Would you like to adapt the Fashion Fictions materials to support participatory speculation activities in spheres other than fashion?
Great! All of the Fashion Fictions guides and tools are shared with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International licence which allows others to adapt and remix them. You can do this in any medium and for any purpose, providing that you credit the author (Amy Twigger Holroyd / Fashion Fictions) and apply the same Creative Commons licence to whatever you create.
The Stage 1 World-writing guide, the Stage 2 prototyping guide, the Wonder-capture activity and the Enactment recipes, along with their supporting materials, can easily be adapted to other contexts by substituting the fashion-specific elements.
If you’re interested in adapting any of the Fashion Fictions materials, it’s worth spending some time familiarising yourself with the project’s ‘parallel presents’ premise. The Rules section of the Stage 1 guide provides a useful outline.
If you do adapt any of the materials, please email Amy to let her know what you’ve done with them. Information about how the tools have been used is incredibly helpful in reporting on the impact of the project and securing further funding.
World Generator
The World Generator (available to play with in Step 1, below) is part of the Stage 1 World-writing guide. It is an interactive webpage that allows a user to generate two sentences to describe a fictional parallel world by clicking on areas of blue text and cycling through various options for each one.
The first sentence describes the core ‘what if’ of the fictional world, and the second summarises the ‘backstory’ of the world: an explanation for why and when it split from our own world.
Each area of blue text has multiple options, meaning that there can be many thousands of possible combinations.
In this section you can find the resources needed to create your own customised version of the World Generator using Twine, by editing the options provided for each area of blue text, and to publish your Generator using Github. No prior experience of either platform is required, but some familiarity with basic coding – or the ability to follow instructions carefully – will probably help!
Step 1
Look at the two versions of the Generator and choose which you would like to use. Version A has three multi-option fields, while Version B has four multi-option fields: a location/context is added to the end of the first sentence, which makes the fiction a little more complex.
Note that you will be able to edit all areas of the text – you’re just choosing which structure you’d like to use as a starting point.
Step 2
Download the html file for the version that you have selected:
Step 3
Watch the video below and follow the instructions to customise the Twine code to create your adapted version of the Generator.
You’ll probably need to spend some time working out the options you’d like to appear for each area of blue text. It can be tricky to ensure that every option makes grammatical sense!
For ideas on how to come up with compelling ideas for the first sentence, this part of the World-writing guide and this non-fashion adaptation of version A might help.
You are welcome to add to the credit at the bottom of the page, but please don’t remove the existing credit (starting “The original version of this Generator”). One thing I forgot to mention in the video: you should add your name(s) to the author list after ‘Amy Twigger Holroyd / Fashion Fictions’ in the Creative Commons licence section. See this adapted version as an example.
You will end up with one new html file.
Step 4
In your Finder (Mac) or File Explorer (PC), rename your downloaded html file as ‘index.html’. This is essential!
Step 5
Go to Github.com and sign up for a free account (unless you already have one). Note that the username of your account will appear in the URL of your Generator, so choose carefully!
Step 6
Watch the video below and follow the instructions to upload your file to Github and make it available to others on the internet.
Follow these additional instructions if you need to update your index file at any time:
Step 7
Share your adapted Generator with others using its unique URL. The last part of the main Step 6 video will show you where to find this.
Step 8
Email to let Amy know how you’re using the Generator!