No Sex Until My Body is Green: Trauma-Informed Design Fiction of Spatial Consent to AR/VR Sexual Interactions

Trauma pervades contemporary HCI research, particularly research into sexual harm. This has prompted careful consideration of whether empirical methods that require recruitment of study participants, such as survivors of sexual violence, are worth the risk of retraumatization, as well as exploration of trauma-informed alternatives to empirical methods. In this paper, we frame design fiction (a non-empirical, speculative design practice) as a trauma-informed method when deliberate structures for mitigating retraumatization of researchers are incorporated into fiction writing. Our research team applied trauma-informed design fiction to collaboratively write a speculative sex education curriculum for visualizing consent to sex called Spatial Consent. Grounded in a future where AR/VR glasses are widely adopted, Spatial Consent provides prescriptive guidance to high school students for how to visually (as opposed to vocally) exchange consent so as to mitigate unwanted sex stemming from misunderstandings of consent. The paper makes two distinct contributions: methodological guidance on when and how to use trauma-informed design fiction, and implications of Spatial Consent on HCI research into consent and sexual violence.