WorldMakers
Courses
Resources
Newsletter
Long overdue, much requested, and finally here.
Below you'll find a curated preview of our annotated bibliography for Innovating Emergent Futures: The Innovation Design Approach for Change and Worldmaking—ten essential books to begin exploring emergence-based creativity and innovation.
The complete annotated bibliography—covering philosophy, creativity, complexity, emergence, worldmaking, and diverse fields (currently 103 books with plans to add 45 more in 2026) —is available exclusively to WorldMakers community members. This is an ongoing, evolving resource we continue expanding with carefully selected books that resonate with experimental practice. Learn more about WorldMakers here.
While books matter to our work, they only make sense as part of experimental practices of doing. Most of these books we came to because of how they resonated with what we were testing and experimenting with—books are neither sources of "knowledge" to be simply applied nor do they hold an answer that confirms the truth of what you are doing. Many of our favorite books are dog-eared, coffee and wine stained, rain soaked and rebound a few times.
We encourage you to test things out—experiment in the relay between doing and thinking. We often use two contrasting approaches: one is to be focused—stick with a few concepts, ignore authors, even the full book—collect and follow a concept across several books, articles, movies, objects and environments—test it and evolve it in your own way. A second is to read everything by one author or a group of related authors. Test out their major concepts, track their variations and the diversity of the ecosystem they produce—what can you do experimentally with this whole field?
Ready to explore the complete collection of 103 books? Join WorldMakers to access the full annotated bibliography plus ongoing community discussions about these books and how they connect to emergence-based practice.
Henri Bergson’s, the great process philosopher and Nobel Prize winner's masterpiece on creativity as a fundamental quality of all reality and especially all life: “The more deeply we study the nature of time, the better we understand that duration means invention, creation of forms, continuous elaboration of the absolutely new”. This book is one of the earliest books in Europe to consider creativity directly. It introduces many critical concepts, questions and approaches.
More than any other contemporary philosopher, Gilles Deleuze has focused on the question of creativity and invention. A Thousand Plateaus, co-authored with Felix Guattari is perhaps the most powerful and far reaching evolution of this project. They introduce a critical set of tools and processes (rhizomes, assemblages, the refrain, nomadic science…) that are critical to developing a novel and effective approach to innovation as a social and ecological process. We dedicated a series of newsletters to this book (Volumes 206-208), and many of these key concepts can also be found in this website's glossary. The Chapter “On the Refrain” is one of the most beautiful and moving pieces of writing on the creative process we have read. All of their collective and independent work has been of great relevance to reinventing creativity.
James Gibson’s final work and the one that lays out a radical alternative approach to how sentient beings sense, perceive and engage with the world. How an embodied being with skills and capacities meets an environment and in their active relating affordances (opportunities for action) emerge. Affordances are a critical concept for the development of an alternative approach to creativity as a process.
Steven Jay Gould’s massive magnum opus is an unedited and sprawling work that touches on many many key questions in regards to innovation. Perhaps most important is the section that comes late in the book on exaptation. It is one of the most comprehensive developments of the process by one of the originators of the term. A critical introduction to one of the most important and poorly understood concepts for creativity and innovation.
For too long the study of cognition – thinking or better: how we make sense of things was reduced to concepts of information processing in the brain. Hutchins returns thinking to the actual embedded and embodied context that it happens in – cognition is a worldly distributed activity that is irreducible to what is going on inside the head. Hutchins looks at how thinking can be distributed, such as on a large ship – where no one person is either in charge or knows the full scope of the distributed process of thinking. Other great examples come from contrasting differing forms of ocean navigation (contemporary Polynesian and “Western”). A critical reframing of both creative practices and the organizational settings of all creative practices.
This book is an exemplary work in a larger movement towards recognizing how we are fundamentally shaped by our physical environment and the things we use. Malafouris, who is an archeologist by training proposes a theory of Material Engagement to challenge the prejudices of brain centric models of ideation, representation and the general dematerialization of human thinking and acting. Malafouris argues that “ our ways of thinking are not merely causally dependent upon but constituted by extracranial bodily processes and material artifacts”. Thinking, especially creative thinking emerges not from the brain alone but from how we do things with things. Things, environments and actions play a necessary, irreducible and fundamental creative role in all of our thinking. Given this we really need to shift how, and where we approach the creative process. Essential reading.
Erin Manning (who runs “the sense lab” in Montreal) and Brian Massumi together run The Three Ecologies Institute in Quebec — a critical space (both physical and virtual) for experimenting with new models of creativity. This book that they co-authored articulates an experimental approach to “thought in the act” — thought that is not reduced to ideas in the head, but a creative doing-thinking. Chapter five: For Thought in the Act offers one of the most productive approaches to creativity as an experimental process. Manning and Massumi — together and separately have written a considerable number of books, as well as done many other creative projects. For context: their work draws up that of Deleuze and Whitehead (amongst others). All of their work has been critical to our own experiments.
Creativity has a history. It is not a concept that existed before the 1830’s. How it came into being and how it developed especially during the Cold War period has problematically shaped so much of what is simply thought of as “creativity”. But the individualistic and internalistic model of creativity is a Cold War artifact. To develop alternative approaches to creativity we need to understand this history. Nelson, using a Foucaultian genealogical methodology, offers a powerful critique of this supposedly natural human phenomenon.
Evan Thompson is a critical figure in the development of the Enactive Approach to cognition (alongside Francisco Varela, Eduardo Manturana, and others.). This book, which he intended to write with Varela (who unfortunately died before the project could truly get underway), is perhaps the best one-book introduction to an Enactive Approach to Cognition — laying out a comprehensive argument for why and how thinking is embodied, embedded, extended, enactive and affective. It draws upon brain research, philosophical traditions, evolutionary theory, complexity science, and much else. It is also important for his arguments why other historical approaches to cognition fall short. Evan Thompson brings a strong knowledge and engagement with South and East Asian philosophical traditions and cultural practices to the questions of how we think and what is thinking. All of his work is highly recommended. The Enactive approach allows us to reframe human agency and creativity away from the reductionist focus on the individual, the brain, and ideation – towards a far more distributed and emergent approach. This book also contains an important appendix on Emergence.
What does a professor of Baroque Music have to say about early hominid evolution? It turns out, quite a bit. This book along with its companion books, A Million Years of Music and The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning offer one of the most useful models of the socio-material dynamics of invention. His development of the concept of a “Feed Forward Epicycle” is a concept of far greater use than that of a “paradigm” and the logic of “paradigm change”.
