In The Middle of It All - Collective Futuring in Nebraska’s Panhandle

Collaboration with Ash Eliza Smith and Sam Bendix, University of Nebraska, Lincoln

2022-ongoing
Interactive story engine, collaborative worldbuilding workshops, design drawings and prompts, community funding organizations

Supported by the Rural Drug Addiction Research Center Pilot Project Grant, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (Smith) and the Outcomes-based Community Research Fellowship (Lichtman). Published in Oral.pub arts journal, 2024, and Hyperrhiz Journal of New Media Culture, 2024

We explore how worldbuilding, speculative fiction, and co-creation can shape collective futures, imagining new possibilities for community-driven innovation. Our project, The Middle, is a prototype for a digital platform—a story engine—where all communities, regardless of size or location, can archive their hopes and dreams through interactive tools like 3D collage, storytelling, pen drawings, and audio recordings. The platform, a game-like environment, invites audiences to navigate these creative contributions at their own pace, fostering an inclusive and collaborative space for imagination and action. Ultimately, The Middle is designed to serve as a repository for the future vision and desires of any community or collective, supporting communities to reimagine collective futures in complex realities.

In this pilot implementation of the platform, a series of interactive virtual worlds were developed during worldbuilding sessions in a rural town in Nebraska, engaging individuals affected by Substance Use Disorder as well as school students, healthcare workers and members of other communities. Community members co-created stories and innovative solutions to questions regarding the future of community health and wellbeing. Participants then composed a series of interactive scenes to express and reflect on these ideas using 3D scans of local physical and cultural geography, photos, drawings, illustrations, and audio recordings.

Looking forward, we are currently developing the project to further support communal discourse within the story-engine. This includes collective voice-commentary, empowering participants to reflect on and respond to each other’s ideas as presented in the story-world, as well as an upvoting feature which will serve as a springboard for funding the physical realization of projects developed in world-building workshops and scenes.

We planning to develop a new iteration of the project with community partners in New York.

Link to interactable project published in Oral.pub arts journal

Instructions: Click on windmills to access scenes. Close browser tab to return to map. Works best in Chrome on a Laptop/Desktop.

Collaborative futuring design drawings and workshop prompts