Designing For An = Future
"The decolonization of the imagination is the most dangerous and subversive there is: for it is where all other forms of decolonization are born. Once the imagination is unshackled, liberation is limitless." - Walidha Imarisha, Octavia's Brood
Over a year ago I had a rare gem of a day. I didn't have a car or bike, and I was low on cash. To get to the rare gem place, I needed to get creative. My bus ride was dramatic with a couple breaking up and getting back together again, my metro ride long, and my final shared Lyft ride a test of resilience. I arrived at the Women's Center for Creative Work at the end of a cul de-sac in Silverlake looking at a backdrop of the LA river, mountains, and maze of one story homes.
I was at a workshop in world building, a rad design tool for imagining new universes, often used in the gaming and fantasy movie industries. However, this was no day for dragons, the theme was creating a completely femme focused future. In a couple hours, we wanted to come up with the problems a feminist future would address, the products that would make up our new world, and describe the characters and stories driving the narrative.
This Feminist Futures workshop was the brainchild of two women, Paisley and Caitlin. The two are definitely from the divine future, sent to us today so we could try to evolve a little further. They also just just so happen to have gotten engaged last week, which makes me feel hella pride. At the time when they were running this 30 person workshop, to the mainstream population, the word feminist was still new armor used against Trump specifically, it hadn't yet become a mass printed t-shirt logo. The fourth wave of feminism has been moving since the early part of this decade, but 2017 was a tipping point. The intrinsic questions are just as fresh today as they were before.
They are:
If we could suspend all of today's constraints, what issues would a future with feminism address?
If we were to look in our bags today as if they were an archeologist's artifact, what meaning would those items have had to the people who carried them?
How would that meaning translate into new yet uncreated products in the future? Draw them out, describe them, then make them with real material from around you.
Who would be the new carriers of those products? What would be their stories?
We spent the afternoon, a group who were strangers to one another at first, answering these questions. It was exhilarating, because it wasn't just pretend. We were doing a survey dig of our existing planet, and describing the one that could walk out of the dust tomorrow.
Amanda Chantal Bacon, founder of Moon Juice says, "There are different ways to quantify happiness. We're coming out of the age where you are successful if you made a certain salary and had so many days off for vacation. But if you're really passionate about something you never stop thinking about it."
I spoke with Paisley and Caitlin after the event about why they love, why they can't stop thinking about world building.
Paisley: What I like about it is – because I work in a tech heavy industry, if you don’t have money to access that stuff, it can be really complicated to make work. I like the system of creation because it’s very lo-fi and useful to more demographics, to kids as well as professionals.
Caitlin: We live in a really [momentous] time. Young people are feeling really political again and there are strong forces of feminist action. A lot of it is based on what we don’t want, based on horrible things that are happening around the world. I don’t get a lot of time to imagine what I actually do want, if I could create anything in the world.
Paisley: The thing that we really love about world building is that it works in two ways; in the creation of world building you are working with diverse creators so the process itself is rich and has meaning and it draws from people’s personal experiences. Then the result is a rich story world [that sets the stage] for many stories to live within it.
Caitlin: [World building is] very fantastical. It’s not a bill that has to take place next year. You don’t have all the fear that is tied up to the reality [of today]. It is a cathartic process that gives us hope.
Paisley: It’s really important for young people to see themselves reflected in the materials that they read and the worlds that they see, be it a television show or in the real world. Seeing people in the real world gives you something to work towards. Seeing other female creators gives me a way to work towards my goals, which is to share world building.
Caitlin: The cool part of world building is that you can never guess what people come up with.
Paisley: Even if we did the same workshop ten thousand times it would never be the same and that in itself is phenomenal.
That day we came up with ideas like using period blood to power clean energy and charge our cell phones. Our new future celebrated the public and liberal use of deodorant alongside natural fragrance. We did not put all men underground. We came up with new solutions. Answering all the questions is also key to a compelling world building experience. Like in life, imagining and building objects for the new world is only a part of creating context for the future. Creating characters who use the objects adds the true richness to the world.
Paisley: What’s surprising even if people are really apprehensive at first what they come up with will blow your minds.
Caitlin: The bigger picture is to make a book that documents the process. Because it’s something that if you can look at all of it together it becomes a very meaningful social commentary and I can image in doing this workshop in tons of different places and having a giant collection of people’s thoughts and to compare different workshops and different people’s minds...having it all together would be really impactful.
You don't need to be wealthy to access world building concepts. This low-tech tool can support more new high tech inventions.
Paisley: One of the things I like to think about , if your story is not well thought through, if it doesn’t have depth and meaning. Sometimes people use tech but the story isn’t very interesting. [They] haven’t thought about how it will live on in people's memory and it’s all about what’s exciting about the tech itself. [This process] allows you to think about the meaning behind your story and apply it. If your story works in one form it can work in [a high tech environment].
Caitlin: Especially with emerging technology there aren’t really prototyping tools and commercially ready and there’s an extremely high learning curve. This is a super low budget way to prototype say, your game without ever touching a computer.
Whatever is in the future, we'll build femme into it, and everyone is included in its creation. That's an = future.