Immersive Experience Lab investigates the human and experiential foundations of innovation. We study how people adopt and find value in new technologies, services, and products – and how their experiences feed back into innovation processes.
Technological novelty alone does not make an innovation successful. Innovations become impactful when people integrate them into their lives and continue to find them valuable, while their experiences, behaviours, and communities can in turn shape how innovations develop. This dynamic relationship between human experience and innovation is at the core of our research.
Our research lies at the intersection of innovation research, human–AI interaction and interactive technology research, media psychology, game and play research, anthropology, and consumer research. We approach immersive experience as affective, cognitive, behavioural, and social engagement with technologies, services, and environments. At the heart of our research is meaningfulness: what makes engagement and participation valuable and impactful for individuals and society? We combine interdisciplinary theory with empirical research, using methods ranging from statistical modelling and experiments to qualitative inquiry and co-creative interventions.
Transformation does not begin with technology. It begins with experience.
Digital transformation, artificial intelligence, and emerging interactive technologies are changing how people work, learn, and participate in society. Our research examines what creates value for people and how experiential knowledge can inform innovation processes, contributing to human-centered digital transformation.
Core research themes
- Immersion, engagement and meaningful experience: How do motivation, agency, affect, and social interaction contribute to meaningful experiences, and how can these experiences and their impact be measured and modelled?
- Experiential and user-driven innovation: How do user experiences, practices, feedback, and communities influence innovation development, adoption, and renewal?
- Human interaction with emerging technologies: How do people experience and shape AI-enabled, playful and gameful, adaptive, embodied, and interactive technologies, and what can these interactions teach us about engagement and innovation?
We collaborate with researchers, companies, and other organizations developing digital services and interactive technologies, creative content, and educational and wellbeing solutions. Through these partnerships, we combine human-centered understanding, empirical rigor, and an experimental mindset to study innovation as an iterative process in which experiences generate knowledge for the further development of more meaningful and sustainable innovations.
