Notes on World-Building and Implication: Ideas We Are Working With

These are working notes. They set out four ideas we have been developing in client work and arguing about among ourselves: a layered way of building futures, a way of reading a finished provocation back into present-day decisions, a use of pre-mortems as briefs, and the claim that an artefact's register is a rhetorical decision rather than a matter of taste. None of this is part of any School of Critical Design course. What we teach is set out in Speculative Design Basics. This is the material that is still on the bench.

Why publish unfinished thinking

A school that only publishes what it has already turned into lessons presents a tidier picture of its practice than is true. Everything we teach spent years as something we were unsure about. Showing that stage keeps two registers apart that are easy to muddle: this is tested and we will stand behind it in a classroom, and this is what we are trying, and some of it will not survive.

There is a second reason, which is that we have got this wrong before. An earlier version of some of this material was published here as "our methodology" — a named five-part model, presented with more settledness than it had earned. That was an overclaim, and we have withdrawn it. What follows is the part of it we still think is good, put back into the register it belongs in.

The World Stack, and the artefact-first problem

The World Stack is our shorthand for a layered model of world-building. It is a convenience, not a discovery. The idea that a coherent world has strata — that what people do rests on what exists, which rests on who has power, which rests on what everyone takes for granted — is old and belongs to several traditions at once. Sohail Inayatullah's Causal Layered Analysis cuts futures into litany, system, worldview and myth. The systems-thinking iceberg cuts events, patterns, structures and mental models. Alex McDowell's world-building practice in film establishes a world's rules before anything is designed. Ursula Le Guin built cosmology first and let the objects follow. Our five layers rearrange all of that.

The layers we use, deepest first:

1. 1.Cosmology — what people in this world hold to be true about the universe, the human, time, death and value.
2. 2.Institutions — what organisations exist, who holds power, what is regulated, how money moves.
3. 3.Infrastructure — the material and digital substrate of daily life.
4. 4.Practice — what people actually do: rituals, routines, work, leisure.
5. 5.Artefacts — the objects, services and interfaces that practice produces.

The observation that makes this worth having is about where projects start. Most futures work begins at the artefact layer and never gets underneath it. Someone renders a device, gives it a name and a tagline, and the world it came from is never specified — so the object is beautiful and floating in nothing. Ask any question about it that is not about the object itself ("who regulates this?", "who is excluded from it?", "what has to be believed for anyone to want it?") and it comes apart.

A short illustration. A European energy retailer asks what domestic energy looks like in 2045. The artefact-first answer is a better home battery with a nicer interface — the present with a new feature. The deeper answer starts from a cosmological shift you can already read in price-cap politics: energy moves from being a commodity you buy to an entitlement you are owed. That changes the institutions — supply becomes a licensed public duty rather than a competitive market. That changes the infrastructure — the interesting unit stops being the house and becomes the street. That changes practice — households negotiate with neighbours rather than with a supplier. And only then does the artefact make sense, because the thing you are designing is not a battery. It is a negotiation.

The stack has a secondary use inside organisations: it gives non-designers a layer to hold. Finance and legal teams have strong intuitions about institutions. Operations teams know practice. People who would not comment on a rendering will argue hard about a regulatory regime.

Where it fails. The layer count is arbitrary. Nothing in the world sorts itself into five of anything; three would work, seven would work, and we use five because it fits on a wall. Treat it as a prompt, not an ontology. It also invites completionism — teams fill every layer for every scenario and produce a document nobody reads, when almost all the value sits in two or three layers done properly. And cosmology is the layer teams are worst at. The usual failure is a paragraph of vague spirituality, waved through because nobody wants to be the person querying it. A fake cosmology is more damaging than none, because everything above it inherits the fakery and now has a justification.

Register is a rhetorical choice, not an aesthetic one

When you make a speculative artefact you choose a register, whether or not you notice you are choosing. Three that we find ourselves distinguishing:

A plausible artefact, rendered in the dominant visual language of the present, says this could be on a shelf in eight years. It engages the strategic imagination — people start costing it.

An uncanny artefact almost belongs and then does not, and says the world that produced this is recognisably not ours. It engages the moral imagination. Dunne and Raby's Foragers (2009) is the reference case: digestive prosthetics for people who have given up on the food system, presented so evenly that you cannot work out whether you are meant to want one.

A ridiculous artefact breaks the dominant aesthetic outright and says the assumption you are about to defend is the joke. It engages the political imagination. Superstudio's Continuous Monument (1969) is a monolithic grid laid over the whole planet, and it is an argument about modernist urbanism rather than a proposal.

The lineage here is not ours either — Mori on the uncanny valley, Dunne and Raby on critical design's proximity to satire, the Italian Radicals on absurdity as a political instrument. What we add is only the insistence that the choice be deliberate. The common failure is picking the register that suits the designer's portfolio rather than the one the project needs, and it is very hard to see yourself doing it.

Where it fails. Register is received, not transmitted. You control what you make; the audience decides what register it is in. We have watched a deliberately absurd object get costed by a procurement team, and a carefully plausible one dismissed as science fiction. Cultural context does most of this work — what reads as ridiculous in one market reads as a roadmap in another. Plausible carries a specific hazard: it gets mistaken for forecast, and then you are held to it. And three registers is not a taxonomy. It is a way of forcing the question, and the moment it functions as a menu it has stopped being useful.

Implication ladders

An implication ladder takes a finished provocation and works back through the layers underneath it, asking at each rung what would have to be true for this to exist: what practice, what infrastructure, what institutions, what beliefs. This is backcasting with the rungs named, and backcasting has been in the futures literature since the early 1980s.

It earns its place because the middle rungs are where present-day decisions live. Cosmology is interesting and no one can act on it this quarter. Practice and infrastructure translate directly into standards, partnerships, procurement, hiring, data architecture. A ladder converts interesting into decidable without anyone having to claim the future is likely.

Where it fails. A ladder manufactures a sense of necessity. It is one route, constructed after the fact, and reading it through makes it feel like the route — when several different substrates could usually support the same artefact, and the ladder quietly hides the alternatives. If a team can only build one ladder for an artefact, that usually means the artefact is not yet understood, not that the future is determined. The other reliable failure is that teams stop at infrastructure, because it is the last layer with a budget line attached. The institutional rungs are where the serious risk sits, and they get skipped for exactly that reason.

Pre-mortem briefs

A pre-mortem brief is written from inside the future. The speculative situation has already happened, and the organisation is required to account for how it came to be unprepared. It is a brief, not a risk register: the point is to be handed to a team as a starting condition rather than filed.

The device is Gary Klein's, published in 2007, and rests on prospective-hindsight research from the late 1980s. The figure practitioners like to quote — that treating an outcome as settled improves people's ability to generate reasons for it by around 30 per cent — comes from a small study and has been repeated a great deal more often than it has been retested. We use the technique; we do not cite the number.

What it does well is dissolve the word eventually. "Eventually the regulator will catch up" survives any planning cycle intact. "In 2034 the regulator did catch up and we had no data lineage" has a hiring decision attached to it.

Where it fails. Pre-mortems are generators, not filters. People are extraordinarily good at explaining things that have not happened, so the form will produce twenty fluent accounts of catastrophe and offers no way to tell which one deserves budget — triage has to come from somewhere else. They also skew pessimistic by construction, because the form asks for failure and duly receives it. Organisations that run them habitually end up with a portfolio of futures in which everything is a downside, and we have seen the technique used to justify doing nothing, which is close to the reverse of its purpose. Related organisational patterns are covered in seven failure modes of speculative design in organisations.

Where this sits relative to what we teach

None of the four ideas above is course material, and we would not want anyone buying a course expecting to find them. What we teach is the foundation: what speculative design is and is not, how to read signals and turn them into scenarios, how to build a specific future rather than an abstract one, how to work through implications, and how to bring the work back to strategy. That is Speculative Design Basics, and it is the right place to start if you want the tested version rather than the notes.

Key takeaways

• •These are working notes from client practice, not School of Critical Design course content; the taught material is in Speculative Design Basics.
• •The World Stack — cosmology, institutions, infrastructure, practice, artefacts — is our shorthand for a layered idea with a long lineage in futures and world-building, not a proprietary framework.
• •Most futures projects start at the artefact layer and never get underneath it, which is why the objects look beautiful and answer no questions.
• •Implication ladders read a provocation back down to the rungs where present-day decisions live, but they make one contingent route look inevitable.
• •Pre-mortem briefs dissolve the word eventually; they also generate convincing catastrophes indiscriminately and need a separate discipline for triage.
• •The register of an artefact — plausible, uncanny, ridiculous — is a rhetorical choice, though the audience, not the designer, has the final say on which one it is.