World Building

In order to navigate the difference between reality and designed reality, we must create a place where creativity and ingenuity work together. These coincide to point out new ways of exploration within a certain element. In Bleeker’s 2009 essay “Design Fiction”, we read about the way design is “A way of materializing ideas and speculations without the pragmatic curtailing that often happens when dead weights are fastened to the imagination.” So, certainly, this means that, when we design, we create a new world--a world where our imagination takes reign and the feasibility for communal change is possible. Designing gives room for improvement, for limitless ideas. With this Worldbuilding assignment, our group decided to build a world where Earth was not the only planet with human-like beings in the solar system, but the planet Mars has life on it as well. The humanoid beings we created are void of deep, intellectual thought. So, as a group, we made a news story covering the propaganda and new steps for and against the forced civilization of this newly discovered “primitive” life. We tried to set up the world by giving a back story to what the United Nations wanted with these beings and how the people on Earth were responding. To do this, each of us fulfilled different roles for this assignment; we split the work between our being news anchors, news casters, camera operators, gaffers, and writers.

Interestingly, the types of societies we each envisioned for this world were seen in distinct ways. Each of us brought forward different elements and ideas that helped form the backstory for this new world. As above mentioned, design is a way to open up options to up to new ideas, or open up the mind to more than just pre established concepts. So, by working together, through our project, we were able to make an almost social commentary on politics and community involvement. If humanoid life had been actually discovered on Mars in 2011, we imagined Earth’s people united. United in the way that political discourse would be an “us VS them” thing; this however,  still with a political discourse and contrasting polarization with dominant political power would overrule. That is why we decided to have “everyday citizen” interviews in the story: It showed what people might think if this story were to have actually happened, and the impact on society and the polarization therein it would have, and how governmental ruling would still be the louder voice.

To one end, this assignment brought forth questions of ethical nature for the people on Earth created in this society: Is it our responsibility to attempt to colonize and civilize this neanderthal-like community, or stay uninvolved in order to preserve their natural culture and progression? The element of design in this assignment was key in getting us to open up our thinking and perceive problems and environments that could arise in such a society where like ours, the power and freedom of choice is questioned.

William Knowles, Laurelin Ottesen, Marely Lee, Alex Aguila, and Jaye Abhau