Design Vancouver Festival: Worldbuilding Design Challenge

Arts Umbrella’s World Building Design Challenge, part of Design Vancouver Festival, is an intensive one-day workshop that gives young creatives the keys to their own future by letting them re-design their world from the ground up.

This year’s theme, Kid Island, explores the future of Granville Island and invites young creatives ages 7-19 to reimagine it as a space designed around children and youth in our city. Led by experienced worldbuilders – filmmaker Paisley Smith and architect Graham Smith – the design process will be rooted in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, and guided by a spirit of playfulness and curiosity.

This workshop will use the design-thinking process of worldbuilding to discover what structures currently exist in our culture and environment, so that we might challenge them and redesign what is possible. It will introduce participants to hands-on design thinking and the storytelling tool of worldbuilding. Participants will design and construct artifacts and stories from this future world which will culminate in a final collaborative presentation and a celebratory reception for friends, family, and the members of the design community at Arts Umbrella. Results of the workshop will be displayed in an exhibition to the public at the Granville Island Kids Market during Design Vancouver Festival.