Definition of World Making

What is World Making?

We are not simply beings that find ourselves in a meaningless and indifferent reality that is “out there," to which we are then forced to subjectively add meaning to it after the fact.

By the very fact of our being alive, we are actively participating in an equally active world to sense, attune, and co-configure it in ways that give rise to a unique and inherently meaningful way of collectively being alive. 

In a vast reality, we engage with specific aspects of it in ways that afford us unique capacities. We then collaboratively stabilize these emergent relational affordances into what we sense, see, materially engage with and know. And this becomes our world—our reality.

Thus, we and all living beings don’t simply live in an undifferentiated reality. To be alive is to live in and make a world. This world that is being made is not a subjective, immaterial world; it is no mere “world-view.” 

What is an Example of World-Making?

A great example of having a world and the always conjoined practice of world-making can be found in the life of a tick. The important philosopher of creativity, Gilles Deleuze, spoke beautifully about ticks and their world in an interview late in life:

“Yes, so, in this story of the first characteristic of the animal, it’s really the existence of specific, special worlds that matter. 

Perhaps it is sometimes the poverty of these worlds, the reduced character of these worlds, that impresses me so much. For example, the tick. The tick responds, reacts to three things – three stimuli, period, that’s it. In a natural world that is immense, three stimuli, that’s it.

…That is, it tends toward the extremity of a tree branch, it’s attracted by light, it can wait on top of this branch, it can wait for years without eating, without anything, in a completely amorphous state. It waits for a ruminant, an herbivore, an animal to pass under its branch, it lets itself fall… It’s a kind of olfactory stimulus… The tick smells, it smells the animal that passes under its branch, that’s the second stimulus: light first, then odor. Then, when it falls onto the back of the poor animal, it goes looking for the region that is the least covered with hair… So, there’s a tactile stimulus, and it digs in under the skin. For everything else, if one can say this, for everything else, it does not give a damn… 

That is, in a reality teeming with life, it extracts, selects three things.”

The tick has a world and makes a world via sensing, co-shaping and stabilizing emergent relational qualities that are uniquely meaningful to it. These qualities afford it the capacities for thriving meaningfully in precarious circumstances. 

We, as distinct human communities, enact worlds in a manner not too dissimilar to the tick. Our distinct ways of being alive—of being of a set of specific practices, tools, and environments—specific creating-enabling configurations gives rise to unique realities—unique worlds.

All Creativity Participates in Worldmaking

All creativity ultimately participates in world-making, either by stabilizing and expanding existing worlds or by making new worlds emerge. In this way, it is important to recognize that:

1. Worlds Exist—Other Worlds Exist: We do not simply all live in one undifferentiated reality: distinct worlds exist for distinct human communities.
2. Worlds are not simply subjective constructs, e.g. cultural worldview… 
3. Worlds are always in the making; we make them as they make us: world-making is sense-making and creativity is life.
4. Other Worlds are possible… and this is the focus of creativity

An Experimental Process of Worldmaking

‍Experimental process of making a world. Key process for innovation.

An event self co-ordinating and coming to value.

Never done. Never plug and play -- you cannot “switch” worlds.

Speculative -- for a people still to come (Deleuze).

Some of what emerges will not simply be an improvement of what already exists — but something qualitatively different — this is the beginning of a change-in-kind — the making of a new world — a fundamental qualitative change in the way things are done

This is the real goal of radical innovation — it can never be about a single product — but wholly different approach — a new world

See: World, Sense-Making, Affordances, Enaction, Agency

For more, navigate to our complete list of articles on worldmaking for innovation.