Wicked Solutions for Wicked Problems - Immersive Learning

We live in the Anthropocene with its attendant ecological collapse and looming climate forecasts.

What approaches can help us amplify our ability to perceive, imagine and create solutions facing the current poly-crisis? Are there tools that can help us face our poly-crises constructively?

This is what we set out to explore. You can read on to get the insights that Oleg Koefoed and I got when we explored combining two learning methods: Digital immersion using VR and analogue immersion using site-sensitising techniques. Our project's current working title: VRxSS

Exec summary

1. Explore using digital and analogue immersion techniques to raise climate awareness and strengthen futures literacy.
2. Encourage the development of immersive learning experiences to bridge the gap between city dwellers and nature-based ecosystems.
3. Use immersive learning processes to help organizations understand complex phenomena and make meaningful connections between problems.
4. Support initiatives that enhance empathy and understanding of interconnectedness to drive climate action and promote regenerative transformation.

The following is adapted and based on Oleg Koefoed's Immersiv L?ring I & Immersiv L?ring II (both in Danish) and current explorations between Khora Virtual Reality and Promentum , and other international partners working with science, arts, futures studies and technology.

Reach out to us at [email protected] and [email protected] for more information.

A Wicked Solution for Wicked Problems?

How can immersive learning raise agency, entrepreneurship and awareness about climate change and sustainability?

Amid the global climate emergency, we suffer from a crisis of imagination. This results from a deficit in our ability to anticipate different futures. We find it easy to think about apocalypses and sci-fi-derived dystopian futures but harder to envision a better society a generation or more into the future. At the same time, art gives us the capacity and mandate for heightened futures literacy: “Art is not a magic bullet for change. But it gives us a language to speak about possible futures. And it frees us to imagine impossible ones – which might be what it takes to save us.” (Audience Labs, Kings College London )

We’ve explored ways of using VR and site sensitizing to raise awareness about the climate crisis. Through 2019-21, thanks to grants from Climate-KIC (https://www.climate-kic.org/) and EIT-Urban Mobility (https://www.eiturbanmobility.eu/), we were able to run a series of workshops and hackathons to test the methodology. In short, we combined analogue/spatial and digital/virtual immersive experiences and exercises into different creative formats to explore their potential in a learning context and as tools to strengthen climate and futures literacy.

Experiencing the global impact of climate change can be difficult on a day-to-day, local level. And 70% of us live in cities in ways that are disconnected from nature-based ecosystems. If we add those who live outside cities but live as if they did (think 'indoor society'), we have a huge problem when perceiving and learning about climate and ecologies. We could immerse ourselves more, but we don't. So it made sense to test what we can gain from a multi-layered immersive experience.

Participants completed analogue exercises in Copenhagen. They were exposed to a series of VR experiences that gave them access to prehistoric humans, other species' perspectives, a forest tree, Al Gore walking across melting polar ice, and a bumpy bike ride in Mumbai, to name a few. In each case, none of the exercises or experiences lasted more than half an hour, some only five minutes.

Here is an excerpt from the report's findings (drop us an email and we'll mail it):

"All participants came out feeling both an immediate surprise at how the workshop had activated and sparked their sensory abilities to perceive, imagine, and bring together elements in both spaces around them; fueled their thinking and capacity for imagination; triggered both their cognitive capacity to enter into complex and separate issues and problems, or places and processes that take part over long periods or vast distances, but also expanded their empathy, making it easier to either step out of their experienced somewhat lonely perspective as a climate-oriented innovation-oriented individual, or to be inspired and optimistic towards engaging in creating new solutions based on these experiences, as coordinators, managers, and researchers focused on climate change issues, highly aware of the challenges of promoting solutions and communicating complexity and connectedness.”

After a few hours, participants reported that their ability to perceive, imagine, connect and create across areas, places, populations and issues was affected. In a positive way. And why is that? The effect should be seen in light of the problems we are dealing with, namely climate change and one's agency to it. These are issues that are very difficult for humans to grasp - their complexity reaches what philosopher Timothy Morton calls the "hyper object" level: there are particular conditions if we want to immerse ourselves in them: we can only perceive them in slices.?

Some of us will be able to perceive certain links. If you are a farmer watching your land being degraded by intensive industrial agriculture, if you have been counting rainfall on your land for 40 years (a man named Billy Barr did that in the Rockies), or if you remember how the population of certain animals is declining year by year. Or if you set up an agroforestry farm and discover how soil and life blossom. You will understand how local change interacts with global change in all these cases.

The responses from our participants pointed towards and outlined a first progression model of learning based on a deeper, aesthetically supported experience of systems and communities. The participants' reactions came out very strongly on two parameters: 1) They experienced a fast track to a stronger understanding of complex systems and change processes, both of which require either huge amounts of data or a vision that can stretch across time, space and matter and connect micro and macro perspectives of climates, ecosystems, places and phenomena as 'tipping points' and 'trigger points'; 2) the sense of motivation created by an increased sense of being part of a larger community of climate-focused change-makers and innovators was a clear outcome, especially from follow up workshops, focusing on the tools we tested enablement of insights into deep and complex systemic change processes.

The paradigm shift

Leibniz introduced the concept of the 'incompossible' in the 18th century as an explanation for what we could call the world splitting into different tracks. It can be considered as classical physics, where the world cannot be both as it is when Adam eats the apple and if he had not eaten it. Once you have done something, the consequences of your actions are impossible to undo. But it becomes somewhat easier to accept if we jump to the 21st century and a world of quantum physics. We find it in the Marvel universe, like The Multiverse, but we also find it in the quantum computer, like the fact that a quantum bit is both 0 and 1, both on and off.

The fact that 'we' can understand systems as both mutually exclusive (the world as it will be when we do nothing about our catastrophic CO2 emissions vs. the world where we are both sustainable and regenerative) and simultaneously present - in art or quantum computing - does not mean that it is something we go around doing all the time. Most people turn their eyes and walk away when you ask them to think about this. Maybe you do, too. But the thing is, art - or aesthetic and artistically inspired principles - can be powerful tools of transformation, which the workshops indicated.?

Immergence and emergence

What is the relationship between immergence and emergence? We think it's a big mistake to see the two as opposites. Emergence is a huge concept and essential in evolutionary theory, biology, physics, philosophy, psychology - because it is the very question of when something new can emerge and whether something new can arise or whether everything is just the transformation of what exists.

This is a far from innocent question. If something new is emerging, the world is potentially infinite. Chew on that. If we inversely accept that the world, and thus life, is finite, then nothing can indeed emerge. And if nothing can emerge, then all immergence, in turn, is ultimately repetition. We reencounter something when we immerse ourselves in the world. We return home. In a finite planet. It is also worth chewing on - not least when we live in a culture (and economy) obsessed with the dream of new inventions, discoveries, the (masculine) conquest - for centuries, perhaps millennia. If all discovery is a potential homecoming, then making room for life is not so much a conquest of new land as it is making it possible to come home.

To put it another way: if everything already exists, it is madness to claim that anyone can own anything. Then everything is on loan, no matter how much we in our little corner of the universe try to invent rules that value and makes supreme the individual's property. On the other hand, virtually all the economic growth we have managed to create in the last centuries is linked to the acceptance that what emerges as value (out of an immergence, we might add) can be transferred to another context and locked in as someone's property. Moving on from there is a bit of a journey, but it would not be wrong to say it is underway.

Collective - and organized - immersive learning

"Most of the issues that are urgent at this moment in history can be described as "insidious," which is to say that they are produced through the combination of circumstances over time in unseen ways that have produced danger. Racism is insidious; sexism is insidious; corruption is insidious; consumerism is insidious; greed is insidious; cancer is insidious; trauma is insidious; addiction is insidious" (Nora Bateson: https://norabateson.medium.com/aphanipoiesis-96d8aed927bc).

Regenerative transformations call for immersive learning processes. Could an immersive learning experience also be collective? If it can, does it require everyone to go through it simultaneously, or could there be a way to experience microdoses of immersion? If we want to work on how organizations can open up to put life at the centre to a greater extent, this is a relevant question.

From Francois Jullien's The Silent Transformations to Nora Bateson's work with theories such as aphanipo?esis, abduction and transcontextuality, there is a thread that looks at the invisible or subtle side of transformations. In short, the point in this context is that we must correct the harmful effects of collective action at the top shelf, at the most enormous scale. We often address it at a far less complex level than where the effect is most significant. We then look at the most considerable effect - plastic islands in the oceans, for example - and try to go back upstream to solve the problem. But evend the most intelligent suggestion - catching the plastic in the mouths of rivers before it reaches the sea - is a symptomatic treatment. Necessary but deeply inadequate.

Where do we find the sources to stop the flow of plastic? After all, the origins of the substance spread in wildly ramified networks of production and transaction. We can all agree that the best thing would be to stop producing plastic - yet we are making more and more (400 million tons per year, a figure expected to rise to 600 million per year by 2025 (Plastic Change: https://plasticchange.dk/faq/). This could indicate that many organizations act deliberately or cynically against their better judgment. Or that we find it challenging to get so far into our systemic transformation that we change our behaviour significantly.

Let's take the optimistic angle and focus on the last option. This is also where there is a growing edge, a point from which positive change can happen. Yet, to get that far into the core of our production systems, we need to see them in new ways. This is where immersion comes in. Our modest experience so far is that working with immersive learning processes generates greater insight into complex phenomena and enables mental and collective connections between problems and phenomena that cannot usually be perceived simultaneously.

This should certainly not be read as a na?ve glorification of digital potential. Plenty of developments are happening today in terms of "digital twins" and other virtual versions of the world that follow the same script as the systems they are supposed to help transform. The point here is simply that there is an exciting opportunity for deeper learning and deeper learning processes within and across the collective level. Processes that also address what Gregory Bateson called "Learning IV" - the level into which we need to move to imagine - and realize - transformations of meta-systems.

The path to get there calls for a combination of conditions where we all have a role to play but where leaders may have the biggest. It is about allocating resources to search in directions where control of the output is turned down and where resources are deployed to work immersively without knowing where the emergence will end up or even where it will begin. It is about daring to make room for a method that works at both micro and macro levels at the same time. Rather than looking for revolutions, big or small, it is about enabling our understanding of connections and densifying and multiplying them.

Further reading

Bateson, Gregory (1972).?Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press.

Erlangsen, Rune, Jakob N?rlem og Tim Struck (Promentum):?Interaktionsprocesser og gensidig l?ring i hverdagen, der inspireres af liv.?https://promentum.dk/det-regenerative-paradigme-blog-3/

Koefoed, Oleg (2022).?Learning from Existainability. The Seven Infinity Stones of Cultural Wisdom.?https://medium.com/@olegkoefoed/learning-in-the-anthropocene-252fb96a9ffb?sk=a6044bce6fe4d62ccb29409642800fbb

Matias Seidler & Oleg Koefoed (2021):?Climate Change Revisited – a Learning Journey with Site Sensitising and Virtual Reality.?Report.

Tosey, Paul (2006).??Bateson’s Levels Of Learning: a Framework For Transformative Learning???https://openresearch.surrey.ac.uk/view/pdfCoverPage?instCode=44SUR_INST&filePid=13140358990002346&download=true