Christine Hemphill started Open Inclusion in 2018 as a disability-inclusive research and design organization that is working at the intersection between accessibility and emerging technologies. She makes sense of the broad spectrum of disabilities by saying, "I talk about people that think, feel, move, sense or communicate significantly enough differently that they're excluded from the way design works today. So to me that's disability."



Hemphill's phenomenological framing of disability reminds me of Bernd Schmitt's 1999 article on Experiential Marketing where he defines the "strategic experiential modules" as being "sense, feel, think, act, and relate." VR researcher Dustin Chertoff drew upon this experiential marketing research to expand VR presence theory into the domains of "sensory, cognitive, affective, active, and relational." In my own elemental approach of presence theory, I conceive of it in terms of Embodied Presence from sensory experiences, Active Presence of agency and interactivity, Emotional Presence of emotional immersion, and Mental Presence including the cognitive plausibility and sensemaking aspects as well as the Social Presence and communication dynamics with other people.



Each of these approaches have commonalities that seen when juxtaposing the frameworks from Hemphill, Schmitt, Chertoff, and Bye together:




Sense, Sense, Sensory, or Embodied Presence



Think, Think, Cognitive, or Mental Presence



Feel, Feel, Affective, or Emotional Presence



Move, Act, Active, or Active Presence



Communicate, Relate, Relational, or Social Presence




There are experiential design implications for how to accommodate for a broader spectrum of thinking, feeling, moving, sensing, or communicating differently. Hemphill's slide shown at XR Access lists more details of this spectrum including move differently (mobility, dexterity), sense differently (hearing, sight, touch), feel differently (mental health), think differently (memory, learning), communicate differently (social, communications), and other access needs (mental health, chronic health, neurodivergence, neurodiversity).



Hemphill also lists out contextual dimensions to consider including finances, social resources, education, digital literacy, and just access to that technology in general. In addition, there is also a spectrum of how adaptable folks are given the novel nature of emerging technologies. But defining the spectrum of these variations and differences helps to identify the experiential design considerations when thinking about providing multiple options to users. We'll be diving into some of those universal principles of design and emerging XR heuristics in the next interview with Reginé Gilbert as well as throughout the course of this series on XR Accessibility.















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Music: Fatality