Worldbuilding allows us to imagine rich, colorful, textured, and coherent narratives that bring a future context to life. Worldbuilding is storytelling in rich detail. It’s an architectural blueprint of a future society that fluidly integrates arts, humanities, science, philosophy, religion, governance, and the human experience in novel and complex ways.
Worldbuilding allows us to imagine, prototype, and even experience in multi-dimensions. We are able to suspend our present to immerse ourselves into the future – drawing us into dramatically different possibilities. Worldbuilding promotes systems thinking, applied imagination and sensemaking. It asks us to connect disparate elements into more cohesive wholes, transporting us to new worlds and prompting new discovery.
How does imagining new worlds in vivid detail expand our understanding of what’s possible and our agency in shaping those worlds?
Read or watch a science fiction story and ask your students to reflect on assumptions of that world: What factors led to that world becoming a reality? What are the societal structures, cultural norms, political systems, and details in that world? Who benefits in that world? Who is left out?
Create an artifact from the future. How does this item reflect the culture of that world? Why is it valued? What are the detailed elements of it? Consider creating a scene or experience from the future using this artifact, like a museum visit or store experience.
Turn an element of your strategic plan into an immersive story or visual from the future. Project out your furthest year projection in your plan and situate it into a larger context. What does that world look like? What are the values of your community? What are the priorities of where you live? What issues are top of mind to parents and community leaders? What are the most pressing issues of the moment, and the most promising opportunities?
Where the Wild Things Are Maurice Sendak
Science fiction novels with rich world building such as Kindred or Parable of the Sower By Octavia E. Butler
Future Tense Short Stories a partnership between Arizona State University and Slate
Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World by Ann Pendelton-Julian and John Seely Brown
Worldbuilding Institute University of Southern California
