UDREDNING: an Extended Reality Artwork for Affectively Engaging with Diagnosing Processes

This critique presents and discusses the research contributing to and following the creation and exhibition of the interactive Extended Reality (XR) installation called UDREDNING (English: Diagnosing), which aims to convey the experience of being a parent to a child undergoing socio-medical diagnosis for a rare disease. Being a parent in such a situation often entails great affective and emotional uncertainty, heavy logistics and numerous encounters with people and (digital) systems within social welfare services, public healthcare and bureaucracies. Since these children are pre-diagnosis, they rarely fit neatly into the existing systems, which they must engage with. Due to the open-ended nature of such processes, parents often find themselves alone and marginalized, in lack of an overview, and unsure where to get the help they need. Based on diaries, social media entries and interviews with parents to children during or recently after their experiences of a diagnosing process, an artist created UDREDNING in collaboration with the two authors. The installation uses digital sound, video and a tablet that extends the reality of these parents so people can relate to their experiences of the uncertainties and systemic entanglements characterizing their situation. In this article, we explore the different forms of critique opened by the research and exhibition of the project through concepts across STS, HCI, design and art. We argue that UDREDNING creates an embodied and experiential space of critical resonance extending lived experience into a digital re-activation in an affectively engaging interactive setup.