Joe Rohde may have retired from Disney Imagineering, but the 65-year-old designer hasn’t stopped creating and sharing new worlds with the public.
Since the pandemic began, Rohde has been painting landscapes inspired by patterns he observes in sidewalk stains and bubbles on his pool cover, and occasionally, spots on quails’ eggs. He then posts the paintings to his Instagram page and asks his 87,000 followers to, “Give us a tour, a report, an analysis, an anecdote. What happened, happens, or will happen here?”
His followers suggest everything from the mundane to the fantastical, but the point is not to describe the most imaginative settings, but the most plausible, based on topographical details in the paintings.
A recent example is a picture of blue and white paint on asphalt, which reminded Rohde of an icy coastline. He shared the image on Instagram and pondered, “Somebody lives here. I can’t really tell from here whether the land is forested or just an endless scattering of boulders left behind by some prehistoric glacier. What are the long lines inscribed in the ice? What are the rectangles in the forest and in the ice? Is it ice?”
Rohde then painted the image and posted it, sparking further conversation about the landscape.
@Vanomedia, one of Rodhe’s followers, suggested that, “Local inhabitants might have a ritual for clearing land and orienting dark rocks on the ice with an orientation that expresses something like a temporal marker related to solar or other celestial events. Since the locals build huts with thatch roofs (presumably seaweed), there would still need to be other natural building materials for dwellings and umiaks. That’s what I see.”
When a cohesive narrative emerges, Rohde moves on, typically posting another landscape after a few days. While these conversations might seem like a creative way to pass the time, Rohde is actually demonstrating a theory central to his design philosophy—that theme is the “strange attractor” or foundation of narrative structure.
Rohde believes that built environments, similar to novels and films, contain stories, and therefore, are packed with information. But unlike the linear nature of plot, a constructed space, whether it be a village or a castle in a theme park, can be interacted with and explored, making the information within it incredibly rich and complex. When reduced to a basal composition, that information reveals an underlying theme, e.g., good vs. evil, the glory of nature, survival of the fittest, etc.
Rohde’s most well-known projects all began with clear and deliberate themes. Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: Breakout! in Disney’s California Adventure was inspired by the idea of not belonging, as well as disruption, evidenced by faux cracks in the ground surrounding the attraction, hinting that the structure somehow dropped from the sky. Disney’s Animal Kingdom was framed by “the intrinsic value of nature, transformation through adventure, and a personal call to action,” he stated at a 2018 presentation at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.
The same value set that shaped Animal Kingdom also informed the making of Pandora — The World of Avatar in Walt Disney World. “We had to…reassess how those things manifested themselves through the vehicle of the world proposed by Avatar [the film] and then rebuild the world from scratch,” he said. “So, in fact, when you go to this place, there is not a single thing that is a replica of what you would see in the film.You cannot go frame to frame and see a thing that you would see in the film. It is regenerated from the foundational principle.”
The claim that an entire world could be made from a “foundational principle” suggests that theme behaves much like DNA. A fully developed theme not only provides a general structure for a new world, it informs every aspect of the imagined world, down to its smallest minutia. Even more intriguing, a fully developed theme is capable of reproducing itself.
Because of this, Rohde argues that theme is fractal. First proposed by mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, a fractal is a mathematical structure that resembles itself when magnified or scaled at increasingly smaller levels. Essentially, the general shape and pattern of a fractal is repeated within itself in an infinite process called scale invariance or self-similarity.
When describing fractals found in nature, Rohde cites Places of the Heart by Colin Ellard in which the example of a fern frond is used. Ellard wrote: “The shape of the frond can be viewed at a number of scales—beginning first of all with one entire branch of the plant and gradually descending to the level of its tiny individual ‘frondlets.’ But if you look closely at the shapes contained in the plant, you will discover that at each level of scale, from the very large to the tiny, the basic shape that you see is repeated over and over again.”
A common exercise Rohde uses to prove this theory is asking an audience to think of a place defined by an arbitrary theme, such as, “the glory of nature.” He then asks how a door in that place would look if he were to make one. Would it be round and rough, or smooth and square? When the audience answers, “Round and rough,” Rohde then asks about the doorknob and then the markings on the door. By the second and third example, the audience understands how tapping into a theme allows for self-similar patterns and objects to continue propagating until the narrative in said world feels complete and satisfying.
Worldbuilding in this manner—without a formal system—may sound fun, as it affords a great deal of creative freedom, but it can be a challenging process when leading a team. For instance, if a team member is given the artistic license to design a certain area within a jungle-themed world and decides to paint a wall in neon pink, it shows Rohde that the basal formula and/or theme has not been understood.
Recalling work on Animal Kingdom, Rohde said: “The first week is hard. And the first week might actually be a failure where you go, ‘You know what? This doesn’t work. We got to go back and restate the foundational premise, because it’s not yielding fruit.’ Once it starts to yield design fruit, you can then look at the evidence and go, ‘Look—the intrinsic value of nature has yielded us a raw wooden wall with no paint on it.’”
As more and more decisions are made that align with the fundamental theme, Rohde can grant his team members greater levels of autonomy, as it progressively becomes harder to make a wrong decision and the theme becomes all the more pervasive.
This process, over time, becomes incredibly rewarding for both Rohde and his designers. He has less to manage, and they have more room to create and interpret. Eventually, Rohde expects his long-time team members to have the ability to recognize patterns and nuances in geographical settings and understand how they may or may not fit into the overall narrative of the world they’re constructing.
“I tell my own design teams: ‘You should be able to fly over this project in a helicopter, or a jet, and look down and immediately recognize this place to the exception of other places, and immediately be able to make a confident, intuitive leap of understanding of what it must be like from the plan.’”
While Rhode’s Instagram worlds may not be as fully developed as Disney’s parks, the process of developing them is in sync with Rohde’s philosophy of worldbuilding. Essentially, the Instagram worlds are an invitation to collaborate with one of the most creative minds on the planet, or, at least, to get a glimpse of how the process of worldbuilding works.
Who knows? These exercises may be the seeds of a new Master Class with Rohde. But, for now, anyone wanting to get a taste of worldbuilding just needs a lively imagination and a willingness to look hard at the details.