May 8, 2023 - Unity Technologies and Co-Creation Studio at MIT Open Documentary Lab are excited to announce the second year of a partnership called WORLDING, an initiative to advance thought and practice at the intersection of storytelling, climate change planning, XR, visualization and land use decision-making. The initiative is accepting nominations of teams to participate in the one-week virtual research and development workshop in the fall of 2023.
 
The act of co-creating XR worlds can be a powerful tool in both storytelling and placemaking. It not only sparks the collective imagination, but can also propel land use planning into direct action, especially with specific, local and urgent climate change adaptation and mitigation measures. This, at any rate, is our hypothesis, and we would like to investigate this co-creative approach to technology-assisted future-versioning by drawing together placemakers, community members, and artists/creators to visualize sustainable worlds and explore how we could use realtime 3D technologies to render them possible in real life.
 
We are looking for participation from 4-5 teams from different perspectives.  The co-creative teams should each consist of (at minimum) a storyteller/maker and a land-use/urban planner or placemaker. Experience with XR technology may be helpful but is not required for consideration..

During the workshop, the teams will have a unique opportunity to develop their projects with ODL and CoCr researchers, and Unity team members, to explore how they use (or could use) realtime 3D technology to imagine, plan and co-create future worlds within real-life communities. While WORLDING is not a funding call, the workshop will include a custom curated program specifically developed for the teams.

The cohort will be carefully selected to include a diverse spectrum of disciplines, worldviews and approaches, from documentary, journalism, to games; from professionalized urban planning to community-based place-making, from AI-driven climate science to projects informed by Indigenous Epistemology, Afrofuturism and frameworks for disability justice. The workshop will also serve as a testing ground for curriculum development for graduate level planning classes.

All are welcome to be nominated from anywhere in the world, including self-nominations which meet the minimum criteria. We encourage applications from teams that include: Black, Indigenous, Latinx, and Asian individuals; individuals who are part of racial, ethnic, or religious minority groups; women; gender non-conforming individuals; LGBTQI+ individuals; individuals living with a disability; and other individuals whose authorship has historically been under-supported or underrepresented within the fields of documentary, planning, and technology.

There is no required training, educational degree, or level of experience to be nominated. This workshop will best benefit projects that are somewhere past the dreaming stage but not yet at a stage of a testable hypothesis. We anticipate that engagement in this initiative will be most beneficial for teams that already have a problem statement and have identified common principles for the project that include 01 the making of a story or worldbuilding, and 02 placemaking or land use decision making that is community-based.

The teams will need to make themselves available for a design process that will include a several ideation and planning sessions during the spring and summer of 2023, resulting in an intensive 5 days of virtual encounters over a period of 3 weeks in Fall 2023 (Oct 23  - November 10, 2023). The workshop will make an effort to accommodate candidates from any time zone, but core programming will take place within regular working hours in ET/PT time.

Nominations are accepted until JUNE 5, 2023 (DEADLINE EXTENDED) through this form. The cohort will be selected by project organizers and organizers will reach out only to those projects under consideration. Unity may follow up with additional opportunities to apply for funding for some projects which are not selected for WORLDING.