Wenzel Mehnert
Worldbuilding Futures – An exercise in interconnected speculative thinking
Intensive Workshop, English/Deutsch, 2 SWS, 2 ECTS
Fridays and Saturdays, 10-17 h, on the following days: Friday 24.10., Friday 14.11., Saturday 15.11., Friday 12.12.2025,
Hardenbergstraße 33, room 150

This seminar explores worldbuilding as a critical and creative method to think about futures beyond prediction. Drawing from speculative fiction, science fiction, design fiction, and future studies, we investigate how imagined worlds function as laboratories for ethical, social, and technological experimentation. Worldbuilding combines storytelling with the construction of coherent, immersive systems of meaning, infrastructure, and affect. In this course, we use it both analytically and generatively: to unpack dominant imaginaries and to compose alternatives.

Participants engage with fictional worlds that shape collective expectations about technology, society, and the planet. The seminar introduces frameworks from critical theory, media studies, and STS (Science and Technology Studies) to understand how imaginaries of the future gain traction. Each session blends theoretical input with practical exercises: students prototype worlds, build narrative architectures, and explore formats such as maps, manifestos, speculative policy briefs, and affective environments.

By the end of the seminar, students present fragments of the collaboratively created imaginary world through differently shaped and created artefacts.

Fulfilment criteria for ungraded accreditation: active participation and contribution to a worldbuilding process, design of media artefacts, representing the imaginary world, taking responsibility for the success of the semester project.

Wenzel Mehnert is a futurologist specializing in the study of sociotechnical imaginaries and the ethical dimensions of emerging technologies. At the Austrian Institute of Technology (AIT), he develops experimental methods at the intersection of foresight, speculative fiction, and technology assessment. His work focuses on how narratives—ranging from science fiction to policy visions—shape our understanding of technologies like artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, quantum computing, and synthetic biology. He co-founded the Berlin Ethics Lab at the Technical University of Berlin and has worked at the Berlin University of the Arts, where he explored speculative fiction, design fiction, and worldbuilding as tools for critical future studies. His research combines qualitative methods with creative practices to reflect on present futures and their cultural origins.