I have devised a lightweight framework for designing new worlds and in this post I want to see how well it works and identify what is lacking. This is part of a bigger project to design a curriculum for world building particularly suited to companies and organisations to offer them an alternative to scenario planning.
The purpose of designing a world may be to provide the background for the development of narrative stories, computer games, virtual worlds in the metaverse, integrated marketing campaigns or to develop resilience to challenges ahead.
My template is an attempt to reduce the complexity of imagining the world and I hope supports both real and fantasy worlds. In the last post I set out 10 steps and a template/canvas. My tasks to fill that in and then reflect on what works and what needs to be improved.
The world I have chosen to explore is one I have had in my head for many years and it is exploring sleep medicine. I attended a sleep clinic in the early 2000s after years of poor sleep and crossed the threshold into a weird mixture of brain, electronics, drugs, talking therapies and mythology. This sounds like a perfect world for a whole set of dramatic stories and I am therefore going to use it as our first world.
Here is the template with my initial answers.
I found it quite easy to complete; drawing ideas from a long thought about setting. I did feel challenged, in a good way, by some of the questions and this is exactly the purpose of the exercise. I want to end up with a deeply coloured and textured world for my stories to live in and I realised very quickly that this provides only a shallow foundation on which to continue building. But this framework is certainly good enough to form the basis of early stages of a course.
Reflections and next steps
There is an obvious tension between completeness and simplicity. While I have made progress in seeding the foundations of my world, a lot of it feels derivative and commonplace. Perhaps that is inevitable.
Building worlds is about pulling out essential observations from the setting that will ignite emergent stories and decision making. I need to move from the so what to the what if phase of this world as soon as possible.
I need to be able to show you my world and creating some artefacts and maps will help. I have to start drawing the audience into the world.
I will return to this world and revise the answers in the next few days to highlight the areas from which I think stories and change will emerge. I believe strongly that understanding the needs of the different groups are essential to creating that emergence.
I will also design a different world in parallel to retest the approach. I’ll use the same template for now but revise a few of the questions afterwards to make them stronger.
Stay tuned.
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