January 21, 2021

Enworlding

(Worlding)

“Much like a drum circle, we feel there’s a real metaphor for the way world building works in large-scale collaborations. Rhythms start to emerge out of the raw material.” Alex McDowell

The World Building Institute at USC, founded by production designer Alex McDowell, is an immersive trans-media and transdisciplinary ideation and prototyping process dedicated to leveraging the underlying power of the stories we tell ourselves about reality. “The neural sparking between left brain and right brain is at the core of WBi — we are moving into a landscape where art and science, design and engineering are inseparable. At their intersection lies the new creative laboratory for the future of our narrative practices.” (McDowell) McDowell founded WBi upon three beliefs: 1) that storytelling is the most powerful tool for advancing human capability; 2) that worlds underlie the powerful stories that we tell ourselves; 3) that new technologies are powerful enablers of the imagination. Adapted from McDowell’s work in films such as Minority Report, WBi’s world building method establishes sets of parameters from which scenarios can be developed, such as “ asking participants to build upon a handful of geographic and population parameters describing a future Los Angeles flooded by global warming.” (Karlin) Students in the program collaborate over multiple semesters to imagine in detail the constraints governing their world-in-progress, such as the fictitious Rilao, the at-risk, hacker-driven hypothetical island-world in the South Pacific developed by teams of students at WBi over several years. The value of world building is its expansion of the imagination of creative participants, the loosening of the veracity of reality, and the development of the skills of perspective taking, collaboration, systems thinking precautionary thinking, and nonlinear thinking.

Human-world assemblages make and remake the world unceasingly, bringing external structures and conditions into dynamic correlation with divergent worldviews. The manifest designed world can be seen as a palimpsest of propositions and responses - theses and antitheses - instantiated in time(s) and in context(s). This process of “thingification”, where beliefs and values become concretized as structures and artifacts is the active interface between culture, politics and design. World making is a means of perspective making. Representing particular perspectives on what ought to be, world making takes the form of propositions and configurations. Perspective making situates one’s worldview in relation to those of others in the form of enculturation, structuration, commemoration, destruction and transformation. Perspective making is a reflexive, ontological designing continuum that unfolds in the interior and exterior dimensions of human experience: first-person subjectivity, second person relations, and third-person inter-objective dynamics.  

As experts in cultural pattern formation, designers craft propositional narratives from the qualitative raw materials of human beliefs and values. As a designer, you may be doubting that design is ideally situated to the transformation of our tangible and intangible infrastructures. You may have experienced firsthand the difficulty of making change on the level of concrete structural realities. John Ehrenfeld currently serves as Executive Director of the International Society for Industrial Ecology. He retired in 2000 as the Director of the MIT Program on Technology, Business, and Environment, an interdisciplinary educational, research, and policy program. According to Ehrenfeld, several conditions must be met at the collective level, at least by a critical mass of change workers, before structuring elements and artifacts can be redesigned. First we must recognize our current condition and also accept it. This involves seeing our role in the bigger picture, as well as integrating these realizations as part of our reconsidered identity. From this place of heart-mind clarity and relative equanimity we can collectively sense and collaborate with emerging future, redesigning structuring artifacts without unnecessary drama and reactivity. Ehrenfeld names four key areas where design can contribute to innovative artifacts that can in turn serve as designed scripts for life-positive reinforcing feedback loops. He names these highest-leverage overlapping arenas for conscious reflective design as: technologies, beliefs, norms, and authority. Ehrenfeld reminds us that structures and artifacts arise out of awareness and intention. <Enforming - Forming>

Unskillful designed interventions will be poorly fitted to their psychological, ideological and emotional contexts ant therefore cannot take root. Great breakthroughs and revolutionary innovations are the result of design agency at several levels: functional capacity, position within the system —such as degree of marginality or centrality— as well as strategic skillful means in addressing the world views of stakeholders. In order to resonate with stakeholders design propositions must seek out and align the perspectives of diverse constituents. From this perspective, the periphery of current design discourse is a fertile place from which to grow meaningful, emancipatory and serious design contributions. As designers responding to a brief, the very first step is a thorough immersion in context. This is a forensic process of perspective seeking working forward and backwards in time to understand the mutual relations between perspective holding and perspective making.

There are many sociotechnical and political theories of large-scale socio-technical change, and process models of how change structures possibilities and forecloses options (Bhaskar, Giddens, Luhmann) specifically how historical structures both tangible and intangible inhibit the emergence of new cultural patterns (Bhaskar, Simmel). The dynamic interplay between what we intend, what we build, what we dismantle, and what we believe is possible, is the boundary condition of civil society - always in flux and always in negotiation. In order to be diffused and adopted, any innovation has to interface with the priorities and values of powerful civic, economic and cultural structures. According to Dr. Ichak Adizes, management theorist, change consultant and author of the book Corporate Lifecycles: How Organizations Grow and Die and What to Do about It, individuals and groups effect change to the degree that they successfully coalesce authority, power, and influence or CAPI. (Adizes). <Absenting - Presencing>

Because design models and enacts human consciousness and volition, the designed world is a mirror of cultural evolution. Designed outcomes mutually co-arise within historical contexts themselves conditioned by particular worldviews, and in turn condition future arisings. Worldviews are powerful memes- deep cultural patterns of collective beliefs, values, and norms. Because they are transnational and transcultural, world views have more fundamental influence on the worlds we make and destroy. By foregrounding the ways perspective holding translates into perspective making, we glimpse deep structural ideologies and values that underpin structures. <Propositioning - Habituating>

The designed world is a tangible demonstration of what we collectively valued in the past. Our designed world shows us who and what we have been and are becoming. For example, many cultural structures and institutions rest on our collective agreements about Nature. As reality drifts away from our existing language and categories, existing concrete structures such as zoos for example, stand as reminders of the past and gatekeepers to the future.

Designed artifacts are crystalizations of the forms of consciousness that created them. To proposition and to bring forth worlds is a powerful interplay between consciousness and form. Because our mental models represent what looks like coherence from our individual perspective, world making is a primary mode of consciousness and a means to construct identity. Because world making is a powerful form of perspective making, the meeting between culture, politics and design is a space of difference, dissensus, conciliation, alignment and negotiation. In his book Worlding: Identity, Imagination, and Reality in a Digital Age, author David Trend frames it this way, “Nothing using the term “world” is complete or neutral. The very slipperiness of the term means that it can be taken in negative or positive directions. To some the word conjures up images of sovereignty, while to others it might mean the creation a new domain. But in either case, “world” and “worlding” are loaded terms.” (Trend)

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