Level: Beginner  |  Time: 2 hours  |  Cost: Free

What You Need

Just a notebook, or a smartphone with a voice memo app.

Instructions

1. Pick a daily task you normally do by touching a screen (ordering coffee, setting an alarm, checking the weather).
2. Write out, word for word, exactly what you would say to a voice assistant to complete that task — including how it should respond.
3. Test your script by reading it aloud to a friend who plays the assistant, following your script exactly, nothing more.
4. Note every moment where the interaction felt awkward, slow, or unclear.

What You'll Learn

Voice interfaces remove visual cues entirely, forcing you to think in turns of dialogue rather than buttons and menus — a skill central to conversational design.

Extensions

Try the same exercise for a task that involves several steps, like booking a table for a specific time and party size, and see where the voice-only version breaks down.

Level: Beginner  |  Time: 1.5 hours  |  Cost: Free

What You Need

Paper, pen, and your own two hands.

Instructions

1. List five common computer actions: select, delete, scroll, zoom, undo.
2. For each action, invent a hand gesture to perform it without touching anything.
3. Perform each gesture in front of a mirror or camera and photograph it.
4. Show your gestures to three people with no explanation and ask them to guess what each one does.

What You'll Learn

Good gestures need to be intuitive without instructions — this exercise reveals the gap between what feels natural to design and what's actually understandable to someone else.

Extensions

Redesign any gesture that was widely misunderstood, then retest it.

Level: Beginner  |  Time: 1 hour  |  Cost: Free

What You Need

A smartphone or laptop with a modern browser (a headset is optional, not required).

Instructions

1. Find a public WebXR demo gallery online (search "WebXR examples").
2. Try at least three different demos — one AR, one VR, and one that uses hand or motion tracking if available.
3. For each, write down what made it feel immersive or, alternately, what broke the illusion.

What You'll Learn

Direct, hands-on exposure to the sense of "presence" that spatial computing designers work to create — and how fragile that sense can be.

Extensions

Sketch one small change you'd make to the least convincing demo to improve its sense of presence.

Level: Intermediate  |  Time: 2 hours  |  Cost: Free (uses your phone's vibration motor)

What You Need

A smartphone with adjustable vibration/haptic settings.

Instructions

1. Go through your phone's notification and keyboard settings and identify every distinct vibration pattern it uses.
2. Trigger each one deliberately and describe, in your own words, what feeling or meaning each pattern seems to communicate.
3. Design one new vibration pattern for a situation your phone doesn't currently have a distinct pattern for (e.g., "a friend is nearby" or "battery critically low").

What You'll Learn

Touch-based feedback carries meaning the same way sound or color does — and most people have never consciously noticed the "vocabulary" already in their pocket.

Extensions

Test your new pattern on a friend without explaining it, and see if they can guess its meaning.

Level: Intermediate  |  Time: 3 hours  |  Cost: Free

What You Need

Paper, pens, or any simple drawing app.

Instructions

1. Pick a real-world task that could benefit from digital overlays — assembling furniture, cooking a recipe, fixing a bike.
2. Storyboard six frames showing what the user sees at each step, including exactly what virtual content appears and where.
3. Mark clearly which interactions use gaze, gesture, or voice at each step, and why you chose that input for that moment.

What You'll Learn

Designing for mixed reality means choosing the right input method for each micro-moment, not picking one interaction style for the whole experience.

Extensions

Redesign your storyboard assuming the user has one hand full and can't gesture — what has to change?

Level: Intermediate  |  Time: 2.5 hours  |  Cost: Free

What You Need

Paper and pen.

Instructions

1. Choose a spatial or gesture-based interaction you designed in a previous activity.
2. Redesign it for someone who cannot make large hand gestures, cannot see a headset display clearly, or cannot speak aloud in public — pick one constraint.
3. Identify what alternate input (voice, EMG wristband, eye tracking, switch control) could replace the original one.

What You'll Learn

Designing for one specific constraint from the start, rather than "adding accessibility later," almost always produces an interface that's more flexible for everyone.

Extensions

Compare your redesign to the original — which one would you actually prefer to use day-to-day, and why?

Level: Advanced  |  Time: 3 hours  |  Cost: Free

What You Need

Paper, pen, and a willing partner to role-play with.

Instructions

1. Design a single command that combines two input types at once, like saying "put that there" while pointing.
2. Write out exactly what the system needs to know from each input channel to correctly understand the command.
3. Role-play the interaction with a partner: one person gives the multimodal command, the other acts as the "system" and narrates what it understood.
4. Identify moments of ambiguity where the two channels disagreed or one was missing.

What You'll Learn

Combining multiple inputs can make interaction more natural, but it also introduces new ways for a system to misunderstand you — multimodal design is a balancing act.

Extensions

Redesign the command to work correctly even if one input channel (say, voice) is completely unavailable.

Team Size: 3-4  |  Time: 3 hours

Team Roles

Product Manager, Ethicist, Engineer, User Advocate.

Design Challenge

Your team is launching a consumer EEG headband that reads brainwave data to detect focus levels for a productivity app. Draft a data policy covering what brain data is collected, who can access it, how long it's stored, and what users are told before they opt in.

Deliverables

A one-page plain-language policy document, plus a short list of the three hardest tradeoffs your team debated while writing it.

Team Size: 3-5  |  Time: 4 hours

Team Roles

Spatial Designer, Sensor Planner, Storyteller, Skeptic (challenges every assumption).

Design Challenge

Design a room — a classroom, a hospital room, or a shared workspace — where technology responds automatically to the people and activity inside it, with no screens, apps, or explicit commands. Decide what sensors would be needed and what happens in three different scenarios.

Deliverables

A floor plan sketch annotated with sensor placement, and three short scenario scripts describing what the room does and why.

Team Size: 4-6 (two sub-teams)  |  Time: 2.5 hours

Team Roles

Two teams, each with a Product Lead, Designer, and Skeptic.

Design Challenge

One team designs a use case that's best solved with a full VR/MR headset (like Quest 3 or Vision Pro 2); the other designs a use case best solved with lightweight AR glasses. Each team pitches their solution, then the other team cross-examines it for weaknesses.

Deliverables

A 5-minute pitch per team plus a shared list of which device category "won" for which use case, and why.