The School of Worldbuilding

Bauhaus Futures is an edited collection just published by MIT Press to mark the 100th anniversary of a short lived but profoundly influential institution.

Founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany in 01919, the Bauhaus was an interdisciplinary and international school of design whose charismatic and encompassing vision has had a tremendous impact on design, architecture and art over the past century. As Tom Wolfe wrote, "“It was more than a school; it was a commune, a spiritual movement, a radical approach to art in all its forms, a philosophical center comparable to the Garden of Epicurus."

This new book's point of departure is a provocation, "What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practising today?"

With my longtime Situation Lab collaborator Jeff Watson (USC School of Cinematic Arts), the point of departure for our own contribution is a kind of playfully manifesto-ish contemporisation of the Bauhaus, whereby "the school of building" becomes "the school of worldbuilding" and the motto "Art Into Industry" becomes "Art Into Reality", tying the ambitious reach of the original to emerging imagination-ramifying practices in transmedia storytelling, cinema and media production, game design (alternate reality games, larp, etc), activism, and experiential futures. A sample:

The School of Worldbuilding responds to the question, “how might we design a better world?” by turning it on its head: “how might we world a better design?”
. . .
The School of Worldbuilding is not as interested in what we can do in imaginary worlds as it is in what we might do with or through or occasionally in spite of them, in this world.

The School of Worldbuilding sees the role of the educator not as a purveyor of content, but as a certain kind of game master. It sees the role of the student not as a receptacle, but as a certain kind of player.
. . .
The School of Worldbuilding is political because the imagination itself is political. Power and authority contour and transform social imaginaries just as those imaginaries contour and transform power and authority. Indeed, domination and liberation alike depend on the imagination. What revolution ever started anywhere but in the imagining of a different world? And what tyranny ever lasted without mastery over imaginal resources?
. . .
The School of Worldbuilding confers no degree. To be a student of worldbuilding is to commit to exploration and experimentation as a way of life. Graduation is not only impossible: it is undesirable. To graduate from the School is to fail out of it.

(And so on.)

Edited by Laura Forlano (IIT Institute of Design), Molly Wright Steenson (just down the hall at CMU School of Design), and Mike Ananny (USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism), the book Bauhaus Futures includes contributions in a wide variety of formats from a fantastic lineup of writers.

The full text of The School of Worldbuilding can be found here.

The book is now available for order and is set to ship within the next couple of weeks!

Related:
> I Design Worlds (Interview with Liam Young)
> Reverse Archaeology / The Time Machine (Assignment)
> Design is Storytelling
> How to Build a World (Video)
> The Thing From The Future

The Thing From The Future

The Thing From The Future is an imagination game that helps players generate countless ideas for artifacts from the future; to amuse, delight, explore, and provoke.

Designed for play by individuals or groups, this hybrid party game and creativity tool has been compared to Cards Against Humanity and Oblique Strategies. It's easy to hack and customise, so can be used for exploration in specific domains, or in random-access mode as a gym for the imagination.

The game has been played in all sorts of contexts including:
- classes at Johns Hopkins, MIT Media Lab, and Parsons Mumbai;
- gatherings such as the World Future Society annual conference in San Francisco, 5D's transmedia "Science of Fiction" shindig in LA, and the United Nations Development Programme's annual strategy meeting in New York;
- festivals including IndieCade (LA), FutureFest (London), Hot Docs and Maker Festival (Toronto), Amplify (Sydney), and the Berlin Film Festival;
- design jams resulting in popup artifact exhibitions at OCAD University, NYU, and Stanford d.School;

as well as at any number of parties and kitchen tables, and inside countless organisations from community arts groups to Fortune 500 companies.

Co-designer Jeff Watson and I published The Thing From The Future through Situation Lab in March 02014, and we have been refining it continually since. A revised edition, containing four times as many permutations as the original, was released last October.

The project was recognised this year by the Association of Professional Futurists (APF) with a Most Significant Futures Work award.

I wrote an article about the game for the APF periodical Compass in April, and then revised that piece for an anthology on Methods which came out this month. The text looks under the hood at how the card deck's four-suit structure scaffolds players' imaginations.

Here it is:



To reiterate a key point made there: The Thing From The Future comes against a backdrop of increasing interest over the past five years in hybrid design/futures practices such as design fiction and experiential futures. The game takes a certain kind of intellectual and creative operation (viz. quickly moving from vague notions about alternative futures, to ideas and stories revolving around specific artifacts) that has so far been relatively specialised and unusual, and renders it accessible and fun, thereby in a modest way helping to demystify and democratise futures.

As the game becomes more widely known, the novelty of the "artifact from the future" premise will wear off. This is a good thing. People ought to be less apt to be impressed by that concept in itself, clearing the way for a more futures-literate interest to develop around the substance of the ideas themselves. It would be good for the field and its underlying goals if more of us were able to be curious, critical and demanding about what makes certain future narratives, and their experiential manifestations, worthy of attention.

Thus the practice shifts to its next level of maturity. A larger corpus means a proportionately larger number of projects with something to say. Meanwhile, the game provides a fun entry point, without requiring anyone to engage explicitly with such state-of-the-union practitioner concerns.

This post is prompted by two things that have happened in the past week or so.

First, we at Situation Lab have just launched a free, downloadable, print-and-play edition in Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) that anyone in the world with a computer, web access and a printer can now use. The INK Conference in Mumbai provided an excellent platform from which to announce this news and bring the project to a wider and more international player base.

Second, we have put out two special online shufflers to support participants in the United States Department of Arts and Culture (USDAC) national grassroots campaign #DareToImagine, described here.

(Update 3 Nov 2015: A special bilingual edition of The Thing From The Future has been distributed to delegates at the biennial UNESCO Youth Forum in Paris.)

To download the inaugural Print and Play edition, including Playsheets, go here.

The revised edition of the game deck, containing over 3.7 million possible prompts, is still available for purchase here.

Finally, check out what's happening in the gameplay community via the hashtag #FutureThing on social media. Or better yet, why not play a round right now? :)

Related:
> 1-888-FUTURES
> Build your own Time Machine

> A history of Experiential Futures

> The technology of public imagination

> Designing futures

Strategic foresight meets tactical media

It has been just over six months since I moved to Toronto, and some irons placed in the fire early on are getting ready to be hammered out. Particularly exciting to me is the Guerrilla Futures studio/seminar class to be run together with my Situation Lab co-director Jeff Watson, also a new prof at OCAD University, during the Northern Hemisphere summer now approaching.

Our description for this course (affectionately dubbed SFIN 5B01 by university admin):

'In order to work, fantasy needs to be rooted ten feet deep in reality.' - Maurice Sendak

Many artists, designers and entrepreneurs aim to bring the future to life: the Guerrilla Futures studio offers a unique approach to doing just that. Co-taught by a professional futurist and a game designer, you will systematically picture how alternative worlds could unfold; manifest your own visions playfully and compellingly in a range of media; and make these narratives available in the real world, via live urban interventions for unsuspecting audiences to encounter. Prepare to imagine rigorously, explore genuine change, and learn first-hand the joys – and hazards – of unsolicited transmedia storytelling.

Intended Learning Outcomes for the class:

- Analyse environments and systems in order to identify opportunities for transformative action;
- Formulate action plans to effect change in lived environments through the use of tactical media interventions;
- Produce and document urban media interventions using both digital and analog technologies and practices;
- Develop a designerly, impact-oriented approach to communication, honouring mastery of convention as well as appropriate experimentation; and
- Acquire experience and confidence in foresight methods and skills, kindling a lifelong interest in developing these further. 

Course registration is just about to open.

For anyone wondering just what guerrilla futures means, my short answer is 'strategic foresight meets tactical media'. A fuller answer's in this presentation given last year at FESTA, the Festival of Transitional Architecture.

[Update 30nov16: dead presentation embed fixed & moved to top of post.]

Related:
> FoundFutures: Postcards from the future
> Fast-forwarding gentrification
> What becomes of Chinatowns in a world where China is the global superpower?
> Street art simulates bird flu epidemic
> New York Times Special Edition
> Future jamming 101
> The Futures of Everyday Life