World-building is the process that speculative fiction writers use to think through the setting—geographical, cultural, personal—they’re creating for a story. Tara speaks with artist and writer Morgan Harper Nichols about her personal practice of world-building, and how we might approach rethinking work with world-building as a tool.

The way things are is not the only way things could be. Strange New Work imagines radically different work futures through speculative fiction. Think space travel, exoplanets, artificial intelligence, and—yes—aliens. All that “strangeness” helps us break out of the constraints of the present and break into a whole new way of thinking about work.