Research / Worldbuilding · Harvard GSD, MIT · 2026
How do you pitch an idea in the age of AI? By building the world around it. Worldbuilding as a medium, tested through Babel.
Shared fictions
Currency, nations and brands are shared fictions. Worlds that enough people agreed to believe in. They run everything, and building them used to take institutions, generations, sometimes empires.
For the first time, one person can prototype a believable world from a laptop.
Two digital turns
Two digital turns explain how. The internet turned the designer from creator into curator. Every reference one click away, so selection became the skill. AI turns the curator into an orchestrator. The computer was a calculator, now it guesses. Creating means steering probability through prompts, images and references.
Tools change weekly. But the frameworks beneath them don't.
Babel is the case study, a science fiction analogy of the hyperconnected world we already live in. Screens are everywhere, so what if you could walk through them? An AGI invents the portal. A megacorporation called Babel turns it into infrastructure. Two portals, same size, same type, tuned to each other. One continuous space.
The first rules, worked out on paper. Portals as a box or a whole house, notes on playing with gravity and weather.The premise at domestic scale: one room with two doorsteps.Portals across a market street in a near-distant future.
Early years
The early years cover Babel's adoption phase, modeled on how real infrastructure spreads. A luxury first, institutional later, domestic last. Building this stage meant deciding who gets access first, where the first gates go, and how daily life reorganizes around them. Every new technology arrives twice: first as news, then as routine.
Portals start as public transport, bridging distances inside national borders.Allied governments make diplomatic gestures at monumental scale, which are really demonstrations of technological strength. Lady Liberty returns to Paris.Seaports and airports lose their reason to exist. Highways and railways adapt to a network that connects Beijing and Sao Paulo instantly.Physics becomes something the inhabitants of this world can set.Space and time become adjustable, and their relativity is something you can feel.
For a few, where to live and work becomes unlimited. It could come down to the economy, the climate, or simply taxes.
Babel, Inc.
Babel is branded like a real company. Name, logo, tone of voice, slogan. Technology that brings the world closer. Infrastructure becomes real the day it starts advertising to you, so the world tells its story through commercials.
A world proves its rules when you can use them. Babel extends past film into software. A launch site, and Traveler's, a portal route planner running as a real mobile web app. Every screen is a policy decision. Who travels, who gets tracked, what stays restricted.
The world came together in two weeks. References came first, setting what Babel should look and feel like down to lenses and lighting. Then the pipeline. ComfyUI running Hunyuan image-to-video with LoRAs for film, Flux and SDXL for stills, Wan and LTX in the mix, LLMs for lore and scripts.
The theory board: research and revision run with LLM agents, Gemini and ChatGPT, before any visuals existed.The reference board, deliberately AI-free: ad language studied from Meta and OpenAI commercials, lens and lighting decided before generating a single frame.Moodboard for the stations: small pods holding the portals, imagined before they became commodities.
The concept was cut and earned its keep anyway. This is where the shots learned to feel natural and the AI slop look got engineered out.
Where it goes
In January 2026 the thesis ran as a course, a J-Term session at Harvard GSD, later adapted into a lecture at SCI-Arc. Babel keeps growing alongside it. The Home Portal commercial is scripted, and a publication and a graphic novel are underway at MIT. Care is the only thing that scales. Craft is the only thing that cuts through.
[Watch the full lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NikRIwtW_Ws&feature=youtu.be)
The framework
The course hands over a framework anyone can reuse. Define the world's rules. Encode its values spatially. Iterate through AI-assisted media. Curate the outcomes into arguments. Four steps, any genre, any scale.
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