Worldbuilding
The Engineering Imagination

Jenn Stroud Rossmann (Author)

9781509567133, Polity Press

Hardback, published 26 June 2026

216 pages
21.8 x 14.2 x 2.3 cm, 0.386 kg

"With both insistence and grace, Jenn Rossmann guides us toward a more accountable, more reflective engineering practice in the face of escalating political and environmental crises, globally. Where conventional ethics has too often trod on tiptoe, Worldbuilding scaffolds deeply transformative, profoundly activist understandings of technology as, inescapably, a form of power."
Amy E. Slaton, Drexel University

Engineers across the globe are building our future and, by extension, our world. But how can these engineers – whose educations have often encoded historical gendered, raced, competitive, and capitalist norms – responsibly engage in worldbuilding, which is both an art and a science? How can we better prepare the next generation to build a world that is more inclusive and intersectional?

In this concise and accessible book, writer and engineer Jenn Stroud Rossmann argues that we need to upgrade the "engineering imagination". By interrogating engineering's history and storytelling traditions, she reveals how we could better understand and anticipate the impacts and implications of new technology and so better envision alternative futures. Far from being a merely technical science, engineering has been shaped – and can be revolutionized – by sociocultural factors and products, the ways that we talk about the history of technology, and the ways that we pass on knowledge through education.

Drawing upon sources as varied as literature, poetry, visual art, and film as well as history, philosophy, and the technicalities of science, Worldbuilding is a guide to thoughtful technological citizenship for makers and users alike.

Introduction


1. The Engineering Imagination

2. We Are Water

3. Inspired and Dauntless Men

4. Road Tripping

5. There Was a Demon Who Lived in the Air

6. The World of Matter Has Become a Giant Nerve

7. The Ethics of Worldbuilding

8. Building Alternate Worlds


Acknowledgments

Notes

Subject Areas: Education [JN]