Alex McDowell - A master class in worldbuilding and designing holistic spaces

Alex McDowell is a worldbuilder. He builds future realities to envision worlds that don't yet exist. By working across disciplines to imagine the future, his worlds inform and inspire stories and open eyes to new possibilities.

Alex has made a life outside of the status quo. He was born in Borneo with the jungle as a backdrop and attended Quaker boarding schools in England from age 7 to 18.

In 1975 he enrolled in the Central School of Art and Design in London to study to become a painter. His happenstance staging of the Sex Pistols' first concert altered his life, in a meandering way landing him in film production design. Alex has been the production designer for films that have transported minds --Lawnmower Man, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Crow, Minority Report, and Fight Club, among others--he’s been creating worlds for many years.

McDowell ushered in a broader cultural shift in the film industry creative process through the adoption of computational media to support the 2002 film Minority Report. The list of awards and accolades from his 30 years experience in film production design are too many to list here.

More recently, he's been applying his worldbuilding approach to broader applications, integrating interdisciplinary humanistic, scientific, and design inquiry to alter our imagining of the world we inhabit.

In 2012 he brought his wisdom to the classroom, becoming Professor of Practice at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. There he directs the USC World Building Media Lab and leads the USC World Building Institute, a renowned multi-disciplinary knowledge space.

His craft in imagining new worlds is part of how we will understand our own and make it into what we hope it can become. We explore the lessons his life holds for all of us to do this imagining.

So this is a conversation about the principles of worldbuilding to imagine a better future for our own, at the personal and planetary scales, from communities to cultures, cells to society.