Production designer Alex McDowell has launched Planet Junk, a project that invites university students to imagine a future world that is built on the detritus of our current planet.
The project, which McDowell first introduced during a panel discussion with Twinmotion on redesigning the world, started with the fundamental question: what if we destroy ourselves as a civilisation"
From this prompt, McDowell challenged students from 12 universities across six continents to use his "World Building" technique to come up with a society that exists 300 years from now.
The World Building technique involves creating conceptual versions of a world in which "characters" can be inserted to test the environment.
Students working on Planet Junk use World Building techniques to imagine a new world To start building their worlds, the students ? who come from a diverse range of fields such as architecture and economics ? examined current events and disasters across the planet in order to look forward.
"We've created a new society in 300 years, but we had to look back at this destroyed civilization in order to extract all of the things that are really valuable for a new society," McDowell told Dezeen.
"We start off with how you can create a realistic world. In order to do that, you need to reflect on what's happening right now in the sense of global warming, rising sea levels, fires, the pandemic and so on," he explained.
Twelve universities from ...