Heather Renée Barker

Heather Renée Barker is a theorist, educator, researcher, and practitioner whose work advances an experience-centered approach to design across architecture, immersive technologies, and civic engagement. For more than two decades, she has investigated how human experience emerges through dynamic relationships among people and across actual and virtual places. This work is grounded in phenomenological, psychological, and ethnographic inquiry - positioning lived experience as both the subject and measure of design.

As a Full Professor of Design at California State University, Long Beach, Heather Renée Barker is Founding Director of the Immersive Design Research Lab (IDRL), and of the Human Experience Design Interactions (HXDI) graduate program. Her book, Designing Post-Virtual Architectures, published by Routledge, articulates experience-first philosophical, theoretical, and practical frameworks for designing where digital, physical, social, and ecological realities converge.

Neuroarchitecture, how built environments shape cognition, attention, emotion, and well-being, is a central focus of her work. Through the IDRL, she’s developed Design Happenings, a participatory methodology for designing for wonder in urban civic contexts where investigative methods connecting environmental and bio-sensing data with human experience research are created and tested.

Throughout her career, Barker has practiced architecture, exhibited, published, and presented design, psychology, and human experience work internationally. She serves in leadership roles with organizations including the American Institute of Architects, Los Angeles (AIA|LA) and the Downtown Long Beach Design District (DTLBDD). She is a member of the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture (ANFA). As both leader and learner, she is an eager collaborator and deeply values the expertise of others.