#1787: Blending the Elements of Experiential Design & Process-Relational Foundations of the Elements
I gave a lecture about "Blending the Elements of Experiential Design" on Saturday, June 6, 2026 at Seattle XR in Seattle, Washington. (PDF of Slides]. At the end, I run through some examples of the types of interdisciplinary fusion that I see within the context of immersive storytelling and immersive art. This lecture also digs into the process-relational philosophical foundations, as well as how I'm gaining additional inspiration from Empedocles, Aristotle, and the Classical Quadrivium (Four Arts) of Math, Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. For my 30+ hours of coverage of Venice Immersive, then I apply this archetypal framework to help describe the context, quality, character, and story of each of these projects. You can see an overview of how I've been using this framework in this PDF on "Venice Immersive 2025 Archetypal Categorizations"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01M5NcOYzx0
One of goals of this talk was to further define the archetypal nature of the elements, and how I'm conceiving of them as a possibility space of design tradeoffs (C.S. Peirce's "Firstness"), but also as the concrete decisions that an experiential designer makes ("Secondness"), and then finally how these decisions are experienced more from a phenomenological experience as the audience as we feel, sense, act, and make sense of these experiences, and what they might mean ("Thirdness").
I do not actually dive into Peirce's concepts of Firstness, Secondness, or Thirdness in this specific talk, but I wanted to elaborate on these concepts in this write-up as these have been crucial concepts to help translate the overall abstract Firstness quality of my talk, and ground it into the Secondness of something that is a bit more practical and pragmatic. For Peirce, his semiology is grounded into a triune theory of actualization that goes from a non-Boolean possibility space as Firstness, and then grounds into a Boolean actualization of secondness, and then an interpretant mediates from the concreteness of the Secondness object back to the Firstness of the fundamental archetypal qualities or meaning. I find speculative philosopher James Bradley's summary of the Peirce's triune semiology to be the most easy to digest in his essay titled, "Beyond Hermeneutics: Peirce’s Semiology as a Trinitarian Metaphysics of Communication." I can also recommend this article on "Peirce's Theory of Signs" from the The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for a comprehensive recap, and there's also this excellent YouTube series primer by Philosign's Markus Raninen titled The Basics of Semiotics. But here's Bradley's description of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, which I find myself coming back to again and again.
"Within the fundamental speculative triunity of activity, difference and order, or firstness, secondness and thirdness, semiology is an analysis of order or thirdness… Thirdness is analyzed as idea or sign, as the exchange of information between individual entities, and as interpretation; in other words, thirdness is itself a threefold of sign, object and interpretant. Here, sign occupies the position of firstness because it is the potentiality for interpretation; object occupies that of secondness because it is determinate; and the interpretant occupies that of thirdness because the interpretant has the sign-interpreting or sign-ordering role, and so has the status of a third. [24] Thus for Peirce semiology is the analysis of the triune relation of sign, object and interpretant."
It's still a bit obtuse, and one way that I like to think about it is through the experience of communication. You have a possibility space of meaning you want to convey (Firstness of the sign/potential), then you choose specific words that convey that meaning (Secondness of the object), then someone listens to those words and phrases, and then connects those words back to a meaning space (Thirdness of the interpretant mediating between the two). For Peirce, each of the Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness can also refer to themselves, like you can have a Firstness of Thirdness or Secondness of Firstness. It gets a little bit confusing, but I found the following graphic from Collected Essays in Speculative Philosophy (2021) by James Bradley and edited by Sean McGrath to be very useful.
Within the context of immersive storytelling, then it's a semiotic process of communication of meaning where you're able to use all sorts of affordances from game design, literature, social dynamics and relations, music, film, lighting, architecture, dance, theme park design, sensory design, and embodiment. My Elemental Theory of Presence attempts to simplify this into the following:
Fire Element of Active Presence: Interactivity, Agency, Game Design
Air Element of Mental & Social Presence: Meaning, Semiotics, Language, Possibility, Form, Relationality
Water Element of Emotional Presence: Experiential Processes, Story, Film, Music, Cycles, Time
Earth Element of Environmental & Embodied Presence: Sensory, Immersive, Worldbuilding, Space
I elaborate on the various philosophical frameworks that I'm leaning up within this talk that I gave on June 6, 2026, but since then I've been diving more into Peirce and his Triune Metaphysics and Semiology of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness, which has been a helpful framework as I've been applying the elements to my Venice Immersive Coverage and categorizing the elemental center of gravity for each of the nearly 40 projects that I covered. Again see this framework in this PDF on "Venice Immersive 2025 Archetypal Categorizations" to see how I have been thinking about each of these projects. I used this approach in the introductions for each of my podcast episodes from Venice (see the links down below).
Firstness of Fire: Creativity, Novelty, Intention, Purpose, Goals, & Aristotle's Final Cause
Secondness of Fire: Interactivity & Core Gameplay Loops
Thirdness of Fire: Agency & Will For Active Presence
Examples of Fire: Game Design, Locomotion Options: No Movement, Automatic movement, Teleportation, or free roaming. The LIVENESS of the Live, To what degree does the experience encourage the expression of will and agency? And to what degree does that alter how the narrative unfolds (narrative agency vs participatory interactive moments that customize and flavor the experience)? Adventure, Exploration, Creativity, Novelty, Freedom, Will, and Collective Action. System Dynamics, & iterative feedback loops
Firstness of Air: Peirce's "Sign," Intended Meaning, Pattern & Form, Archetypal Possibility Spaces, Relationality, & Aristotle's Formal Cause
Secondness of Air: Peirce's "Object" Within A Triadic Semiotic Process (i.e. a specific action, word, harmonic, or action that points to a larger meaning.)
Thirdness of Air: Peirce's "Interpretant," Sensemaking Thoughts, Expectations, & Social Dynamics For Mental & Social Presence
Examples of Air: Literature, Language, Semiotics, Communication, Symbols, Abstractions. Single Player vs Multi-Player, Suspension of Disbelief and Plausibility, Social Dynamics, Anticipation of the Future, Possibility Spaces, Types of Choices. Realms of Speculative Imagination, How is meaning communicated? Dialogue amongst characters, voice-over narration, environmental storytelling, non-verbal associative dream logic. Mental friction from puzzles. Rules & Mechanics. Use of certain types of AI and Conversational Interfaces with Virtual Beings
Firstness of Water: Time, Cycles, Harmonics, Value, & Aristotle's "Material Cause" (in Whitehead's event ontology, then base reality is processes, relationships, and possibilities of value & not Substance)
Secondness of Water: Experiential Processes That Provide Contrasts
Thirdness of Water: Feelings for Emotional Presence
Examples of Water: Cinematic Film Tradition, Music, Harmonics, Rhythm, Pacing, Editing, Contrasts, Emotion, Memory, Dreams, Images, Soul, Psyche, Symbols, Lighting, Mood, Collective Unconscious
Firstness of Earth: Space, World, Context, & Aristotle's Efficient Cause
Secondness of Earth: Environment & Worldbuilding With Situated Perspectives in that Context
Thirdness of Earth: Sensory Perception & Sense of Place for Embodied & Environmental Presence
Examples of Earth: Worldbuilding of a spatial context & culture. Architecture, Theater, Theme Park Design, Dance, Are you a ghost or an embodied character? Sensory Experience: Touch/Haptics, Hearing/Spatial Sound, Smells, Vision. Relation of Immersive Tech to Environment as either VR, MR, or AR. Virtual CGI vs Cinematic 180/360 Video,
Again, check out this PDF on "Venice Immersive 2025 Archetypal Categorizations" to see how I've ranked nearly 40 projects from Venice Immersive 2025 on the relative elemental center of gravity. Some projects feel more like a cinematic immersive film, which would be a bit more biased towards the Water Element. Some projects are more focused on the experience of a world that was build, and more focused on the Earth Element. Some projects are asking you to Read a book together with other people, which is more focused on the Air Element. And then other more game-like experiences are focused on using interactions as their primary mode of engagement, and so they're more focused on the fire element.
There are 64 total combinations of the elements in terms of the first, second, third, or four centers of gravity, and you can see the comprehensive visualization here:
Technically, all four elements are always happening all at once all at the same time. However, in experiential design, then creators can emphasize and blend elements together. So I find that ranking the elements can be helpful in determining an overall center of gravity, and that looking at the first two centers of gravity can achieve a sufficient job of creating some ad hoc, immersive and "elemental genres....
