Designing impact in extended reality: Towards social, ethical, participatory, and transformative immersive practices

Extended Reality (XR) has emerged as a transformative medium for addressing social change, yet its potential for meaningful, community-centred impact remains largely unrealised. Foundational XR scholarship on presence and behavioural change has largely assessed impact through narrow metrics that privilege individual psychological effects over social transformation. Building on contemporary frameworks of interactive documentary “i-docs,” current XR research and impact theory, this paper proposes a qualitative framework conceived as a design tool to co-design XR experiences for civic engagement, community empowerment and socio-political transformation. Precisely because impact intentions are built into the design process from the outset, the framework inherently becomes an evaluative tool, allowing teams to continuously monitor whether those intentions are being met by the final XR experience. Drawing from Sora-Domenjó and Kapur’s (2022) approach to i-docs impact—which examines how interactive and immersive technologies create pathways between individual empathy and participatory action—the paper argues that XR’s affordances require integrated design and evaluation strategies. This work highlights why understanding XR impact demands attention to both psychological and social dimensions, which we view as complementary rather than mutually exclusive. To address this, a qualitative ecosystem-oriented framework is proposed that bridges design and evaluation, grounded in six interrelated dimensions: (i) Co-creation, (ii) Community Emplacement, (iii) Meaningful Participation, (iv) Digital Community Building, (v) Technological Inclusivity and Accessibility and (vi) Cross-Media and Context Design. These dimensions align with broader XR research showing that lasting behavioural and attitudinal changes emerge not from immersion alone but from structured pre, during and post-experience reflection, activations, participatory processes, community scaffolding, and meaningful agency. By reframing XR not as an “empathy machine” but as a collaborative space for knowledge-making, this framework emphasises long-term community relationships.