[Editor’s note from 2017: This essay is something I wrote in 1995 not long after I was in animation school. At the time, I was trying to put a name to something I’ve always wanted to do, but couldn’t seem to nail down. Looking through LinkedIn now, I see that some people are calling this “concept design”, and doing this is still my dream job. I have been doing this kind of design since I was in high school, in one way or another, and would dearly like to figure out how do it full-time…]

This page is an introduction, in several sections, to the nascent art of world design. The sections are…

• What is World Design?
• World Design in Fiction
• Immersive World Design
• Interactive World Design
• Some Guiding Ideas
• Some Gory Details and an Example
• Ethical Implications
• World Design Resources

This is not an exhaustive survey by any means; it is intended more as a leaping-off point for further explorations…

What is World Design?

World design is the art and science of creating interesting, detailed and internally consistent environments as backgrounds to interactions between people.

If that definition sounds rather inclusive, that’s because it is. World design touches fiction, movies, theatre, theme parks, flight simulators, virtual reality, and many other fields. It involves ecology, architecture, psychology, industrial design, the visual arts, user interface design, sound and music, cinematography… everything that relates to the creation and display of spaces for people. Neither spaces nor people need physically exist. (Where is the setting of a movie? Where are its characters?)

World Design in Fiction

Every story has a setting; in many cases the settings have been expanded to become complex worlds in their own right. There are the worlds of fiction, as well as utopias and dystopias intended as social criticism… though the line between these is more than a little vague at times.

Perhaps the best known of the written fictional worlds is J R R Tolkien’s Middle Earth; there are many others. Many written worlds end up on movie and video screens, and many more start there. Very popular is the Star Trek universe; there are many more, for example, Larry Niven’s Known Space and George Lucas’s Star Wars universe.

The artist and industrial designer Syd Mead created a complex dystopian world for the movie ‘Blade Runner‘. Science fiction writers banded together to create ‘Medea: Harlan’s World‘. They started with a physical simulation of a star system, worked out climate and calendar, and the places that resulted were strange indeed…

Then there are the graphic-novel worlds: the French artist Mœbius and his ‘The Airtight Garage of Lewis Carnelian’, the dark world of the newer Batman sagas, Dave Sim’s Cerberus…

All of these works have vast and complex worlds as their settings. Histories, geographies, technologies, societies and even entire solar systems were carefully created to provide consistent, believable backgrounds to their dramas.

Immersive World Design

Worlds don’t exist merely in books and on flat screens, however. Imax and Omnimax movies surround viewers with very large or (for Omnimax) domed screens to visually immerse them in the action. Combined with surround sound, the feeling of immersion can be compelling. The next step is the so-called ‘simulator rides’, which physically move the audience in synchronization with a projected image. Often these take the form of a journey, with actors on hand to react appropriately to the screen action. Closely related to these are the traditional theme-park ‘rides’ which are almost entirely three-dimensional.

Interactive World Design

All the previous examples, however, do not let the audience affect the works.

Another branch of world design involves interactivity. This is the mark of the classic video game. Video games are now common enough to be considered a problem, but they are not the only interactive works; there are also board games, role-playing games and ‘theme nights’. Among video games, Descent and its cousins are notable for their fluid three-dimensional motion, and SimCity and its relations have complex underlying simulations that provide autonomous action to their worlds.

This brings us to ‘Virtual’ Reality…

Some Guiding Ideas

In all of these worlds, the viewers build up their own representations of the world in their heads. Ultimately world design is the creation of these representations.

Many people have approached the concept of world design from different directions.

The visionary Ted Nelson originated some concepts related to world design such as ‘fantics’ and ‘virtuality’. In his book ‘Computer Lib‘, he envisioned a worldwide hypertext publishing system not unlike today’s Web. In my opinion, however, the key insight of this book is the realization that the conceptual design of systems is the most important part of design; this is crucial to world design.

Green utopias:

The books Ecotopia, YV88 and The Fifth Sacred Thing were all written to show better ways to run society; they all explore connections between spirit, technology and the earth rarely looked at in literature. Any society has shared cultural and spiritual values that suffuse the design of its artifacts, and world designers must be aware of these in their designs.

The Whole Earth Review should be mentioned here. Under the slogan ‘access to tools and information’, the people of this magazine and its predecessors gathered an immense variety of tools, ideas and viewpoints. Glancing at several issues of this magazine will give an idea of the real diversity of the world, and the span of possibilities for world design.

‘Ecological’ Design:

In his book Out of Control, Kevin Kelly discusses principles of ‘neo-biological’ design: using the complexities of evolving lifelike systems to produce works beyond those explicitly designable by individual humans. Another book, Artificial Life, by Steven Levy, looks at the results of evolutionary processes in ecosystems in computer worlds. These developments are of great importance to the designers of simulated systems and virtual realities, and promise much for world design.

Some Gory Details and an Example

What does it mean to ‘design a world’ anyways? What must be done? An easy way to illustrate this is with an example: the World of the Woolly Mountain Incident.

This world evolved from an assignment I was given while studying classical animation at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. We had to design a scene containing Hansel and Gretel, the characters from the old European folk tale. At roughly the same time, I received another assignment: to write a story. I decided to partially combine the two.

In animation, both the characters and their surroundings must be precisely specified, so that many people can work on a given character or situation with seamless results. I had to design three characters (Hansel, Gretel and the Witch), their clothes and belongings, and their surroundings. Being a little tired of the ‘evil old hag’ stereotype, I decided to make the Witch a ‘good guy’. I also wanted her to have ‘magical powers’, so I had to figure out what those might be. I decided to set the scene in the central California mountains south of Big Sur, after being enormously impressed by the area while on holiday.

In the folk tale, Hansel and Gretel are the children of poor woodcutters deep in a European forest. What would a corresponding situation be in the coastal mountains, which are covered by bushes and grasses, with trees only in sheltered valleys? I decided to make Hansel and Gretel’s people itinerant herb-gatherers. The area needed to be isolated enough to support the herb-gatherers and provide room for a Witch as well, with only occasional contact between the two. Furthermore, it had to provide customers for the herb-gatherers and an explanation for the Witch’s history and powers.

For the writing assignment, I decided to write about the Witch: who she was, and where she came from. I named her Evelyn. This assignment became ‘Evelyn’s Story‘. During the writing of ‘Evelyn’s Story‘ I started to keep notes on the world Evelyn inhabited. These included a future history, and descriptions of some of Evelyn’s powers. These became the ‘Notes on the World of the Woolly Mountain Incident‘. The Woolly Mountain Incident itself, of course, is the meeting between Hansel and Gretel and the Witch.

In ‘Evelyn’s Story‘, the meeting between Evelyn and the children is a minor incident in Evelyn’s centuries-long life, but it is a turning point in the lives of Hansel and Gretel. There is an unfinished version of the story which goes into more detail on this. This story would have included more background on the trading culture of the Traditionalists and their towns in the California valleys.

For the animation assignment we had to design our characters. Initial sketches of the Witch had her rather hideous, but gradually she became younger and less ugly. Hansel and Gretel and their parents were never as fully sketched out as the Witch, but I imagined the parents as tough, rather humourless hill-dwellers, all their energy used in the struggle for survival. Hansel and Gretel themselves, of course, were children, still being forced into the mould of their peoples’ lives. Hansel did not want to go…

I had to explain the names of the children. Why are they named ‘Hansel’ and ‘Gretel’ in California in the 24th century? I came up with this:

The Traditionalist culture reveres the ‘Good Old Days’, our time, and Traditionalists tend to name their children after ancient heroes and heroines. More often than not, this means names of celebrities, characters, people high in profile, who may or may not have been actual heroes: Mickey, Arnold, John, Paul, George, Ringo, Jayefkay, Liz, Jamesbond, Batman, Yoda, Eddie, Michael, Madonna, Ronnie, Lancelot, Hansel, Cinderella, Ojay, Elvis… all icons of the old civilization. The mix of names would depend on when the old civilization collapses and new celebrities cease to appear. By the time of the story, the details of the people behind the names have become garbled and half-forgotten, and a set of names such as these becomes customary in each Traditionalist tribes.

Later on we had to design a ‘layout’ for an animation scene involving these characters. Layout refers to the process of detailing the character’s relationship with objects in his (or her, or its) surroundings as the scene progresses, and also the planning of the camera moves. All of these go together into a tightly detailed and very exact package of drawings, which, when combined with the storyboard, guides the character animation.

I chose to place the scene near the coastal highway at the Bixby Creek bridge, south of what is now Big Sur, California, for several reasons. I had visited the area in person, and had taken photographs; it was easily located on topographical maps; and it is the kind of stunningly beautiful place that gets into a lot of travel books. Documentation was easy to find. The area is sparsely inhabited today, and it is likely to remain so; thus pictures taken today will remain fairly accurate.

In the background scenario, I had given the Witch, Evelyn, various powers so that she did not require elaborate shelter. I set one of her little houses just off the coastal road, near the ruins of the Bixby Creek bridge. (The whole area is unstable, and over a period of centuries, the road if left untended would almost certainly fall into ruins. They have enough trouble keeping it open as it is…) I had to do detailed and exact drawings of Evelyn’s house, which means that I had to design things down to the details of the kitchen utensils… Everything had to fit in. Evelyn is a Gaian, a member of an advanced biologically-based civilization, so she would tend to use local materials for the house and grow things that we (and the Traditionalists) would build…

Onwards and onwards it goes. Each choice made in creating a world guides and constrains later choices. At the same time, there is great creativity in fleshing out the implications of each choice. If I had gotten to the point of actually doing a detailed background painting, I would have had to research the geology and plant life of the California coast, so that everything would look right. If I had gotten to the point of animating the scene, I would have had to plot out the motions and activities of the characters and design the properties of their tools and belongings necessary to the plot and action. This includes the activities of any of Evelyn’s living biological tools, which implies at least a faint idea of what they do, if not how they do it.

It is all too easy to sink indefinitely into level after level of detail when designing. The way out is to provide only that level of detail that the audience can perceive. Distant trees can be a green blur at the same time as the leaf in front of the viewer’s nose has every vein and pore etched in stark relief…

Designing a world tends to start with broad strokes of the brush, and only later are details filled in. There is simply too much in a world for one person to design it all. This is why shared worlds are so interesting; the Star Trek universe, for example, is by now the creation of thousands of people, and each new designer who works on it must learn about what has gone before. In a very real sense learning the basics of a new world becomes like immigrating to a new country and picking up the customs… Interactive and shared worlds will only intensify this. It is now very possible indeed to get lost among real strangers in a shared figment of someone else’s imagination…

Some Ethical Implications of World Design

World design raises some interesting questions.

The very concept of ‘world design’ implies that the creator is able to imagine a society different from the one he or she lives in. This in itself is unsettling to some people who desire stability and therefore fear difference. Many societies have traditionally tried to limit new ideas to preserve the old. How much should the designer bow to the conventions of his or her society? (This is not a new question…)

Almost any kind of world can be designed. Hatred, brutality, oppression and ugliness can be designed in as easily as love, kindness, joy and beauty. This is a conscious choice of the designer. This may not have been so pressing a concern when the only worlds were to be found in books, pictures and live theatre, but in today’s world of interactive virtual environments, hells and heavens both are easily opened to unwary travellers. The world that is one person’s harmless entertainment could seriously hurt someone else. What are the responsibilities and obligations of the designer?

Worlds can be designed for external purposes. Each world has a set of assumptions hidden at its core. These govern its size, shape and appearance, what actions are possible or impossible, and how people can interact. Worlds intended for advertising or propaganda will carefully try to hide their assumptions, while guiding travellers to desired actions and discouraging undesired actions; spotting these assumptions may be a popular sport among media-literate people in a few years…

Being able to create shared worlds will change everything. In the longer term, we seem to be moving towards a time where scoundrels carrying glittering pocket realms will beckon to passersby, where childrens’ toys will contain universes, where utopias will become public, and private hells shared. The possibilties, both good and bad, will be magnified.

The world designer will need a strong sense of morality to choose the appropriate parts of his or her new world. It will be the world designer’s joy to weave these worlds out of the magic of light and information, and to see others learn and grow because of his or her work… and it will be the world designer’s curse to suffer when tragedies happen.

World Design Resources

These should be, um, ‘interesting’ to find. I don’t have anything yet; I suspect that part of the challenge is that I’m pulling the field together out of varied parts found in many other fields. It is all connected, and has been all the time; I’m just redrawing conceptual boundaries…