Bolor Amgalan is an interaction design researcher, educator, and design strategist leveraging virtual reality, craft, and blockchain technology to design culturally sensitive transition design interventions with implications on the future of work and human-machine collaboration.

Design Futures: Work, Play & XR is an upper-level undergraduate/graduate level course about collaboratively redefining the future of work focusing on creativity, cognition and decolonization. We leverage extended reality (XR) technologies as both a tool and a creative medium ideal for storytelling, systems design and activism. Through speculation we define productive labor, play and social responsibility in a post-capitalist world and craft tools, experiences, and provocations that support alternative values-based systems. As automation, AI and XR technologies proliferate, we’re actively asking ourselves what, if any, forms of human knowledge and skills should be nurtured, and how this will affect the different systems – social, natural, economic, technological – that we’re part of.

How can physico-digital material know-how be designed to create meaning and a heightened sense of embodiment in virtual reality? Virtual Matter is a series of hybrid materials that exhibit characteristics similar to analog textiles, yet when working with them, their behavior is augmented by computation giving birth to physico-digital material know-how. The delight in the discovery of this new materiality and the ultimate reward of learning to tame the emergent behaviors of these hybrid materials form the essence of the experience. As a creativity support tool, Virtual Matter occupies the space at the intersection of human-machine symbiosis and embodied learning, placing Homo faber — man as the maker — at the heart of human becoming. In this experience, time and emergent material know-how are used to create opportunities to instill in the apprentice intrinsic values attained through craftsmanship — the enduring commitment and desire to do a job well for its own sake and awareness of resource limitations.