EMERGING VISIONS: AI/VR STORYTELLING FOR
SUSTAINABILITY COMMUNICATION
By Junyu Ke
May 17, 2026
With the generous support of the Rotman Institute of Philosophy, through the Graduate Interdisciplinary Research Accelerator Fund (GIRAF), I am leading Emerging Visions in collaboration with Prof. Natalie Mathieson and Dr. Alessia Romani (Engineering). The project explores how mediated experiences — particularly those shaped by emerging AI and VR technologies — influence the way environmental knowledge is communicated, understood, and trusted.
The starting point is straightforward. As AI systems increasingly mediate environmental knowledge, generative outputs can widen the gap between technically robust evidence and lived, interpretable meaning. This sharpens the challenge of knowledge translation across disciplines, contexts, and audiences. Meaningful expertise in such conditions depends not only on technical competence, but on capacities that resist automation: judgment, ethical sensitivity, audience awareness, and the ability to craft meaning. Yet many communication practices — including those in STEM — tend to privilege clarity or correctness over sustained attention to how meaning is constructed, felt, and contested across contexts.
Emerging Visions addresses this gap through an interdisciplinary approach, treating narrative form as a research variable and communication itself as inquiry. The project asks how AI- and VR-mediated storytelling shapes environmental meaning, what kinds of mediation open ethical and ecological understanding, and what kinds may foreclose it.
A few design principles already shape the project's early direction:
Mediation matters.
Perception, narrative, and design choices already shape what we come to know. AI and VR do not simply introduce mediation; they reconfigure the conditions of mediation already in place.
Translation is constitutive.
Knowledge translation is part of how knowledge becomes possible at all — particularly when the subject matter is ecological, layered, and partially inaccessible to direct human perception.
Multiple modes of knowing matter.
Ecological knowledge resists being reduced to a single disciplinary frame. The project values scientific, philosophical, computational, artistic, and embodied modes of attention, and seeks to allow them to mingle without prematurely collapsing into one.
Ambiguity can be productive.
Some of the most generative interdisciplinary moments happen when meaning is not yet stabilized. Where conventional communication often prioritizes correctness or efficiency, this project takes a slightly slower path — testing what becomes possible when framings remain open longer.
The summer will be a period of active development. More updates to come on the project’s creative experiments, design explorations, public-facing components, and reflections that emerge along the way.
I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Prof. Bipasha Baruah, Prof. Joshua Pearce, and the Free Appropriate Sustainability Technology (FAST) Research Group for their generous support in making this project possible.