Capturing the right assets
The first step of the process is perhaps the most challenging one. How do you go into remote communities with a 360 camera with the intention to capture high quality footage and interviews? As someone who did not speak the local language, I found negotiating my positionality the most challenging aspect in this process. My approach in this process was to capture more than needed because it's a lot more challenging to suspect ahead of time the visual and audio cues that can be useful in the editing process.
Curating the Content
The second step included liaising with the community partner, in this SELCO Foundation and course instructors, to curate the content collected and to pack and unpack the wickedness in each of the case briefs for the course. This required a shared understanding of how students would benefit from the content being designed. The most important lesson I learned from my experience in the field was that the stories I was capturing are, and will always be, owned by the locals in that community and that consent is compulsory, even if the end goal is to offer help.
Relaying the stories
The most important aspect of relaying the stories to students using VR in a classroom setting is “intentionality.” I define intentionality as coming to terms with the fact it is not just the researcher who is learning about the issue at hand, but also that the researcher’s actions are a purposeful attempt to capture the issues and communicate that to another audience.
Moving from capturing to relaying a story in VR requires contextualization even beyond the editing process, especially when engaging with stories of communities that students have never met in person. This, in itself, adds a layer of wickedness to the problem.