World Building
World Building designates a narrative practice in which the design of a world precedes the telling of a story; the richly detailed world becomes a container for narrative, producing stories that emerge logically and organically from its well-designed core. As a narrative practice combines research, holistic storytelling and interdisciplinary collaboration, at the intersection of design, art & technology. It has been developed as a practice by Alex McDowell and Juan Diaz Bohorquez. -
In 2007, Juan Diaz Bohorquez began a continuous collaboration with renowned designer Alex McDowell. Recognizing the complementary nature of their approaches, they merged their methodologies, graphic tools, and protocols. This fusion gave rise to the innovative art-science practice now globally known as World Building—a groundbreaking method that has been widely adopted across various fields.
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Over time, Diaz Bohorquez and McDowell have continued refining their respective variations of these processes. In parallel, World Building has evolved into a powerful narrative design system applied across diverse domains, including film and media production, social impact initiatives, and science-art collaborations. The method has been rigorously tested in real-world contexts, addressing complex issues such as migration, microbiological research, regional development, and post-war reconstruction.Building on this foundation, Juan Diaz Bohorquez has further developed his own theoretical framework, which he terms Emergent Imagination and Ecosystemic Storytelling—an evolution of the system he was already exploring before their collaboration.
World building argues that the recent centuries of the single author in western culture has undermined the coalition of audience and authority. World building returns us to a shared evolution of cultural narratives that can negotiate the agitated present through the exploration of plausible futures, and change the world.
World Building Institute
The World Building Institute is the world's leading World Building collective. Our network of preeminent World Builders transcends borders and boundaries in film, animation, fashion, gaming, theatre, television, music, architecture, science, governance and interactive media. Since 2008, the network has come together at Wbi's distributed events to engage in a disruptive interrogation of our fractured disciplines, to create best practices and a new shared language across narrative media.
Juan Diaz Bohorquez and Alex McDowell head the World Building Institute in Berlin and Los Angeles under the principle that interdisciplinary collaboration is an essential part of transforming the way we work and especially how new ideas emerge.
Their dialogue and research evolves continuously, matures, adapts as an organic system through the continuous collaboration with the broad World Building Institute network of illustrious collaborators from diverse fields.
