World Building

      Our main idea was to look at a world that shines a spotlight on the everyday, average person. In a Disney movie, both a street rat like Aladdin and a princess like Jasmine get equal time to sing and dance their way through life. Everyone is the star of his or her own story. This is a well-known idea and a famous way of looking at life. William Shakespeare said that “all the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”  The world that we have created makes this a reality. In our society everyone shines through their ability to sing and dance about their lives. This has some unfortunate drawbacks however. If everyone is a star than who is there to fulfill the supporting cast and backup singing? The truth is that we are all the supporting cast to those around us. We are the harmony to each other’s lives and others are the support for us. So in this vein, we have created a world in which spontaneous musical numbers are performed daily and those who shine brightest are the most talented performers.
     Even a society based on spontaneous musical numbers needs infrastructure. Musical numbers are an addition to their everyday lives which will inform their performances. But, since jobs must continue to be completed, the musical numbers will in turn influence how they perform those jobs. For example, a street sweeper might break out into a Stomp number as he cleans the roads. This was in part why we chose newspaper as a medium. It is a media form consumed by the masses which allowed us to represent diverse elements of society. We wanted to show as many aspects of our proposed society as possible. This included the singing woodland creature advertisement, the need for a confetti blower operator, and even the report on a baseball game. All these articles were influenced by the fact that musical numbers dominate every individual’s life. Even the court cases revolve around the musical aspects of life. With this in mind the newspaper's formatting is inspired by musicals. The title font is large and cartoony, and the fonts themselves differ as we wanted it to have a whimsical, creative look.  
       The reading described the process of designing as an “exploration” in which the imagination is “link(ed)...to its material form.” We experienced this exact process in the construction of our world. An interesting part of that was making sure that we were all “grab(bing) hold” onto the same vision. At one point we had to decide whether this world would be Musical centered or Disney centered. We determined that because we wanted to explore the idea of a musically saturated world, that this would be our focus. From this point, our alignment actually led to a deeper exploration that yielded more physical material forms. Therefore, this homogeneity of vision was an important principle in our design, and essential to holding a concept as big as a designed world together.