Growing societies have developed highly efficient structures and abstractions to facilitate communication and get around. With man-made media on the forefront of this, both designers and audiences of all media types today seem to be stuck in a specific rhetoric that not only manifests but reinforces our system culture. Beyond our ambition of creating thematic content to foster change,as designers it thus seems necessary to understand general structural and aesthetical mechanisms of legacy media that have been drastically limiting our capacity of acting out, thinking and even fantasizing about change on a larger scale.The session highlights the very special characteristics of VR and AR in contrast to traditional screen-based media, discusses chances and challenges of a more humane design approach as a start to developing a new mindset for designing alternative realities.