Nicole McKinney’s world revolves around design — creating and executing ideas bigger than life itself. As the daughter of a Black American father and Jewish British mother, her journey as a Black and mixed-race woman combines the historical significance of the Transatlantic slave trade and the Holocaust. These atrocities define the legacy of her courageous ancestors whose path she continues to forge. With a career extending from art and fashion to women-centric advertising to the building of an organization that utilizes data, policy and culture audits — combined with storytelling — to help people find common ground, “Wake the unConscious” encourages relational change in the individual. By using immersive narratives and lived experience as the anchor for educating others, our sister company WtC (NFP) has had tremendous success weaving context within our collective history, creating manageable concepts around societies’ systems.

Design thinking demands we use a nonlinear iterative process to develop our understanding of the relationship between (and transformation of) human behavior and societal systems by challenging assumptions, redefining problems and creating innovative solutions. Typical attempts at changing perspectives and behaviors are failing. But our XR/AI SaaS platform with transformational learning systems and evidence-based measurement tools can create sustained perspectives and cultural change for people and corporations.

Immersive VR has shown great potential for creating impactful experiences in a broad range of contexts including gaming, entertainment, education and shared group experiences, in addition to therapeutic objectives such as trauma remediation and mindfulness. It is also being used in DEI as a method to generate empathy and understanding through shared access to multiple perspectives. The emergence of accessible machine learning, generative AI, natural language processing and adaptive systems means that the depth, breadth and fidelity of VR experiences will only grow in capacity and impact.

DEI has been purposely selected due to its effect on all aspects of daily life. The use of DEI immersive scenarios will demonstrate the far-reaching implications of this technology — with vast opportunities for use in nearly all business sectors where human behavior plays a dominant role in the outcome of societies’ systems.