World Building

In our world, gravity isn’t a constant. Instead, it just sort of wildly fluctuates throughout the day. This idea was somewhat inspired by the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slapstick. In it, sudden, rapid shifts in gravity’s force cause the whole of society to plummet into chaos. When we were pitching ideas, Slapstick immediately came to my mind because of how drastically this one thing changed the world. I thought that this idea could be interpreted in a lot of different, really interesting ways. Our world is a lot less intense than the one described in Slapstick, the whole of society hasn’t collapsed. Instead, people have had to make adjustments to live their day to day lives despite the random shifts in gravity.

We created concept drawings of different ways typical items would be altered in order to function in this world. For example, towns would have domes over them to stop things (including people, and even the air itself) from floating away into space when gravity fluctuates into its weakest levels, or anchored chairs with buckles that allow people to strap themselves in and wait for gravity to return to normal. Another idea we had is a vest that has a controllable mass, that can be increased or decreased depending on the strength of gravity allowing people to still walk around during the fluctuations. All of these ideas would have varying levels of quality, richer people would be able to afford better equipment while the poorer would have to settle for things like strapped down chairs. This would create a very clear distinction between the upper and lower class.

One example from the class that we drew inspiration from was the notice from the film, District-9. This public notice gave us the idea to create our own for our world where gravity is not constant. So we wanted to create a sign that portrays a particular public issue that commonly occurs in our world. We wanted to show how littering is a very eco shattering problem, more than it is in our present world. When people choose to litter in our world, it can be lost into our atmosphere every time our gravity starts to fluctuate. In this world, you are unable to simply pick up litter from the ground, because it floats around the atmosphere, getting in the way and polluting the air. Another issue that this fluctuation in gravity creates is sudden, forceful garbage rain caused by higher levels in gravity makes trash jettison towards the Earth with extreme force.

It was interesting to think of all the implications that such a world demands, from the obvious (the need for mass-changing vests and chairs with “seat belts”) to the more unapparent (like the need for domes so that the atmosphere doesn’t float away, or the litter problem). We tried to imagine what the everyday life of someone living here would be like, and it helped us to come up with more creative ideas. Though we all agreed that living in this world would not be fun, the citizens of it have made it manageable for themselves, and that is what we tried to convey with this assignment.

Olivia Taylor, Morgan Akana, Jesse Baird, Taylor Davis