Studio Reworlding – Infinite Rehearsals

To prepare for the future, we have to imagine and design the world differently. During the spring semester of 2025, students experimented with design methods and tools that allowed them to both project alternative realities and change the prevailing conditions in which we live today. For this design studio, we took inspiration from world-building and reworlding practices. Where the former speculate on future developments through (science) fiction, the latter adopt design strategies that promote participation and concrete changes to address acute challenges.

Oscillating between future-oriented speculations and a more pragmatic hands-on approach to the circumstances, students started to respond to a wide variety of short and long-term challenges, needs, and desires. Combining storytelling and prototyping, expectations regarding changes in the environment - from demographic shifts to the implications of the climate crisis - were articulated and tested in and around the Design and Dialogue Lab in Zürich-Oerlikon.

The studio was slowly building up to a Live Action Role Playing, or LARP, a type of role-playing game where participants physically act out their characters' roles following a (fictional) scenario. The role play revolved around the future development of the so-called RIA building, next to the Design in Dialogue Lab. Following a presentation by the architects who won the competition for the building’s redevelopment into luxury apartments, students were asked to propose alternative future scenarios based on a variety of counter-narratives and a great diversity of perspectives. Working in groups, they developed smaller role plays that put their ideas to the test and created empathy for other beings and their respective worlds, to design futures for and with the many.

Every architectural project is an act of world-building. Humans actively shape and inhabit buildings, cities, and landscapes, as well as the narratives that give form to them. Architecture is both a physical and an imaginary enclosure, another layer of ‘world’ that conditions and reassures its users. Cities and landscapes, as giant works of architecture that are also designed, managed and maintained, constitute further tangible and fictional layers of ‘world’.

Our way of living is, however, unsustainable in the long term and destabilized by multiple crises. To face these challenges, we are forced to fundamentally change the way we live, think, inhabit and build our environments or – in short – to reworld. Architects, urban designers and other spatial practitioners could take up a key role in imagining these potential alternative realities.

In architectural history, there is already a longstanding tradition of radical propositions by visionary architects ranging from Étienne-Louis Boullé to the futurist groups of the 60s such as Superstudio or Archigram. These have remained, however, mostly discursive projections of distant futures. Science fiction writers such as Octavia E. Butler or Ursula K. Le Guin have been perhaps more successful at imagining more just and equitable realities within a genre that stretches the imagination of the possible and challenges seemingly inalterable conventions with its radical investigations into other forms of being and living in the world, of fearing and hoping. Further, fashion and game designers and filmmakers have engaged with climate fiction movements such as solarpunk or hopepunk, speculating on optimistic postapocalyptic futures.

They inspired us to embrace (re)worlding as a radical act of creating conditions – physical, social, economic, political – for new forms of cohabitation. Simultaneously, the studio built on previous experiments of the NEWROPE chair with role playing and speculative design, including the seminar week in Naples and Studio Switzerland - The New Landlust.

The studio consisted of three phases, each ending with a Design in Dialogue session:

I. ITCH

During the first phase, students went looking for their ‘itch’: an urgency or dissatisfaction they wanted to address through the studio and the practice of reworlding and world-building. After visiting the fantastical Bruno Weber Park on the first day, students were asked to study existing world-building practices. After engaging with the work of renowned visual artists, novelists, designers, and others, they started experimenting with specific forms and artistic methods of world-building, from game design to science fiction writing, while they were finding their ‘itch’. The first phase culminated during the first Design in Dialogue session, where students presented their ‘itch’ in the form of a short video that was inspired by the practices they had studied.

II. WORLD

The second phase focused on the creation of a character and the world it inhabits. Starting from the videos they produced at the end of the first phase, students started developing a scenario and protagonist that allowed them to narrate and spatialise their personal ‘itch’. By creating an alter ego and a fictional world with specific characteristics and customs, they started testing the impact of future developments. While some stayed close to the current situation and only imagined incremental changes, some developed radical scenarios in which they completely reimagined the world by introducing completely new conditions. For example, a world in which emotions are commercially exploited or one in which humans and animals can communicate. This phase ended with the presentation of these various worlds in the form of elements at a 1:1 scale. Students would perform their world by playing the fictional character and using the props.

III. CASE

During the third and final phase of the studio, students applied their newly gained world-building and reworlding expertise to a real-life case of urban transformation. This phase was kicked off in the form of a workshop by Tommi Vaski of Trojan Horse, a Helsinki-based autonomous educational platform, who has been organizing live-action role-plays, workshops, and reading circles in the landscapes of architecture, design, and art for many years. Under his guidance, the students formed groups of characters with shared interests and ideas for the RIA-halle, an industrial building next to the Design in Dialogue Lab. Together, they developed several smaller live-action role-plays, or LARPs, to test different approaches to and possible future uses of the RIA hall. All worlds and characters came together during a day of LARPing. For this final Design in Dialogue session, the students and studio team were joined by a group of reworlding researchers from around Europe and by a selection of other guests.

The studio was complemented by a weekly Reading Club, irregular presentations by various Reworlding practices, and a lecture series in the context of the Master of Advanced Studies in Urban and Territorial Design (MAS UTD), organised by Philippe Vandenbroek and with contributions by Martin Savransky, Tania Zittoun, Ann Light, and Federico Campagna.

Given the experimental nature of the studio, students took on different roles and produced a wide variety of expressions. Initially working individually or in small groups, developing their world-building skills and the basic elements of their respective worlds and characters, in the course of the semester, they created larger teams of characters from different worlds who together designed a ‘live action role play’. This role-playing game brought together some of their newly gained skills and insights and applied them to a concrete real-life case, resulting in a wide range of scenographies, rules, narratives, and physical elements like costumes and props.

[Date] Spring 2025

[Place] Multiple (imaginary) places

[Studio team] Juan Barcia Mas, Seppe de Blust, Ellena Ehrl, Lukas Fink, Sophia Garner, Freek Persyn, Michiel van Iersel. Charlotte Schaeben together with Natassa Dourida, Michele Porcelluzzi, and Philippe Vandenbroek.

[Students] Alisa Ahlm, Laurant Ajvazi, Luana Bearth, Murielle Binggeli, Elias Böhnlein, David Costea Gyorgy, Jacques-Léonard Delalande, Gabriel Enguidanos von Schinckel, Denise Gerber, Loris Haller, Tim Hebach, Zoe Hugi, Mirthe Hummel, Anja Keller, Ozan Kiefer, Olivier Knecht, Antonia Melber, Marvin Lu Pagenkopf, Robin Rohner, Vito Schaniel, Berit Schumann, Ramon Stuck, Cedric Trees, Ayumi Unger, Carlotta Venuti, Marisa Vocaturi

[Contributors] Ann-Kathrin Eickhoff, Sarah Lohmann, Markus Miessen, Tine Milz, Agostino Nickl, Michela Pelusio, Thea Reifler, Berit Seidel, He Shen (何珅), James Taylor-Foster, Tommi Vasko (Trojan Horse)

Reworlding Doctoral Network:

Anannya Bhowmik, Carolina Carvalho, Natassa Dourida, Nikolas Kanavaris, Melike N. Kaplan, Aslı Kolbaş, Weronika Kozak, Andy Peruccon, Júlia Tena Mensa, Xinquan Wen, Petra Žišt

The design studio grew out of NEWROPE’s involvement in the REWORLDING project, a European doctoral network of researchers in Participatory Design (PD) who examine the diverse interpretations of ecological issues across different actors, communities, and organizations with the ambition to support just and sustainable futures in a historical period defined by, and contributing to, climate change. The network includes organizations in Belgium, Croatia, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland, along with scholars in PD, architecture, the philosophy of technology, and sociology. The project is inspired by the work of the late philosopher Bruno Latour, who pointed to the need to find new ways of relating to Earth when discussing ecology and human activities. More information via the REWORLDING website