Podcast
XR Innovator · Experience Designer · Strategic Advisor · Keynote Speaker · Immersive Specialist
Adipat uses podcasts as a space to think out loud, rigorously and accessibly, about what immersive storytelling is really doing when it works. Across different conversations, he explores how immersive experiences shape behaviour, how they build trust and how audience-as-protagonist design can scale across culture, brands, institutions and public life. These discussions sit at the intersection of storytelling, systems thinking, technology, and human behaviour, translating complex ideas into practical insight.
Podcasts by Adipat Virdi:
Below is a curated selection of podcast episodes Adipat has appeared on, with overviews of the conversations and links to listen.
Featured Guest Appearances
Disrupting the Hi-tech Narrative: Why Data Without Empathy is Just High-Tech Noise with Adipat Virdi
Immersive experience designer and strategist Adipat Virdi joins host KJ to challenge the tech-first mindset that's dominated industries from entertainment to healthcare. Drawing on his work with Meta, the BBC, NASA, and Charlotte Tilbury, Adipat introduces his Empathy Engine Framework, a set of principles designed to close the gap between brands and audiences by putting human connection, meaning, and agency at the center of every experience. From redesigning how the BBC covered the Syrian refugee crisis to transforming how Nike sells sneakers, he makes a compelling case that without the "why," all the fancy technology is just expensive noise.
Immersive Experience Network Podcast: “Making Immersive: Participatory Practice” (Season 1, Episode 11)
This episode focuses on participatory practice in immersive work, unpacking how designers create meaningful audience agency and what “immersion” really means beyond technology. Adipat discusses why connection, reflection and ethical framing are the true mechanics behind impact-led experiences and how participation must be carefully designed rather than assumed.
In the conversation,Adipat also explores why immersive storytelling is fundamentally a behavioural and relational design challenge rather than a headset or hardware problem. He looks at how to build audience journeys that reframe perspective without preaching and how the craft of participation depends on clear stakes, consent and invitation.
The No Proscenium Podcast: “Double Header: Agog: The Immersive Media Institute / I AM, OTHER” (Season 1, Episode 443)
In this wide-ranging episode, Adipat discusses I Am, Other and how the piece uses immersive mechanics, without relying on technology, to surface bias, judgement and the hidden stories people tell themselves. The conversation looks at how immersive drama can create a container for dialogue rather than delivering a fixed message.
Adipat also explores the show’s core premise and how audiences are positioned inside a moral question rather than outside it as observers. He talks about why agency combined with reflection is more powerful than passive “awareness” as a mechanism for change and how immersive storytelling can hold space for complexity and disagreement.
Innovation Storytellers Podcast: “How Embedded Experiences Will Change Brands Forever”
This strategy-focused conversation looks at immersive ecosystems inside organisations and what changes when brands stop thinking in one-off campaigns and start thinking in environments, rituals and behaviour loops. Adipat discusses how experience design can become an ongoing relationship rather than a moment of attention.
In the episode, Adipat argues that innovation fails when it is treated as a buzzword rather than a discipline. He then explores ecosystem thinking and talks about where content, consumer and brand form a living system and what it really means to design “embedded experiences” that shape behaviour over time.
Mormedi - Talking Futures: “Talking Futures #2: The Role of Space Typologies”
This future-facing episode centres on space typologies and the idea that the most important aspect of a space is not its architecture, but the behaviours it produces. Adipat discusses how this thinking translates into immersive design and into broader conversations about virtual environments and the so-called metaverse.
Adipat then talks about space as a behavioural instrument rather than a neutral container and how environments can be designed to encourage feedback, learning and transformation. The conversation also touches on why spatial intelligence is becoming a key design material in immersive work.
Talking Creativity: “Adipat Virdi: Creativity’s Shades of Grey”
This episode explores creativity inside large organisations, the realities of building in emerging technology contexts and what virtual worlds might unlock, or constrain, in creative practice. It’s a candid look at the tensions between experimentation and institutional structures.
Adipat discusses how creativity at scale is shaped by systems and constraints, how virtual and immersive spaces can expand creative possibility and where the hype around new platforms can obscure the deeper design challenges.
Siemens.FM: “Adipat Virdi: Creativity’s Shades of Grey”
On the Siemens.FM platform, this conversation looks at creativity through a systems lens, moving beyond simple definitions of innovation. Adipat explores why experiential and immersive work resists binary categories and how creative systems are shaped by context, constraints and emergent behaviours.
Adipat discusses why creativity in immersive and participatory design is not a checklist but a landscape of decisions and pressures. He looks at the value of ambiguity and “grey spaces” in inviting participation and interpretation and how organisations can rethink creativity as a system of conditions and outcomes, particularly when embedding new experience logics into established structures.
Key themes include systems thinking as a creativity practice, designing for uncertainty and ethical complexity and the interplay between technology, story, and human agency.
Customer Reviews
XR Innovator · Experience Designer · Strategic Advisor · Keynote Speaker · Immersive Specialist
Adipat Virdi is a global voice on XR, empathy-led design and immersive strategy, helping organisations transform how audiences think, feel and engage.