From Speculation to Immersive Space: Designing Narratives about Emotionally Diminished Futures

Abstract

This practice-based research explores how speculative performance design, developed through hybrid scenographic practices, can create immersive narrative spaces that prompt emotional and critical reflection on imagined futures of emotional diminishment. This speculative premise forms the core of the project, envisioning a distant civilisation that has lost empathy, creativity, and emotional depth and fails to reclaim these qualities. The scenario provides a lens through which to reconsider the vulnerability of human experience in technologically accelerated societies. Rather than providing a linear narrative, the research translates speculative ideas into spatial, sensory, and performative experiences.

Methodologically, the research adopts a hybrid scenographic approach that combines virtual production and physical fabrication. Digital modelling, VR testing, animation, and material experimentation are used to explore spatial scale, atmosphere, and embodied experience. This dual-pathway process creates a feedback loop between virtual and physical experimentation, positioning making and testing as forms of inquiry.

Through performative elements such as light, sound, projection, and large-scale installation, the project invites visitors to construct meaning through movement, perception, and interpretation. The resulting installation creates a speculative scenographic environment that challenges the conventional boundary between audience and stage. Chinese bronze script (Jinwen, 金文) is also used as a semiotic and performative element. Its pictographic qualities and varying degrees of legibility transform language into spatial form, allowing meaning to emerge through perception and interpretation rather than direct communication.

This research brings speculative design and performance design together through hybrid scenographic practice to explore how imagined futures can be encountered through embodied spatial experience. Rather than providing solutions, the project uses immersive speculation to question what might be lost, and what may remain valuable, in futures shaped by technological acceleration and emotional diminishment.