WORLD ORIGIN LABS
OUR STORY
World Origin began as a question:
What happens when cultural knowledge disappears faster than systems can remember it?
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From grassroots fieldwork with Indigenous and rural communities to youth-led cultural education initiatives, early World Origin projects focused on reconnecting people with heritage through lived experience.
This work revealed both the power and the limits of visibility alone.
Youth Power
STORY-TELLING
MEDIA
PRODUCTION
Our roots began with a nonprofit initiative started in 2018 dedicated to intergenerational cultural education, documentation, and creative reconstruction. These projects rebuilt cultural connection and exposed structural gaps in continuity, ownership, and protection.
FROM PRACTICE
TO
SYSTEM
Through fieldwork and community engagement, we discovered:
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Cultural knowledge lacked legal, technical, and economic systems that could protect provenance, consent, and continuity in a digital world.
World Origin Labs is a research and design practice developing culturally accountable AI systems grounded in ethnographic insight and community collaboration.
OUR SOLUTION
Research · Community · Systems
our model
1. Field-Grounded Models
Cultural knowledge is gathered through participatory fieldwork
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2. Agentic & Interactive Systems
AI agents designed to learn, teach, and interact through culturally situated norms.
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3. Governance-Aware Design
Systems built with provenance, consent, and accountability from the ground up.
