World Building and the Future of Media: A Case Study-Makoko 2036

Toward Civic Co-production: Using Worldbuilding to Go Beyond Participation in Urban Planning and Enact More Equitable Cities

“…worldbuilding provides a valuable framework for multiple participants to share connected stories (Cechanowicz et al, 2016). The more detailed a world becomes, the more questions it can be asked, providing an increasingly nuanced space for exploring the potential repercussions and opportunities stemming from possible future change.…”

“…A framework for comparison was developed by selecting three steps distilled from literature of worldbuilding process and design: brainstorming, prototyping, and feedback and iteration. These terms occur frequently in worldbuilding related literature, as well as research on community planning process in urban development projects (Bowen, 2010;Karasti, 2014;Sabiescu et al, 2014;Cechanowicz et al, 2016;Baumann et al, 2018;Faliu et al, 2019).…”

“…The worldbuilding process used in the FWV mega city effort followed a methodology developed by Alex McDowell, the creative director of Experimental Design and a widely acknowledged leader in the worldbuilding field (Coulton et al, 2017;Wolf, 2017;Breauleux et al, 2019;McDowell, 2019;Silva and Brandao, 2019;Wille, 2019). According to McDowell and researchers affiliated with his Worldbuilding Institute at USC, his methods incorporate "extensive research at the individual, community, and world scales; a constant redefinition of research questions; a research and world map; as well as expert interviews, speculative fiction, character lenses and development, narrative design, and rapid prototyping" (Cechanowicz et al, 2016).…”

The World Building Framework for Immersive Storytelling Projects

“…Drawing inspiration from a specific location and culture, specifically the Lagos Lagoon in Makoko, Nigeria, the group explored the articulation of different fictional scenarios, from both a story and technology standpoint. In this interdisciplinary World Building context, the authors of this last article wrote, "Any storyteller can weave a compelling narrative, but world builders create storyworlds that support myriad stories by multiple storytellers across disparate platforms -including those platforms that may not yet be named" [29]. It thus appears that the world exists in itself, outside of any sort of media embodiment, and thus serves as a basis for the infinite generation or proliferation of stories and substories.…”

Editorial: Towards sensory studies of digital health

“… 19 Building on Pantzar and Ruckenstein's methods, using digital devices to collect information about people's sensory responses and using these data as stimulus material in discussions with them, can provoke insights into their data sense-making. Inviting people to engage in speculative design, 20 speculative fiction writing 21 or world building activities 22 are other inventive methods in which the sensory and affective dimensions of digital health can be accessed, including imaginaries about how these technologies might enact embodiment in future worlds.…”