Transcendhance

This late-breaking work describes the design and application of a game to facilitate techno-spiritual design. In it I report the results of 24 interviews with people of diverse spiritual perspectives and three "Transcendhance" design game workshops involving 12 participants; I describe design fictions arising from these activities; and I discuss issues and challenges of designing a game to enable people to explore indescribable experiences and create design ideas in an atmosphere of fun and play. My work bridges the domains of user experience and spiritual experience, aiming to gain insight into design for enhancing experiences of something beyond oneself. Spiritual experiences are tricky to define, difficult to discuss, impossible to predict, and challenging to address in design, so I used a game to explore the design space.