Navigating between an End-goal and a 'Readiness to be Affected': A Virtual Reality Briefing to the United Nations Security Council

Abstract

This article describes the design process behind a Virtual Reality movie intended to brief the Security Council of the United Nations about the situation in Iraq, in April 2019. The last couple of years have seen an increase of Virtual Reality movies made by the UN to support advocacy campaigns and provide general public information. But in this case, the goal was to test if the immersive experiences that Virtual Reality movies enable could be used as a political tool. Through a personal reflection upon the peculiar circumstances of this process, this account shows how aiming solely at instrumenting the briefing, which is a typical political situation in the organization, hid the political and transformative potentials of all the other situations of the design process. I will discuss what inhibited these potentials and how they could be enabled, from the perspective of the social interactions and instrumental mediations at play.