World Building

Picture this: You’re at your thirteenth birthday party. It’s a bowling party and as you’re about to impress everyone with your “supa sweet” bowling skills, your feet suddenly morph into fins. You faceplant onto the ground while your crush and the rest of your “friends” laugh at you. In a world where puberty is replaced by becoming your spirit animal, experiencing random morphing is just part of being a teen.

There are of course good and bad aspects of such a society. While some find the spirit animal a liberating, necessary part of themselves, others see it as something to be kept personal, almost hidden. Although a fictitious world, there is nothing new about these views. We as humans have debated for centuries about social expectations and etiquette. Agonizing over what to do and what not to do. In our artifacts, we have represented a society in which morphing into a spirit animal is an integral part of society. Even so, there are mixed opinions and implications concerning whether it is accepted or even acceptable. Such questions ignite a new and unknown conflict, one more question of human rights, like race or gender, political opinions or social standing. In each artifact we chose to explore this question and design pieces of such a conflicted world.

As we created our own new world, we opened our minds to this pressing question, but also to what life would look like with spirit animals involved. Creating snapshots of everyday life through newspaper headlines, political posters and photos of city signs, we designed a fictitious world that came to feel real. With each artifact we seemed to uncover a new story about the people, places and things that this world contained. Like Julian Bleecker says in his article, Design Fiction, “ [Design fiction] objects are totems through which a larger story can be told, imagined or expressed…” There was no way we could explain every portion of the newly discovered spirit animal world, but we could craft our own perception and provide a base for new stories. 

We can see this phenomenon of new worlds and stories in our own world today. When the novel, The Hunger Games, was released, the imaginary world of Suzanne Collins began to take form. Following the detailed book, was the professionally designed world of Collin’s imagination in film form. Helping the reader and the viewer to see Katniss’s world as real, the specific choices in design became a trademark of that world. People everywhere began to dress up like people from the Capitol, District 13 or maybe even like Katniss herself, delving deeper into the newly created world.

Although our world may not spark a phenomenon of people dressing up as spirit animals or making movies about awkward transforming teens, it has made us more aware of how design holds the power to open an avenue of creativity. That each photo we created or political poster we staged contributes to the creation a completely different and magical world.

Morgan, Catherine, Hannah, and Grace