02.180DH Worldbuilding: Critical and Creative Practices
The course investigates worldbuilding as a critical lens and creative practice for understanding and making interventions into our rapidly transforming techno-cultural world. Worldbuilding is the construction of imagined worlds, with their own histories, environments, social systems, and logic. Such worlds can be built in a variety of media, ranging from literary texts (speculative fiction) to fully immersive virtual reality games. Today, worldbuilding is no longer the domain of fiction but also increasingly entangled with AI-generated media, algorithmic systems, and platform infrastructures which shape and transform how individuals and societies imagine their past, present, and future.
With roots in art and speculative design, this course introduces students to the creative practice of worldbuilding. Students will examine the social and cultural implications of artificial intelligence, algorithmic processes, and digital platforms and how they shape culture and society. They will use existing technical skills available to them or identify and develop the skills needed to develop prototypes, scenarios, and environments for the artworks they want to create. They will be encouraged to use, subvert, or reimagine AI tools as part of their worldbuilding process, and to test new models of authorship and narrative design. By introducing interdisciplinary approaches from speculative design, interaction design, game studies, literary studies, and critical theory, students learn to use worldbuilding not just as artistic method but as strategic design tool for shaping more thoughtful, ethical, and responsible futures.
Learning objectives
- Articulate the ethical, social and speculative implications of worldbuilding practices, including how design choices and artificial intelligence shape audience agency and perception
- Analyse how constructed worlds across different media, platforms, and technologies – including AI-generated and algorithmic systems – embed social, cultural, or ideological systems
- Evaluate a range of creative techniques, processes, and AI tools appropriate to one’s individual practice which can be used to produce artistic or design projects
- Experiment with narrative, spatial, and AI-influenced worldbuilding techniques to develop an individual creative methodology
- Produce an artistic project that applies research, knowledge and skills acquired throughout the course, integrating conceptual and critical considerations
Measurable outcomes
- Articulate and explain thoughts and arguments through class participation throughout the semester.
- Analyse creative techniques, methods, and processes in order to justify how the approaches could be applied towards the development of artistic or design projects
- Identify relationships and conceptual connections by maintaining a commonplace book that documents, organises, and synthesises their research, research, references, reflections, visual experiments, and sketches of ideas to support the development of their final project.
- Evaluate a case study which articulates insights, critical reflections, and learning which can be applied into their own artistic or design practice.
- Demonstrate conceptual development and execution of a worldbuilding project, including the development of supporting materials such as maps, illustrations, timelines, or physical prototypes.
Assessment
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Assessment items
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Percentage
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WEC: Class participation (individual)
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10%
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WEC: Presentation (group) |
20%
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WEC: Commonplace book (individual)
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20%
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WEC: Mid-term paper (individual)
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25%
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| WEC: Final project (individual) |
25%
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(WEC = Writing, Expression, Communication)
Weekly schedule
Week 1: Introduction: What is Worldbuilding?
Defining worldbuilding and exploring foundational concepts of worldbuilding, focusing on the expanded notions of contemporary art and design and its role within culture and society.
Week 2: Narrative and storytelling: From cybertext to metaverse
Understanding worldbuilding by tracing the intellectual lineage of virtual
worlds from cybertext to future visions of the metaverse, including how AI-driven narrative systems and generative tools are reshaping authorship and narrative design.
Week 3: Art & Design approaches: Artistic research methods and rapid prototyping techniques
Understanding practice-based research methodologies and a practical
investigation of how prototyping can be used as tools for inquiry and critique of social issues. Students may experiment with AI-assisted brainstorming, ideation, or creative development.
Week 4: Socio-political Dynamics of Worldbuilding
Logistics, labour, power structures, data infrastructures and governance: how they influence worldbuilding.
Week 5: Fieldtrip
Students will experience a real-world example of an interactive art exhibition, immersive theatre performance, or virtual experience which can inspire their project work.
Week 6: Atlases, Maps, and Guides
How have different cultural terrains been mapped into different media such as photography, cinema, and contemporary art exhibitions?
Week 7: Recess Week
Week 8: Mid-term Project Presentation
Week 9: The Reality Effect: Work and Play
What insights do worldbuilding projects offer about contemporary society and the systems that the everyday person navigates through daily? Through the lens of the Futures Cone, we will consider what kinds of futures are likely, what is desirable, and how we can design worlds to reflect our values?
Week 10: Ethics and Society
What kinds of broader questions do worldbuilding projects raise? What kind of ethical imperatives and social responsibilities should we consider? What are the moral dilemmas that arise in thinking about speculative worlds?
Week 11: Emerging technologies and Cultural production
What is the role of technology in shaping the cultural landscape? How can
synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, quantum computing or virtual reality be the context for artistic interventions, and how can art mediate public understanding of emerging technologies?
Week 12: Consultations for Final Project
Week 13: Final Project Presentation