Jakob Ion Wille is a Ph.D. scholar attached both to The Danish Design School and the Copenhagen Business School, Department of Intercultural Communication and Management.

In his Ph.D. project Visual Experience Design – on design for visual fictions he explores the field of production design, which covers the development and management of the overall design expression, mainly in connection with narrative films, TV-series and interactive media, such as computer games.

Designed concepts for fiction is a field that is developing in leaps and bounds and taking on growing importance. Designed concepts are not just used in film and digital media but also in books, cartoons, etc. Fictional worlds or universes that span multiple narrative media are often the result of a painstaking design process. Typically, surviving a transmedial representation requires not just a good story but also a good design.

In his Ph.D. project Jakob Ion Wille describes the design tradition that has developed in the field of narrative media. Film history is closely associated with the development of photography techniques from the late 1800s until today. With the advent of colour film, it became increasingly important to design and manage the film’s overall expression. In 1939, Gone with the Wind was released as one of the first colour films ever. Here, William Cameron Menzies not only managed the scenography but the entire visual design and expression, and he was the first person ever to be credited as production designer.

In a second part of the Ph.D. project Jakob Ion Wille describes and analyses methods for working with design for narrative image-based media. And in a third part he explores the concept of visual dramaturgy. He compares “visual dramaturgists” with “demiurges”, subordinate gods in ancient Greek mythology capable of creating (physical) worlds. Thus, he introduces the concept of demiurgy, meaning the study of visual world creation.

Jakob Ion Wille teaches dramaturgy in the specialty field of production design at The Danish Design School. At the National Film School of Denmark he teaches cinematurgy, which deals with the structure and aesthetics of moving images.

In 2010, Jakob Ion Wille also worked as a script writer for the children’s film Ulven i Jernskoven (The wolf in the Iron Forest). Here he worked closely with the director and a designer in a process where the story and the visual universe developed simultaneously.

Jakob Ion Wille graduated as an M.A. in dramaturgy and information and media science from Aarhus University in 1991.