For the world builder activity this week, we started with an idea for a world where it is illegal to look at your reflection. Obviously this is something so common in our society that it was hard to imagine such a thing with mirrors literally in every building ever created. As we created our artifacts, namely a tabloid article, a preliminary architectural sketch, and a black market website, we narrowed our world down to a society where mirrors are illegal to be sold and where it is highly discouraged for one to look in the mirror.
One of the biggest influences for the choices we made in our “world” came from a similar situation in the book Divergent. In this society, there is a faction that focuses on selflessness. This faction trains their members to think of mirrors as self-indulging and vain. We tried to mimic that feel with the anti-selfie article in the tabloid. These decisions made our society more of a propaganda, program based government, rather than a totalitarian, suppressive force.
The reading for last week also influenced our creative process.The author of the design fiction article makes his main point in that the combination of fact and fiction is the best way to make a compelling, interesting world that people can contribute to outside of the original creators. We aimed to create a society that had elements of reason and logic, as well as elements of creativity and fantasy. Our original idea spawned two possible outcomes that could’ve happened: the idea of political leaders making “anti-selfie” campaigns to decrease vanity, and also the rise of a black market that sells the things that some people want but can’t have, something present in all societies. In this way, the political environment that we created subsequently created the media that we made as part of the project. The idea that a society could exist with government prohibiting, even combating the sales of mirrors is interesting, and opens the door to intelligent conversation dealing with the issues of self-centeredness and selfishness in society at large.
All in all it is most satisfying to know that we have created a world that could be potentially self-perpetuating. We realize that this twist on a modern society could be something that people continue to make media about, people far more talented at drawing, graphic design, and website building then we are. That is what we hoped to engineer, an open-ended society that people that become interested in and run with it. I mean, isn’t that what we want to do with film?
My partners were Aurelia and Isaac
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