Definition of World Making

What is World Making?

Worldmaking is, for us, both a key concept and the term we use for the general approach we take to engaging with creative processes. As such, it is both part of the web of crucial concepts: world, worlding, worldmaking, worldblind, worldloss, world-denying, etc. – and the pragmatic term for the form of creativity that all living beings engage in. 

The beauty of the word – worldmaking – is that it is quite explicit. When asked, “How could one speculatively define the creative processes that the living participate in?” – the answer we would give is “worldmaking.” What is being made explicit in this conjoined term is (1) the ongoing conjoined activities of making and (2) making is not a piecemeal practice but making is the making-of-a-world.

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.” 

More on Worldmaking

World-making is what all living beings are inherently doing all the time. Life is an ongoing, entangled activity – living. And living as an activity is a form of change-making – of creativity – for no activity is impactless. 

In all activity, change happens – and all change involves the new. Living is inherently involved in creative processes in richer ways than this  – life is ever becoming otherwise – tipping in novel trajectories. The active processes of living are creative change-making processes that are open and ever co-creating a self-exceeding space of potentiality. Life and living are an ever self-exceeding adventure. 

The living are fated to be neither in ultimate control of what sustains nor is deleterious to their life. And so out of inherent necessity, living will actively reach out beyond itself, and those things pulled into its circle will transformatively loop back through life. And in this way, the smallest unit of life is this assemblage becoming a self-environment. 

The condition of the ever ongoing creative changemaking of living is rendered more precarious because they can and will die. Living is, quite simply, the ongoing creative activity of a life going on and going beyond itself – that is done under precarious circumstances in an open, and highly dynamic creative context. 

For them, as finite beings not in control of the essential circumstances of their lives, their actions are always actions where something for them is at stake. Because something is always at stake – meaning, making and life are always intra-woven. One does not arise without the others. For living beings, sensing, evaluating, and doing are always present and intimately conjoined. This inherent “meaningfulness” or value is not immediately explicit – nor does it ever need to become that – it arises as something felt – the always present, directly sensed valence of experience. In this manner, the ongoing process of living brings forth – co-creates a meaningful domain (a world-in-the-making).

An example: The simplest bacteria’s actions involve an intimately conjoined sensing and evaluating – they are collectively sensing/feeling-doing-evaluating into incipient possibilities – a felt moving towards what is felt as positive and felt moving away from what is felt as negative. From this example, we can see how living is an ongoing sensing plus doing/making as one fully fused activity. From this perspective, it would be accurate to say that “Sensemaking” is the activity of life. 

But this way of understanding life is incomplete. That life is sensemaking under precarious conditions is too narrow an understanding of living. The question is: what are they making in sensing-making? What is the outcome of sensemaking? 

Let us try to give a general answer to this: The living in their collective activities inherently change their immediate environment, and their immediate environment is equally directly changing them in a dense web of non-linear emergent feedback loops. They are becoming who they “are” in creative dance with an active environment that is equally becoming more relationally “what it is.” In this looping process, they are both becoming more-and-more inseparable and more-and-more unique. What is evolving and emerging is a co-made and co-making “world.” And to say this in a more exact manner: what has co-emerged is an ever ongoing creative process of worlding in which both environment and self are the emergent co-creative achievements of a-world-in-the-making. A world-in-and-of-the-ongoing-making without end.

A couple of important notes: The context of living is always with and through other living beings who share the same environment, but are of differing worlds. A further example: The bacteria, because of its size in relation to the molecules of water, directly experience water as being bumped around by larger hard spheres. While the Water Strider (a long-legged insect that skims across the surface of the water) directly experiences the water as a tensile dynamic surface that their legs are glued to, while a human with the embodied skills to swim will directly experience the water as a thin liquid that surrounds and supports the body. The same general environment, but each of a relationally distinctly enacted world. This extends further into the intimate, co-created specific intra-dependencies of all creatures – consider how humans are composed of over 60% other creatures.

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: Emergent Worldmaking, Ontology, Ontogenesis, Know-how, World, Sense-Making, Affordances, Enaction, Agency

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