Developing Immersive Storytelling Systems for Play and Learning
An exciting new project in development - By Immersive Ideas in collaboration with Artists, Designers, Practitioners, Storytellers, and Makers.
Exploring Immersive Practice Through Play
This page outlines an emerging area of research and development within Immersive Ideas, exploring immersive, participatory storytelling for children and families. The work sits within our wider practice of designing experiences where audiences are active participants, shaping stories through play, choice, and interaction.
The current focus is on securing an early stage R&D. We are exploring how stories can emerge through doing rather than telling, how children naturally lead narrative through play, and how simple systems, objects, and prompts can support imagination, confidence, and shared meaning making.
This phase is intentionally exploratory. It is concerned with process rather than product, and with developing ideas, methods, and questions that can inform future development, piloting, and delivery.
What we are interested in Exploring
Choice based and participatory storytelling structures
Gamification in schools
Child led play and audience agency
Physical objects and systems as story starters
Collaborative play and shared world building
How immersive practice can support learning, curiosity, and confidence
The work draws on immersive theatre, games design, and participatory arts, translating professional techniques into formats that could be explored within education and community contexts.
How the R&D is being approached
Immersive Ideas is currently developing this work through early research, creative exploration, and conversation with collaborators across immersive theatre, play, games, and participatory design.
Any future R&D activity will be structured to allow experimentation, reflection, and iteration, with documentation embedded throughout to capture learning and inform next steps. Rather than testing for success or failure, the emphasis is on understanding what happens when agency, choice, and play are placed at the centre of a storytelling experience.
Support So Far
TThis early stage development work is supported by North Somerset Council, Portishead Town Council, and Together Portishead through the Portishead Economic Development Fund. This support is helping Immersive Ideas explore and develop ifuture prototypes and testing, informing hopeful led artist led R&D, piloting, and potential next stages of development to support access across North Somerset for 2027.
To Futher support this project, lead artist Sarah Morris was accepted onto the Income Strategies for Creative Professionals Skills Bootcamp delivered by MUTI Live Bristol - a government-subsidised training programme designed to support creative freelancers and small business leaders in developing sustainable income strategies. The programme forms part of the national Skills Bootcamp initiative, subsidised to improve access to professional development for creative practitioners.
We are currently in the process of bringing together a dream team of collaborators, practitioners, writers, designers, and researchers to support an intensive period of artist led research and development. This next phase will focus on deep exploration, shared thinking, and creative experimentation, allowing the work to be rigorously tested, questioned, and shaped through collective practice. The aim is to build a strong, thoughtful foundation that can inform future stages of development, piloting, and collaboration, while keeping the R&D rooted in curiosity, play, and creative integrity, before we look at creating am accessable market ready product in the future.
About The Practice
This area of research is led by Sarah Morris, founder and creative director of Immersive Ideas. Her practice focuses on participatory storytelling, play, and audience agency, particularly within work for children and families.
This exploratory R&D reflects an ongoing interest in how immersive practice can be playful, inclusive, and empowering, and how creative research can open up new approaches to learning and shared experience.
Sarah Morris - Founder Immersive Ideas Experience Agency
