Story-making: Re-imagining possible futures through collaborative world-building approaches

This paper discusses insights from a collection of workshops where participants were invited to engage in active imagination and play with world-building and collaborative story-making through activities inspired by improvisation and tabletop role-playing games (TRPGs). The purpose is to explore ways of dismantling the ingrained habits of current design methodologies; unlearn normalized ways of thinking and re-construct shared approaches for designing, making, rethinking and reframing problems. To achieve this, the authors interrogate three of the workshops seeking patterns and characteristics that might offer opportunities for tools that are less encumbered by the legacies of their western modernist colonialist roots. We believe that speculative tools such as these can provide a point of departure for discussing ‘alternatives to alternatives’ and make spaces for emergence. Exploring the potentials of such tools is not so much about radical change but about creating spaces for shared active-imagination and moments of re-creation and re-framing that leads to hopeful pluriversal futures.