Extended Design? Forecasting New Forms of Distributed Design Supported by Extended Reality.

The current scenario of socio-technical transformation, modified by the pandemic, has highlighted the importance of increasing the use of technologies such as augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR) and mixed reality (MR) - all grouped under the term “extended reality” (XR) - that offer the possibility of bridging the gap between the digital and real worlds. Within the field of industrial design and product design, there has been a long phase of experimentation and reflection on the relationship between the design and extended reality, which concerns the implementation of more interactive, collaborative, and efficient design processes. The diffusion and adoption of practices and tools for augmented and virtual prototyping have been debated for almost twenty years. It is now widely accepted in the scientific community and the industrial world that AR and VR can contribute to increasing efficiency in the user experience, design, production, or maintenance of products. The first boost for the diffusion of extended reality in the industry came when AR and VR were included in the technology landscape of Industry 4.0. Gaming, on the other hand, has been the driving force behind the initial dissemination of these technologies to end-users. The most relevant case being Facebook, and what they did with Oculus , a device released during the pandemic and ready for large-scale adoption by both the general public and developers. The pandemic, which required the sudden introduction of drastic social and organizational changes, has increased the average level of digitization of people and organizations. More people now own appropriate devices to interact with AR and VR. Meanwhile, more and more organizations are designing or configuring digital social platforms to support and democratize — from gaming to education and healthcare — the use of these technologies. Also during the pandemic, especially in the initial emergency phase, a population of makers and designers with the support of Fab Labs and makerspaces was the protagonist of mobilization on a global scale, aimed at designing and manufacturing personal protective equipment and parts or components of respirators. It was based on the use of traditional technologies for digital manufacturing. Any experimental approach to the use of such technologies as extended reality (the most accessible in the technological landscape of Industry 4.0) would have allowed interactive design operations in virtual environments within a context of physical and social distancing. A search of scientific databases reveals a lack of literature on the relationship between Distributed Design and extended reality, while Industry 4.0 paradigm is increasingly interested in considering the Fab Lab operational model in two ways: i) to create digital twins of the Factories of the Future and increase their resilience (Bécue et al., 2020), ii) to experiment with the use of immersive technologies to increase the potential of human-centered manufacturing systems (Ramalho et al., 2020). It emerges that makers and Fab Labs have not yet explored the potential of extended reality. The reasons might be different: historically, the extended reality is not part of makers’ repertoire in terms of Fab Labs practices and equipment. Moreover, open-source software and hardware for virtual reality, which is more compatible with the philosophy and principles of making and distributed design, has only recently been implemented.