Jason Godesky’s Portfolio: The Fifth World

I’m free to say whatever I like about the Fifth World, because it’s my own project. Unfortunately, that also makes it the one that I can only work on during evenings and weekends, and that sometimes shows. While it’s not my most polished work, it does give me an opportunity to step through how I approach product design and development from a broader point of view.

The Problem

I’m rather eclectic, and I think that shows in the intersection of interests that originally gave rise to the Fifth World: open source, rewilding, wikis, the works of Daniel Quinn, Michael Green’s “Afterculture,” and Dungeons & Dragons. It’s an open source science fiction shared universe that imagines a neotribal, ecotopian future 400 years in the future. Any number of creative projects can use it as a setting (I’m working on a tabletop roleplaying game as one of the first, while my wife is writing an anthology of short stories for it), so the core of the project is an online wiki that serves as the official canon of the setting. Central to the project is a notion of challenging our underlying assumptions about history and the future. I believe the market potential for this could be enormous, but it does present some unique design challenges.

Visual communication is all about the use of established conventions. For example, Western audiences associate red with danger, but this is because of its history of use. A Chinese person might associate the same shade of red with prosperity or good fortune, because they approach it with different associations from a different history of use. This makes it inherently difficult to convey new concepts in visual design. In the case of the Fifth World, leaning too heavily into patterns from indigenous art styles could convey a feeling of backwardness or “primitiveness” owing to a long history of colonial denigration of such styles. Leaning too heavily into futuristic styles could convey the feeling of the very sort of inhuman, machine-dominated science fiction that the Fifth World is moving against.

The Fifth World doesn’t have any established base of users that we can talk to. As such an eclectic concept, there aren’t even many clear competitors that we can look to, or whose users we can talk to. As my own project, I don’t even have the budget for proper market or user research anyway. Talking to potential customers should be the starting point for any new product, so I was definitely off to a very rocky start.

Listing product and services ideas against profiles that might be interested in them. — After developing nine profiles and coming up with a value proposition canvas for each one, I made a spreadsheet of all the products and services I’d come up with and which profiles could be interested in each of them.

My Approach

UX personas are a format for communicating research findings. If they’re not based on research, then they’re not personas — they’re just a collection of biases dressed up in a story. Since I couldn’t do any real research, I can’t call what I made personas. Rather, I did an affinity clustering exercise, first coming up with interests and activities that might draw someone to the Fifth World, and then grouping those items into nine profiles that I might expect to find in my eventual audience.

I then filled out a value proposition canvas for each profile, speculating as to the gains, pains, and jobs that each profile faced, and what gain creators, pain relievers, and ultimately products and services the Fifth World could offer. If I had more time and budget, I would have done market and user research to fill these with responses from actual people, rather than my speculation. Skipping the research severely undermined the strength of my results, but it nonetheless gave me a good direction to start. I would like to circle back to these activities in the future, once I have a decent-sized user base from which to recruit research participants.

A page from the Fifth World wiki — Since the wiki is the heart of the Fifth World, I focused on the reading experience first and foremost.

Our Solution

I took an API-first approach with the Fifth World, developing an API before I developed anything else. I expected this to support my open source vision, making it easier for people to make use of this common hub in new and unexpected ways.

My next step was to develop a design system for the Fifth World. In 2006, Oliver Reichenstein declared that web design is 95% typography. The web is still primarily about reading, even with podcasts and videos proliferating as they have in recent years. I focused first and foremost on an optimal reading experience as the core design choice around which to build everything else. The real-world people that inspire the Fifth World most are largely oral peoples, who don’t have any typographic tradition from which to draw inspiration. Instead, I looked to Hopi art (the name of the Fifth World is inspired in part by the Hopi “Emergence” tradition). I noticed that, like many indigenous traditions, Hopi art makes striking use of geometric patterns, something that these traditions have in common with our general understanding of a “futuristic” aesthetic. This eventually led me to the Fontin family.

Graphic design really begins with bookmaking in the Renaissance. Those early designers pioneered a wide collection of methods that started with the page and folded inward with pleasing, harmonious ratios and relationships. Translating these concepts to the web has proven difficult because the web has no set page to begin from. We have a different set starting point, though: the letter. Instead of moving in from the page, we can move out from the letter. I took this to heart, developing design patterns based on the proportions within the Fontin typeface. For example, the rounded corners of our buttons and boxes match the shape of certain letters in the Fontin typeface, like the top bar of the capital “T.”

Printed Fifth World products — The Fifth World required a visual language that could work as well for printed and physical products as for digital ones.

Besides the website, my visual language also had to translate well to printed materials and physical products, like the sheets and cards used in the tabletop role-playing game. There’s certainly room for improvement in these areas, but I’ve taken these products to several large conventions and attracted customers there nonetheless.

What We Learned

I am now working on a wiki called Tagger Keeper. Like the Fifth World, I am implementing an API-first strategy, then a skinnable/themable design system, and then a thin server that brings the two together and serves pages to users. The next generation of the Fifth World will run on Tagger Keeper, but, as a separate system, it will be able to fulfill many other needs as well. I am now even more convinced that API-first development and design systems can create very flexible product ecosystems with enormous potential for iteration, change, and growth. If anything, I wish I had embraced this approach even more thoroughly, as it might have led me sooner to the strategy that I’m now pursuing.

The Fifth World has achieved little success so far, but I ascribe this to my limited time and budget for it, rather than any failure of the product itself. Most of the ideas I came up with in my original value proposition canvas remain unfinished. But without real research behind that activity, it’s only my best guess, and I need to be careful not to fool myself into thinking it’s anything more than that.

This project has forced me to consider design decisions more deeply, considering where our associations with visual design come from and what they ultimately mean. It’s forced me to consider the deep intertextuality implicit in all visual design, and the degree to which all design is ultimately anthropological. You can’t know how users will see your work without talking to them, because they will always see it through the lens of their own experience, which will always differ from your own. If I had the chance to spend a few weeks and a few thousand dollars on this project, I would spend that time and money talking to users. That is ultimately the most crucial investment that can be made in any product.