IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - December 2016 - 29

orld building exists at the
intersection of design, technology, and storytelling. In
its ability to enable and conjure deeply considered holistic worlds, it represents the
foundational narrative and
design practice for transmedia, spherical storytelling,
and the post-cinematic. World building takes a lateral
anthropological stance, borrowing specifically from ethnographic practice to contextualize speculative designs
in real world research. World builders as designers then
use this ethnographic groundwork as a place from
which to begin imagining future possibilities [5, pp.
2-3]. This process allows designers to intelligently project
plausible scenarios and outcomes through the creation
of diegetic prototypes and models [3, p. 190] backed by
rigorous research, envisioning desirable futures and the
steps we may take to realize them - or the parallel universes we may be grateful to prevent. This essay is a case
study that illustrates the use of world building as a "technology of the imagination" - entering a tradition of many
other technologies of the imagination as elaborated by
Sneath et al. and Halse - that envisions the future of
media and technology [3, p. 182].
Any storyteller can weave a compelling narrative, but
world builders create story worlds that support myriad
stories by multiple storytellers across disparate platforms - including those platforms that may not yet be
named. Such world building becomes even more powerful when it moves beyond transmedia entertainment
experiences and tackles real-world challenges in realworld environments.
Within Alex McDowell's World Building course at the
University of Southern California, with teaching assistants Laura Cechanowicz and Brandon Cahoon, an interdisciplinary group of students have imagined, across two
semesters, a future world set in Lagos, Nigeria, 2036,
named Dry City. The team chose to focus on Lagos due
to its rapid urbanization, booming economy, and growing population. In our fictional world build, we established that water commodification and water scarcity in
the future would intensify social inequity, generate conflicts, and require aggressive adaptation even within the
upper class, and across social boundaries. Our heterogenous group of students - architects, interactive media
designers, musicians, engineers, urban planners, animators, filmmakers, and artists - speculate upon the possible contours of this near-future, privatized water
society, and collectively generate narratives within it.
As we examine problems arising from domains of
energy, politics, infrastructure, and culture; and from
subdomains such as identity, media, virtual/augmented reality devices, body, food, education, health,
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desalination, synthetic biology, smart materials, water
parks, informal urbanism, and water economics, we are
projecting an alternate reality. Within our world build of
Dry City, the theme of technology as intertwined with
identity and accountability comes to the fore through
multiple braided narratives. The spherical storytelling of
this world allows us to research and imagine the real
world consequences of our technological, economic,
and social trajectories.
What follows is a snapshot of our in-class process, a
slice geared toward the future of technology and media.
Our work with Dry City exemplifies the means by which
we can begin anticipating the ethical consequences of
our current trajectories, thereby considering which
paths to pursue and how to best interrogate the multiple outcomes of our developing media technologies.

Methodology
Our version of world building employs a collaborative,
ethnographic design methodology that incorporates
extensive research at the individual, community, and
world scales; a constant redefinition of research questions; a research and world map; as well as expert interviews, speculative fiction, character lenses and
development, narrative design, and rapid prototyping.
See Figure 1 for an illustration of our approach as developed by Alex McDowell.
We began our first two semesters of the Dry City
project by grounding our premise, or "origin story," in a
real location: Lagos, Nigeria, in the undefined future of
2036, in which water has been privatized and commodified. The first semester we worked primarily with Lagos
as a whole, but in our second semester we decided to
shift focus and explore Makoko, a floating fishing village
in the Lagos lagoon. The economic and political tensions
that currently exist between Makoko and the mainland
of Lagos provided a rich opportunity for exploring how
this impoverished community might reinvent itself in the
coming years, as it has been forced to do many times
since its creation more than a hundred years ago. In reality, through our research across articles, through interviews, and within media, we have learned that
Makokoans have created a system for terraforming the
shallow lagoon, have access to cell phones, are adept at
repurposing technology, and have formed social networks for recycling raw material. We decided to explore
the narrative potential of these facts, adding the premise
to our world build that, by 2036, Makoko has been cut
off from the power grid and Internet on the Lagos mainland, but that it has not been destroyed due to its selfsufficient nature and growing awareness and support
from the world community.
In a uniquely collaborative development, at every
stage, each participant shared his or her research into

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