Field research in Sierra Leone’s Kono District captured miners’ daily challenges. My team and I employed a mixed-methods ethnographic approach including contextual inquiry at active mining sites, semi-structured interviews with 15 working miners, environmental mapping with photography and 360° video, binaural audio recording of worksite ambient sounds, participatory observation of mining techniques, artifact analysis of tools and equipment, journey mapping of daily routines, and ecological impact assessments of mining activities on surrounding communities. Having been born in the Kono District, my connection to the region provided additional validation and cultural context for our findings. We prioritized understanding three core elements: the mining environment’s authentic conditions, critical decision points miners face daily, and the physical realities of their labor.

Some of our findings on the consumer side reveal that the diamond industry’s traditional transparency efforts fail to create meaningful connections. Only 63% of consumers engaged with standard educational materials about mining conditions, with even fewer retaining this information or changing their behavior because of it. VR’s embodied experience showed the potential to transform passive knowledge into active solidarity, creating stronger emotional connections and knowledge retention than conventional approaches.

The findings highlight miners’ stark realities, including economic pressures that force them to sell personal possessions to obtain essential equipment. They work under hazardous conditions, confronting the dangers of contaminated water and unstable terrain daily. Additionally, the demanding nature of this physical labor takes a significant toll on their bodies, underscoring the urgent need for better support and resources for these workers.

These findings influenced our design intervention, ensuring the final experience was grounded in diamond miners’ realities, aiming to engage consumers in ways traditional methods could not achieve.

The intervention aims to support marketing narratives for our target audience, including socially conscious consumers who care about ethical sourcing but lack tangible connections to the human stories behind their purchases.

We proposed an immersive VR experience that could empower users to temporarily embody a miner’s daily reality, facilitating a simplified yet powerful emotional journey and allowing users to develop solidarity with mining communities without requiring extensive background knowledge. From this foundation, we proposed three facets of intervention that our design solution must have:

• We needed an authentic environmental recreation that represented actual mining conditions, which ensured users engaged with genuine challenges rather than sanitized versions.
• The VR journey would incorporate actual choices miners face daily, translating abstract supply chain concepts into tangible personal dilemmas.
• We would create an embodied physical experience by ensuring users physically experienced aspects of miners’ labor. Haptic feedback and interaction would be paramount to foster genuine understanding and motivate changed consumer behavior.

We prototyped the designs with miners in Sierra Leone and potential consumers in the U.S. For consumers in the U.S., we tested with 12 participants in New York City, showing low-fidelity wireframes, storyboarding, and establishing narrative flow and core interaction mechanics. I also developed interactive prototypes that tested hand presence and environmental interactions using the design and technology facilities at Parsons School of Design. We discovered that haptic feedback significantly enhanced immersion, with 86% of testers reporting stronger emotional responses when physically feeling the weight of mining tools. Preserving cultural accuracy was difficult given the constraints of technology; however, by leveraging my lived experiences and working directly with miners, we created an authentic representation of miners’ lived realities, from accurate ambient sounds to realistic lighting conditions. We found the optimal experience length was 10 minutes — long enough to create empathy but short enough to maintain engagement. We also discussed the potential for mall-based empathy stations where consumers could experience the VR journey during shopping trips, addressing the limited home VR adoption while meeting consumers where they are.