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3.1 – Prepare For Building
First, you must agree on the tool you eventually want to use to represent your target world. Will it be a one-pager description, a short-story, a comic book with pictures, Lego Serious Play, a short movie or documentary, an architectural model or built in Sims or another computer game. It is entirely up to you. The only thing it should not end up being is a simple vision statement.
Next, agree on and prepare a process to track your decisions. Will it be a team member taking notes, will you have a dedicated worldbuilder knowing the tool you want to represent your target world in?
Agree on some limits now. How many years from now will your target world exist? Where will it exist? What kind of people will be there (remember to stay close to your insights from step 1 and 2). Set some limits and agree on a bit of scope so your group does not astray too much through the process.
3.2 – Define And Map Your Target World
Now it is time to start the building process. In your group, start by sketching the landscape of your target world. Is it a village, a coffee place, an entire city, a virtual world? Draw some borders to define your new map you want to fill. Next to your new map, look at your results from step 1 and 2 and create some of the characters and main actors (human and non-human) that will play main roles in your target world.
List the macro drivers, rules and goals of your world, the meso level with relations between humans and technologies, what they value and what relations mean to them, as well as the micro interactions, feelings and emotions your target world should be filled with.
3.3 – Materialize Your Target World
As said before, it is up to you and your innovation network but now it is time you start materializing your target world. How you do this depends on your choice. The following provides a short list of examples for how you might materialize your target world:
- Short story written descriptions
- Pen & paper sketches, paintings
- Lego etc.
- Handcrafted models
- Board games
- Software
- Computer games
- Virtual reality
- A screenplay
- Short video clips
- Movies
The students from Dry City, for example, combined a “wide range of media and platforms, including app prototypes, physical artefacts, photography, and web-based graphic design, fictional blogs, a film festival and experimental social media storytelling” (Hollon, 2018). Some of these are shown below.
Figure 18: Dry City representation 1.1 as a comic (Source: Long 2016)
Figure 19: Dry City representation 1.2 as a comic (Source: Long 2016)
Figure 20: Dry City representation 1.3 as a comic (Source: Long 2016)
Figure 21: Dry City representation 2 as a short video (Source: Dawson 2016)
Figure 22: Dry City representation 3 as an encyclopedia (Source: Bosch et. al. 2021)
3.4 – Enact Your Target World
As a last step in the process of building your target world, enact it: try to find out how it would feel to experience this target world. Use your outcome from step 3.3 and really try to get immersed in your target world. At Dry City, “each student developed a character and then envisioned a day in their character’s life, imagining everything from the contents of a character’s purse to their daily routine from hour to hour” (Hollon, 2013). This helped them to develop a form of empathy for how it might feel to live in this world in the future. Other forms of enacting your target world might include role playing. virtual reality scenarios, story reading, dialogues and whatever helps to feel immersed in a day of your target world.
4 – Build For Your Target World
You made it. After running through all steps so far, you should have ended up with your own target world. With your target world at hand you have a more contextual, rich and detailed environment, which your new innovation should contribute to and get embedded into. The next and final step is how you prepare for building your product or service for your target world. Look at your results from step 1 and 2 and at your target world and try to define a way how your innovation will eventually facilitate the realization of your target world. Freely choose your preferred innovation approach. Due to my own current professional situation, I am close to corporate venture building which includes several steps that I find applicable for this purpose too.
Figure 23: Building target worlds – Step 4
4.1 – What Assets Can You Contribute?
In corporate venture building, we usually consider the existing assets a corporation brings to the table, which we might want to use for a new product or service which will become the core element of a potential new company. In Target Worlds your outcome could be a product, service, a company, a building, or anything else. Essentially, though, you will have to ask yourself the same question. What assets can you utilize that will enable you to achieve your vision? What partners, supporters might you need to achieve it? How do they fit into your target world? How might they contribute to it themselves, or what might they find appealing about it so they might partner with it? This brings us back to Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. Do those partners share the same target world, thus, purpose and vision? If not, maybe it is not the right partner.