Creating a Mixed-Reality Installation with Families through Theatrical Co-Design

2026-07-07

AI Summary

This study addresses the imbalance and discontinuity in family co-design processes, which often constrain collective imagination around sustainability. It proposes a “dramatized co-design” framework that integrates applied drama and mixed reality technologies to facilitate three workshops wherein families engage in role-playing, collaborative storytelling, and tangible making. This approach reconfigures parent-child interactions—such as playful status shifts—and dynamically extends these relational dynamics into a mixed reality installation featured in a national touring exhibition. By bridging intimate co-creation with public display, the method fosters more equitable collaboration among family members and expands the social dimensions of participatory design, particularly concerning roles, rhythms, and authority.

Abstract

Co-designing with families for environmental sustainability relies on participatory imagination, yet habitual family roles and uneven participation, especially between adults and young children, often constrain it. A second challenge is continuity: workshop relationships and embodied ways of working do not easily survive into the final design, where artefacts travel more readily than roles or interactional dynamics. We report on a nationally toured mixed-reality installation developed through applied-theatre-led co-design with families. Across three workshops and user testing, applied theatre methods supported families to co-create narratives, artefacts, and interactional roles that shaped the public event. We show how theatrical co-design can rebalance child-adult participation through playful status shifts, and how selected workshop dynamics can be re-staged within a public mixed-reality installation. We contribute a theatrical account of participatory design in which designers work not only with artefacts and ideas, but with roles, rhythms, authority, and the social conditions that support collective imagination.

Problem

• co-design
• family participation
• participatory imagination
• continuity
• mixed-reality installation

Innovation

• theatrical co-design
• mixed-reality installation
• participatory imagination
• child-adult participation
• embodied interaction