The following videos are selected from a 23-hour program of the inaugural WORLDING workshop, which included a keynote, team presentations, short lightning talks from leading figures across the field, and hands-on sessions from facilitated by experts from 5 diverse disciplines.
worlding playlists
keynote
Living Infrastructures: Reworlding Urban Environments
Living infrastructures: Reworlding urban environments by Dawn Danby, co-founder of Spherical, an integrative design, research, and technology studio offering cosmovision remediation and ontological repair services. Danby explores how increasing familiarity with the nested scales of planetary infrastructures challenges overly-simplified narratives of climate solutions, requiring new ways of being in reciprocal relationship with the living Earth
worlding is an emergent field at the intersection of five distinct disciplines

cohort of five teams
Selected from a group of 45 applicants from around the world, the following five projects exhibited a unique intersection of land-use planning, storytelling and climate research at a pressing time in human history. The videos below are the works-in-progress presentations.
Waves of Buffalo
Waves of Buffalo is an Indigenous-led, land-based, site-specific installation that seeks to envision a future where once again, the Great Herds of Buffalo walk freely. Following Indigenous story knowledge, the buffalo’s impact reaches the above ground, on the ground, and below the ground. Team members: Tasha Hubbard, Jason Ryle and Marie-Eve Marchand.
Seabreeze Bop City
Seabreeze Bop City is a place-based, collaborative project addressing land use and land rights issues that stem from systemic inequalities and climate change. Seabreeze, NC, is a historic Black-owned beach community with a rich but disappearing history characterized by Black land loss, hurricane destruction, and sea-level rise. Team members: Ash Smith, Chris Lasch and Kwakiutl Dreher.
100th Meridian
100th Meridian is an immersive documentary that unpacks multiple perspectives on the longest-running drought in the American West. The project aims to explore how to best utilize watershed analysis data within an open-world environment. Team members: Jon Cohrs and Mint Boonyapanachoti.
WILD Natures
WILD NATURES is a co-created initiative with Abandon Normal Devices (AND) Festival, artists and with young people who are excluded from mainstream education in Northwest England. Through a gaming project, this community will explore the intersection of criminal and environmental justice. Team members: Ruth MCullough, Angela YT Chan, Hwa Young Jung.
Year 2180
Year 2180 aims to harness the power of VR to experience a rewilded and re-indigenized future. This iteration of the project explores a transformative São Paulo through experiencing the Yawanawà Shukuvena Village in the rainforests of Brazil. Team members: Vanessa Keith, Sarah Ya, Sachem Hawk Storm.
five lenses on worlding (hands on)
The cohort was invited to approach their projects through 5 distinct disciplines/methodologies, that together shape the emergent field of WORLDING. The five hands-on sessions were theme-based sessions, each led by a facilitator from a different domain, using interactive worksheets and prompts for the teams to develop their projects through discipline/domain-based lenses.
Co-Creation
Kat Cizek is the artistic Director of Co-Creation Studio, a documentary director and a pioneer in digital documentaries.
Land-Use Planning
Lafayette Cruise is an MIT DUSP graduate and professor at Rhode Island School of Design. Cruise’s practice engages projects at the intersection of urban planning and speculative fiction.
RT3D Tech
Thomas Winkley is a programmer, manager and instructor at Unity Technologies working around ideating and creating a world in RT3D.
Story / User Experience
Paisley Smith is the Unity for Humanity Program Lead at Unity Technologies. Smith is a Canadian filmmaker & virtual reality creator.
Climate Story Futures
Marina Psaros is the Sustainability Lead at Unity Technologies. She has led climate change action programs across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors for over fifteen years.
lightning talks
The following talks are short presentations between seven to 10 minutes featuring special guests from across scholarship, art, technology, business and government.
A Short History of Worlding
ODL and Co-Creation Studio’s Founder, former Principal Investigator and MIT Professor William Uricchio shares his unique historian’s perspective on spatialized storytelling, and the age-old practice of worlding.
Colonialism and Games
Mikael Jakobsson of the MIT Game Lab shares his findings from his forthcoming book Playing Oppression, about ways to unravel the colonial project from game making and playing.
ART in RT3D
Nell Whitley, Executive Producer and Founder of Marshmallow Laser Feast goes behind the scenes of one of the world’s preeminent immersive studios to share how they employ RT3D to create lush digital magical experiences grounded in science, nature and philosophy.
Land-Use Planning and Authorship
Caesar McDowell , MIT professor of the practice of civic design, associate head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), associate director for civic design at MIT’s new Center for Constructive Communication (CCC), will discuss authorship and decision-making in planning, architecture and placemaking especially in the context of emergent uses of RT3D in the field.
Digital Twinning
Unity Technologies executive Elizabeth Baron explains the technology and application of digital twinning using RT3D in the paradigm shift across industries that reach far beyond games: from land-use planning, to climate forecasting to financial and even automotive sectors.
Indigenous Sovereignty :: Antecedent Technologies:
Artist, Technologist and Scholar Amelia Winger-Bearskin (and Co-Creation Studio’s first-ever fellow, 2018-20) shares the Haudenosaunee knowledge framework of her projects AI Climate Justice Lab, *Talk to me about Water* and wampum.codes
GONDWANA
Ben Joseph Andrews and Emma Roberts share how they work in community to create the virtual world of GONDWANA and how it both simulates and resonates in the real-life rainforest.
Democratizing Climate Projections
MIT professor of atmospheric chemistry Dr. Noelle Selin shares an MIT Grand Climate Challenge Flagship Project, in which the team will build a digital twin of the Earth that can harness more data than ever before to increase the accuracy of climate models and make them more useful for and accessible to communities and other stakeholders.
Climate Policy and the Power of Story
Chief Climate Officer at USAID Gillian Caldwell shares how stories work — and how they don’t — to affect policy and decision-makers in climate planning.
flash talks (a global perspective)
These 10 short Flash Presentations from teams around the world aimed to map the diversity of a larger field of climate futures, speculative modeling and documentary, all working in RT3D.