than a fixed concept, we thought of the house as an open container, something we could freely fill, assemble, and rearrange with domestic activities, without having to predetermine which objects or rooms it would include. Sci-fi author Ursula K Le Guins’ Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction inspired the development of an alternative model for storytelling, where the act of collecting, gathering and carrying, various elements was put to the foreground and the question of connecting and sharing became central (Le Guin, 2019).

What became clear was a core missing competence between us: our limited knowledge of working with bodies, or simply embodied knowledge. Building an xR house did not only involve designing physical objects and virtual environments but also integrating the inhabitants themselves. It required an in-depth understanding of how bodies interact with objects, move through rooms, and transition between physical and virtual worlds. My research on multisensory spatial perception and how it affects the experience of VR, particularly building on the work of female pioneers in the 1980s and 1990s, strongly informed this perspective.⁵ Interviewing these women and working with dancers and performers, I developed a clearer sense of what embodied virtuality actually means, and felt that The Sensing House offered an opportunity to explore this theory in action, together with the students.

To do so, we invited Viviana Defazio, a dancer and choreographer from Berlin, who took on a foundational role within the project (Figure 10). Structurally, the semester was organized around three workshops: first, working with the body; then, finding existing objects; and finally, considering the spatial environments in which the given bodies and objects could interact (Figure 11). For many students, the body-based work was unfamiliar; it was often the most challenging, but also described as the most rewarding, towards the end. An MA Media Art student recalls: ‘I don't often think about the use of the body in my work’, noting that ‘being more comfortable with my own body and trying to use it within the design practice became crucial for us, especially near the end, because we were asking people to complete such an intricate task’ (semi-structured interview, 2025). I had worked with such approaches in xR workshops before, but never positioned them as the starting point of a design process. This was an experiment for me as well. Our participation, moving and dancing alongside students, marked the start of a process whose outcomes we could not fully anticipate. Trust was key, and these workshops even shaped the formation of student groups, many of which stayed together until the end. In this sense, the body became central to the studio at the very beginning, enabling students to move gradually from embodied exploration toward the design of their first objects and virtual worlds.

3.2 Emotion as a design catalyst

Students chose second-hand furniture tied to personal memories, then hacked these objects to amplify the emotions already embedded in them, making emotion, not function, the starting point of the xR design process.

MM: From the start, our studio was deliberately process-oriented. It was clear to us that the goal was not to have a specific object in mind, but rather to initiate a process. The structure was given, but the outcome was left open (Ingold, 2013, pp. 20–26). The performance practices played an essential role on a dialogical level, as they helped us develop a common language, which was ultimately the bodily action itself, functioning as a connecting element between our different disciplinary approaches. Based on this development, we decided that the students should work with existing objects. They picked furniture or other familiar items from a home setting and changed them. Feminist writer Sara Ahmed offers a useful lens through which we viewed existing objects as carriers of affective meaning that ’stick’ to objects and circulate through social use (2004, pp. 10–14). Thus, the basic idea behind this design task was the hacking of existing objects or “physical assets”, where designing a new object was not the focus, but exploring how emotions ’stick’ to the given objects (Figure 12).

Even though Ahmed’s relational theory of emotions wasn’t new to me, implementing emotions into a design process definitely was. My own product design practice focuses on manufacturing processes and on design-through-manufacturing. In this case, however, it was not about creating something new, but about uncovering and examining meanings, emotions, and attributions that are already inherent in objects. This made something that usually stays on a theoretical level tangible: the fact that our world is full of objects that are emotionally charged and trigger emotions. We wanted to use this emotional potential as momentum for designing virtual spaces. Through the performance workshops, students recalled childhood memories and identified objects tied to them. This shift away from a purely functional or aesthetic perspective and toward a contextual examination was particularly challenging and, at the same time, very enriching. The objects were always viewed in relation to their environment, their meanings, and the feelings they evoke. It is precisely this interdependence between object, emotion, and the designed world that became central to the project.

3.3 From elements to relations: objects–bodies–spaces

The breakthrough came when students stopped designing elaborate virtual worlds and instead focused on single physical gestures, like the arm movement on the loom, that could drive the entire xR experience.

PS: What is compelling is how the initial triad —body, object, space— shifted toward relational thinking. Rather than designing elements (movements, products and rooms), students learned to design relationships — a shift toward what Hayles describes as knowledge ‘(re)constructed through relation rather than grasped in essence’ (Hayles, 1999, p. 98). We observed this shift when looking back to early sketches and storyboards: many were overloaded with representational detail that didn't support the embodied “turning point” of the experience. The breakthrough came when students reduced complexity and focused on bodily interaction. The loom project (Figures 13 and 14), for example, worked precisely because it scaled a single physical gesture, the arm movement, into a navigational principle in xR. In this sense, minimal worlds amplified sensation more effectively than elaborate environments. The MA Media Art student who co-designed the loom reflected on this process, explaining that when ‘you place that kind of tool in the hands of a group of artists and designers, and you don't give them strict training wheels or very rigid criteria to follow, certain things are going to happen naturally’, noting that their object's ‘history, the respect it carried, and the sense of embodiment connected to it required much more from both the virtual environment’ to ‘do it justice’ (semi-structured interviews, 2025).

However, reaching this clarity took time. Because this was such a finely tuned embodied process, students had to learn to listen to their bodies not only before working in Unity, but also while moving back and forth between the PC and VR headset, iteratively developing and testing each of their animations. This continuous investment led to more refined outcomes later on.

MM: We eventually realised that our core task was to support students in navigating between worlds. We jokingly referred to this process as “reprogramming”, meaning that it is necessary to first unlearn established design practices to enable new ways of perceiving and thinking. This process of unlearning established design routines can be described using the term ‘undoing’, defined by philosopher Judith Butler (2004, pp. 1–4, 217–219). She uses this term to refer to the critical destabilisation of social and normative frameworks. The goal was to reveal the interdependencies between body, object, and space, and to make them accessible not only cognitively, but quite literally, through feeling.

I remember how intensively we worked to communicate these connections. It took a lot of time and the idea was negotiated in numerous consultations with the students. Several conversations were needed before a moment of understanding finally dawned, and it became clear what it means to ‘design from within oneself’ (Haraway, 1988, pp. 575–581).

Designing from emotion, rather than function, was unfamiliar terrain. Coming back to Ahmed: in our studio context, this meant conceptualizing emotions as relational. Throughout iterative processes, emotional experiences —childhood memories of swinging, the feeling of weightlessness, or short-lived moments of suspension— became tangible. Students used the objects, for example a rocking chair or a swing, as carriers of these emotions, and by hacking these objects they amplified the emotional resonance. Therefore, emotions that were linked through memory or experience actually became a design source (Ahmed, 2004, pp. 45–49). By altering existing furniture, the students shifted attention from functionality to the affective, symbolic and experiential dimensions of these objects.

We realized that students needed to understand how to shape such emotions, not through classic narratives, but through brief, simple actions. In this approach, emotions themselves became the story. This concept was clear to us, but communicating it required repeated guidance and the explicit naming of key actions. Group work supported students in accessing these emotional levels, and collaboration became essential for translating physical objects into Unity (Figure 15). Our challenge was to teach the students to recognize and work with their particular skills without having to master all facets of the entire process. Looking back, this was a key learning experience for both of us. It clarified to us that teaching in this context was not about the transmission of methods, but facilitating relearning and repositioning.

3.4 Trusting and letting go

An xR room does not need walls. Once students let go of representational conventions and tested ideas directly in VR, spatial strategies like shifts in scale and light replaced lengthy design discussions.

PS: This process meant learning to let go of fixed ideas about objects and spaces: letting go of the idea that a bedroom in xR must have four walls, a low ceiling, and a small window with a tree outside. An xR room does not need walls; and domestic activities can take place in dream-like surreal environments. This realisation was reflected by a student as one of the most valuable insights learned, remembering ‘What I would especially like to carry forward is the imaginative and surreal potential of xR’ (online questionnaire, 2025). Accordingly, one group's bathroom project gamified the morning routine by making their inhabitants move back and forth, chasing cavities inside a giant mouth. Another group's meditation space made ‘the invisible into something visible, awakening embodied awareness and sensory resonance’ through cyclical transformations that ‘mirrored breathing and the inner energy flow of meditation’ (online questionnaire, 2025) (Figures 16, 17).

Shifts in scale, light, and materialisation also opened speculative, fictional worlds. Another project, for example, focused on the kitchen and the memory of picking strawberries as a young child (Figures 18, 19). Asked by a parent to help, the child is rewarded and celebrated, drawing on a familiar ‘kid-as-hero' narrative. Toward the end of the semester, the question of how to evoke this feeling became surprisingly simple. The group began working with scale: being smaller than the table, smaller than the door, seeing the father only as a large, abstract shadow, and entering a colourful world in which one's own movements suddenly had greater impact, became the medium for feeling childlike. These spatial strategies created a strong sense of wonder and awe, by being in a child's body and experiencing the world from a child's perspective. At this point, the specific furniture, the colours of the kitchen and the detailed shape of the strawberry basket became far less important than its weight and size.

Developing this sensitivity to what is actually needed to evoke a certain emotion proved difficult to teach abstractly, becoming clear only through first-hand experience in VR. Direct experience and shared observation often replaced lengthy discussions, not only easing decision-making but also making it more playful and fun. At this moment, groups began helping one another: observing how others entered the kitchen and interacted with the strawberries informed their design decisions. Defazio also helped out here by asking the students to iterate their designs by physically acting out the actions their objects afforded.

MM: This iteration was crucial for the process. At the beginning, Defazio assisted the students to convey a basic understanding of which spaces were to be designed. As the project progressed, she redirected the focus, and the students understood more clearly what they needed to design concretely for the activity they had chosen: clarifying which movements were indeed relevant in the virtual world and where the focus needed to be in each situation. One BA Media Architecture student, whose group's work revolved around a chair and the notion of daydreaming, described how ‘through the performative practice, sitting as an interactive experience became increasingly central’, highlighting ‘the role of the body as an essential element of the project’ and revealing that ‘physical presence and embodiment were integral to the extended reality experience’ (semi-structured interview, 2025). With Defazio's input, the connection between physical action and digital implementation became visible: through their movements in the real world, the students were able to understand how the objects are constructed in Unity and what structure the digital world requires. By breaking down abstraction and making interactions tangible for the students, Defazio played a central role at this point, as noted by an MA Product Design student who stated that ‘the sessions with Viviana contributed to our design of the world, in particular to the physical interactions with the object within the real space’ (semi-structured interview, 2025).

PS: Next to assisting individual groups —seven in total— I remember major difficulties emerged in the spatial negotiation process among them, when they realised they had to present their virtual worlds together in one single shared physical space. Their virtual worlds had to make sense alongside one another, without stumbling over the objects of any other's experiences: even if virtual, due to their connection to the physical objects, all the worlds had to fit like a jigsaw puzzle under the same roof. One student describes these difficulties, recognizing that ‘it was distracting as we had to work out how to divide up the work between the real and virtual worlds’ and that ‘changes made in one reality often generated changes that also had to be implemented in the other,’ while acknowledging the reward of ‘being able to walk among the fruits of my labour’ (online questionnaire, 2025). This demanded a very high degree of flexibility from each student and required us, as tutors, to adapt continuously.

Toward the end, we reached emotional limits, and compromises had to be made: although everything took place in a single physical space (Figures 20, 21), the installation consisted of seven distinct experiences. Visitors would enter The Sensing House, choose an object to interact with, and then launch the corresponding Unity experience, engaging with it at their own pace. The level of collaboration we had imagined —both at the level of the small groups and at the level of the larger collective— was ultimately too ambitious for a one-semester project undertaken by participants who had never before worked with VR or Unity.

3.5 Productive uncertainty

Students began extending scripts, sharing assets and troubleshooting with ChatGPT, bottom-up responses that emerged precisely because the process was left open and uncertain. Not knowing outcomes in advance functioned as a pedagogical resource rather than a problem to solve.

MM: At this point, Unity's network-like, tree-based structure also translated our situation in the studio quite well. Just as a scene in Unity is built in layered structures in which elements are interconnected, or actions are linked to further actions and outcomes, our working process increasingly revealed a dense web of dependencies. It became obvious that there were far more relations at play than could be perceived individually. This complex structure reminds me of the concept of assemblages by philosopher Manuel De Landa. From his perspective, an assemblage is a dynamic constellation of components. These components can be for example social, material, natural, conceptual and so on. What is important is that the focus is more on how these components interact with each other in the constellation rather than what the components actually are (De Landa, 2016, pp. 1–6). Within our constellation the network- and tree-like structure of Unity mirrors a collaborative design process in which relations between components are continuously formed, adjusted, and negotiated rather than hierarchically controlled.

All groups worked separately within a shared physical space while they were simultaneously developing related elements. This automatically created connections between their works, even when these were not explicitly planned. Since the aim was to create an experience in which all individual contributions could be perceived as a coherent whole, it was exciting to observe how we gradually began to think about the process itself in terms of a structural tree or network.

The groups were deliberately encouraged to communicate with each other in order to coordinate their work and enable dynamic interaction. By sharing structures, dependencies, and workflows, individual processes became visible and open to negotiation. This transparency supported the groups in growing together and facilitated a transfer of knowledge across disciplinary and technical boundaries. As a result, students were able to contribute beyond their individual areas of expertise, supported by the collective structure rather than limited by it. Much of it would not have worked on an individual level but, to make the project what it ultimately became, the group as a whole needed it. At the same time, I noted that, although this process was central to the design process, it was hardly visible in the final result.

PS: This is also due to how differently groups dealt with their limits, and these observations cannot be generalised, both in terms of interdisciplinarity and collaboration. Certain group constellations were not entirely self-selected, which brought unexpected complications to the surface. The public exhibition added another layer of pressure: each group had its own ambitions, while we had to ensure the installation would function as a coherent whole, including the lettering on the exterior of the studio building itself (Figure 20). The process was intense, involving moments of chaos, uncertainty about whether it would work, and whether hundreds of visitors could experience all the objects. Looking back, we realized that this open, loosely structured approach required us to stay longer in the studio, experiment with ourselves, and sometimes seek extra help. One BA Product Design student noted that we, as tutors, ‘invested a great deal of time', ‘often stayed beyond regular hours’ and ‘were genuinely passionate about (their) ideas and about working with (them)’ (semi-structured interview, 2025). Even if that type of time investment is debatable, it was perceived as a supportive environment that significantly strengthened their work. From this, new practices emerged, almost organically. Students began to extend the given scripts, experiment with ChatGPT, support one another, and share assets, creating structures that we had not planned but that proved highly effective. An MA Media Art student reflected that when ‘you bring together an interdisciplinary group of creative people and give them an interesting challenge along with a new tool, these kinds of processes tend to emerge naturally’, describing the project as 'so new, expansive, and ungrounded compared to what we were used to working with’ that it almost demanded such creative adaptation (semi-structured interview, 2025). As architect Thomas Pearce noted in a preparatory conversation, a certain level of being overwhelmed can push people to find solutions that aren’t immediately visible to tutors.⁶ It was inspiring to experience the students’ openness, curiosity, and willingness to experiment, test, and explore.

MM: Yes, absolutely. I believe that this openness to the process and to an uncertain setup enabled a major experiment. It wasn't always easy, but that's precisely what led to significant results and a steep learning curve among all participants. Working together in this setting was very enriching. I learned and grew a lot through this collaboration. It was particularly exciting to recognize the potential of xR in product design and to experience how products can be conceived in a spatial context. This work opened up new perspectives and showed how enriching collaborative work can be.

PS: The students echoed this sense of discovery, with one MA Media Art student reflecting on ‘fully realising the potential of virtual reality as an art form’ and noting how ‘expansive and limitless it could be’, particularly when putting VR ‘in the hands of designers’ rather than those ‘more orientated towards designing worlds or creating games’ (semi-structured interview, 2025). The openness of the project enabled the experiment to succeed: its interconnected and networked structure, which required constant negotiation, was what made the project strong in the end, even if it was largely invisible in the final exhibition. The shared processes, trust, and knowledge transfer within the group became central pedagogical tools. These conditions didn't always solve problems immediately, but they made it easier to acknowledge limits and continue working together, reflecting openly, and admitting uncertainty. In the end, it wasn't only about benefiting from each other's knowledge or support, but also about benefiting from a shared understanding that it is okay to admit when you do not know something or cannot do it and must change plans — which we did weekly (both laughing).

4 Synthesis of Key learnings

The project of The Sensing House deliberately embraced and fostered complexity rather than attempting to resolve it. It was conceived and conducted as an experimental field that allowed Strunden and Müller to situate themselves, their students, and their teaching practice within a state of uncertainty shaped by emerging technologies, interdisciplinary collaboration, and embodied design processes. All eighteen students completed the project, and all seven groups successfully presented their work at the public exhibition. Despite the experimental nature of the course and the technical challenges involved, the students’ achievements earned them consistently above-average grades. Rather than smoothing over frictions, the studio foregrounded the following three key insights, reflecting on what should be preserved, adjusted, or fundamentally rethought for the development of a similar studio. These insights, oscillating between disciplines, bodies, and technologies, and continuously shifting between intention and outcome, reveal the areas in which structural conditions (4.1), methodological approaches (4.2) and pedagogical strategies (4.3) had the greatest impact on students’ outcomes:

4.1 Structural conditions of transdisciplinary teaching

While the institutional context of the Bauhaus University enabled cross-disciplinary enrolment, and the studio brief was deliberately written to attract students across disciplines, transdisciplinarity as a lived practice developed only gradually through the process of responding to the brief. Initially, students approached the work from within their disciplinary comfort zones. As one student reflected, ‘cross-disciplinary perspectives were both inspiring and difficult. Different backgrounds meant different priorities and focal points, which often scattered the discussion and made it hard to quickly converge on a shared direction’ (online questionnaire, 2025). Over the course of the semester, however, working with the shared material including physical objects, virtual environments, and bodily interaction opened up unexpected exchanges. Product design students appeared struck by the spatial narratives and virtual worlds developed by media architects, who in turn were encouraged to move beyond representation and into physical making. Overall, the students began developing more interactive, gamified content, surprising themselves and each other with what they created. As design researcher Nigel Cross claims, design emerges through negotiation and overlap between different forms of expertise rather than through complete individual mastery (Cross, 2006, pp. 87–90). Groups learned to work with their differences rather than pretending those differences didn't exist. Collaborative design processes, in this sense, rely on shared understanding and competencies rather than on linear, fully controllable workflows. In The Sensing House, this co-evolution happened not only within individual design processes but across the entire studio. Knowledge remained situated, meaning each student contributed from their own position, whether through technical skills, embodied experiences, personal memories or cultural positions (Haraway, 1988, pp. 581–583). Rather than hindering collaboration, this diversity made different modes of knowing visible and generative.

Despite struggles within individual groups, the studio as a whole developed what might be called a distributed competence: no single person mastered everything, but the collective developed and held enough varied expertise to make the shared xR installation work and allow hundreds of visitors to experience each of the seven groups' work during summaery 2025.

4.2 Methodological shifts

Regarding methods, the project had multiple significant turns. On the one hand, embodied virtuality and bodily practice became the pedagogical backbone of the studio. It was introduced theoretically, applied as a method, and as reflected in the conversation above, recognised as a pedagogical turning point and a social structuring force. On the other hand, the object-body-space relations turned into relations themselves: starting as a conceptual framework, this triad evolved into relational thinking through teaching insights, and the project moved from designing elements to designing relations. This shift became apparent in examples such as the loom, where the tracked object became the navigational instrument to transition between worlds. Unity's spatial logic supported this shift: rather than designing static environments and isolated elements, the software enabled students to make their designs come alive, establishing relations between physical objects and virtual responses.

Learning Unity itself became a site of transformation rather than mere technical acquisition. Students described the software as ‘unfamiliar territory’ yet found that ‘after many revisions with the professors’, they gained confidence in navigating its complexity (online questionnaire, 2025). More significantly, students learned to move beyond technical anxiety: as one noted, ‘I also learned not to constantly ask myself, “How do I do this in Unity?”, as this prevents you from creating anything interesting if you stick to what you know how to do with a program’. This shift from tool mastery to creative experimentation enabled students to see Unity not as a constraint but as ‘a foundational understanding of how to build xR experiences’ that ‘expanded my imagination for what such experiences could be’ (online questionnaire, 2025).

Finally, emotions were given a primary role in the xR design process and became a design catalyst. This was achieved by treating them in three ways: first, as material, by providing content (performance workshops and memories); second, as a method, by using storytelling; and third, as an evaluation criterion of the immersive experiences’ quality, from the point of view of others. In this sense, Ahmed's concept of emotions as both relational and cumulative helps to explain this didactic shift of the project and also open up an interpretation of emotions being another designing agent. Objects can thus be read as affective carriers, maintaining meanings and emotional orientations that influence and shape design processes (Ahmed, 2004, pp. 45–49). Extending this thought through Barad's agential realism, where ‘distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action’, it becomes possible to understand emotions as emerging through material-discursive practices: not merely resources for design but active participants in the intra-active entanglements of bodies, objects, and spaces (Barad, 2007, pp. 33–34, 139, 152).

4.3 Pedagogical insights

By prioritizing the process over predefined results and portfolio-ready products, the students transformed the openness of the task and the novelty of working with Unity into generative practices. They started programming with ChatGPT, exchanged scripts and assets they had developed themselves with other groups, and organized troubleshooting sessions via WhatsApp. These were not planned educational interventions, but bottom-up responses to the technical challenges they faced.

However, this emergent learning was unevenly distributed. One student noted how collaboration across technical skill levels created uneven conditions: ‘For those like me, coming from product design without a media background, the same amount of allocated time was not really “fair”, because I needed more time to learn, practice, and make mistakes’ (online questionnaire, 2025). This points to a crucial insight: transdisciplinary xR teaching with students of varying technical backgrounds requires not only extended time but also increased access to hardware (PCs, VR headsets) and dedicated software support.

Where the technical know-how was missing, productive uncertainty functioned as the studio's core pedagogical strategy. Throughout the semester, collaboration proved not to be smooth teamwork but a negotiated, emotionally charged design condition. Cross describes design processes as inherently iterative, in which understanding of the problem and the solution co-evolve over time. He builds the claim of this iterative loop on the ‘reflection-in-action’ theory of the philosopher Donald A. Schön and contextualizes it into the practice of design (Cross, 2006, pp. 24–26). In The Sensing House, this iteration happened at multiple scales: individual students refined their virtual worlds through repeated testing; groups negotiated their objects’ placement in shared physical space; and the collective learned to coordinate seven distinct experiences under one roof. Each cycle of making, testing, and adjusting revealed new constraints and possibilities. After each workshop, students were asked to share with everybody a single word capturing their experience: responses such as overwhelming, fantasy, infinite space, and curious, provided an immediate collective reading of the studio atmosphere and informed the tutors’ next steps.

What enabled this iterative process was what anthropologist Tim Ingold describes as an open-ended process of correspondence between bodies, materials, and environments, in which objects emerge through ongoing engagement rather than predefined outcomes (Ingold, 2013, pp. 21–23). Ingold emphasises that an understanding of space and form emerges through movement and bodily engagement, rather than through abstract representation. In The Sensing House, performative practice and material objects created bodily engagement, which in turn provided another design source for the virtual world. As one student observed, ‘working with real objects in the xR setup made everything feel much more tangible and natural’ (online questionnaire, 2025). Knowledge was therefore generated through this sensitivity to negotiate between physical bodies, material objects and virtual spaces, which in turn shaped the decisions being made in the design process (Ingold, 2013, pp. 48–49).

5 Conclusion

The Sensing House studio was as much about describing and inhabiting a condition as it was about producing a collaborative xR installation. In this process, a central source of insight was the affective dimension of this condition: how it felt to work within it, to be overwhelmed, to negotiate limits, and to gradually develop shared sensibilities. Increasingly characteristic of contemporary design practice in the context of real-time tools, extended realities, and rapidly evolving technological infrastructures, these experiences are not unique to xR education, but the experience of The Sensing House gives insights into their particular potentials and challenges.

For educators interested in adopting similar approaches, several elements of The Sensing House proved particularly transferable. First, beginning with embodied practice —organising movement workshops led by a professional (i.e., dancer, choreographer, meditation practitioner)— before introducing digital tools, helped students explore immersive design ideas through performativity rather than drawing or making alone and develop a shared physical vocabulary that bridged disciplinary divides. Second, working with existing objects rather than designing from scratch lowered the entry barrier and grounded the xR design process in tangible, emotionally resonant shapes and materials. Third, the body-object-space triad provided a simple but effective framework for guiding students from individual elements toward relational thinking. These principles do not depend on a specific institutional context or particular hardware and could be adapted to other transdisciplinary design courses engaging with xR or immersive technologies. What remains context-specific is the Bauhaus University's cross-disciplinary enrolment structure, which enabled (though did not guarantee) the transdisciplinary dynamic described in this paper. The reliance on a single shared codebase and Unity version created dependencies that future courses should avoid. With the rapid advances in AI-assisted coding, technical support could potentially be organised more bottom-up and independently, making it more feasible to run comparable xR studios across disciplines.

Crucially, the studio demonstrated that some of the most compelling design solutions did not emerge from technical mastery, but from students who approached xR outside of conventional frameworks. Product designers, architects, and media artists —precisely because they lacked or actively resisted established xR habits— developed unconventional spatial strategies, emotional narratives, and embodied interactions that took the medium beyond its typical representational uses. This suggests that designerly and artistic ways of knowing are not merely complementary to technical expertise, but are essential for exploring the generative potential of xR. When students surprise themselves with what becomes possible, they open up new territories for the medium itself.

However, to enable such contributions, structural limitations uncovered by The Sensing House must be addressed. The experience showed us that future transdisciplinary xR design courses could greatly benefit from longer time frames and improved technical support, including adequate hardware (sufficient PCs and VR headsets) and comprehensive software training (Unity instruction and semester-long troubleshooting by ideally dedicated technical staff alongside the design tutors). Without this infrastructure, there is a risk that the productive uncertainty that drives experimentation could lead to exclusion based on technical capacity. These improvements could ensure that all participants, regardless of their technical background, can engage critically and hands-on with xR, bringing their distinct disciplinary perspectives to explore what the medium can become.

Generative AI statement

The author(s) declared that generative AI was used in the creation of this manuscript. The conversation between the authors was conducted remotely after the completion of the studio project. It was recorded in German, transcribed using Otter.ai, and subsequently translated into English with DeepL and refined with GPT-4. The proof was additionally language-edited with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic, Claude Opus 4.8).

Any alternative text (alt text) provided alongside figures in this article has been generated by Frontiers with the support of artificial intelligence and reasonable efforts have been made to ensure accuracy, including review by the authors wherever possible. If you identify any issues, please contact us.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Footnotes

Edited by: Carolina Ramirez-Figueroa, Royal College of Art, United Kingdom

Reviewed by: Burak Asiliskender, Abdullah Gül University, Türkiye

Nina Lee, National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

Footnotes

¹The Sensing House was exhibited as part of the annual public Summer Show summaery2025, of Bauhaus-University Weimar, held on campus from 10 to 13 July 2025.

²Including Dancing with Avatars (Bauhaus University Weimar, 2023) and Virtual Vibrations (UdK Berlin, 2024), as well as Embodied Synthesizer, together with dancer Bita Bell (Vienna Architecture Summer School, 2024).

³Student perspectives were gathered through an anonymous online questionnaire distributed after the semester and a recorded semi-structured group conversation with four students from two groups, also conducted after grading was completed. Informal observations and conversations throughout the semester additionally informed the authors’ reflections. All quotations are reproduced verbatim and anonymized.

⁴All data was collected after grading to avoid power imbalances and invite students to be openly critical; participation was voluntary and the questionnaire anonymous. As tutor-researchers, the authors acknowledge their dual role as both facilitators and analysts of the studio process.

⁵These include Brenda Laurel and Rachel Strickland's Placeholder (1993), Char Davies's Osmose (1995), Catherine Richards's Spectral Bodies (2000), as well as work by Rebecca Allen, Monika Fleischmann, Jacquelyn F. Mori, and others.

⁶Thomas Pearce is the Jun. Prof. of Emerging Technologies and Design (EMTAD), Faculty of Art and Design, Bauhaus University Weimar; Strunden was standing in as acting professor for that semester.