CMU Carnival booth: Madagascar
Communications | Experience Design | Collaboration
HOW might we Build and design a structure that is able to encapsulate the story of madagascar?
Carnegie Mellon University has an insane number of school traditions. From painting the fence to the culture of Buggy, at the core of some of these traditions is Spring Carnival. Carnival is an annual event hosted by Carnegie Mellon for the Pittsburgh community, students, staff/faculty, and of course, alumni. One of the traditions during Carnival is called, “Booth”. Booth is a 1 or 2-story structure (a mini house) that is planned, built, and designed by student organizations. I was fortunate enough to participate in 4 booths during my 4 years at college and was a head chair for 2 of them.
My senior year, my organization chose the theme of, “Madagascar” fitting with the overall Carnival Theme of “Planet Earth”. It was the 1st place booth for "Sorority Booths” as well as won the “Environmental Award” given to the most environmental- friendly booth.
Role & Contribution
I was 1 of 5 chairs that did all of the planning of the booth. I led the planning, design, craft, and creation. As a chair, I led my sorority in the execution of the plans. Individually, I created the sign for the booth.
Deliverables
A 2-Story Booth with a digital Dance Dance Revolution Game
Key Features: Functioning 2-story Waterfall, S-shape Staircase, Balcony
Design Brief
Plan the architectural flow of a 2-story environment and tell the story of “Madagascar” through the booth.
Team
Design Chairs: Susie Lee + Samantha Ealy (Mechanical Engineering)
Build Chairs : Linden Runels (MechE) + Alexandra Merigner (Applied Math)
Admin Chair: Emma Molitor (Chemical Engineering + Biomedical Engineering)
PROCESS
Preliminary
Spring Carnival is held in one of the campus parking lots. Before anything really happens, each organization selects a plot and theme. Using a randomized order, the organizations select plots and in reverse order they choose themes. With this parking lot, the lots 16 - 20 are more difficult to build a booth on as the slope is more steep in that area, ergo, harder to level during the building of the booth.
We selected plot 3. Strategically, due to budget constraints and generally lack of man power, we select a plot that only has 2 faces exposed instead of 3. We landed with our desired theme of, “Madagascar,” a tale of some NYC zoo animals lost in the island of Madagascar due to some mishaps led by a zebra thirsting for some jungle freedom. The wikipedia summary is here. In order to select the theme, we spit-balled and came up with a list of possible themes that belong with the overall theme, “Planet Earth”. When deciding the order of themes, we imagine what the rooms within the booth could be, what the structure could look like, and if it is feasible.
Sticking with the theme of, “Planet Earth”, we wanted to make sure we did not purchase the majority of our crafts. From old newspapers to leftover cardboard boxes and egg cartons, we spend year-round collecting recyclables/ thrown away materials to re-purpose. We also purchase minimal amount of new wood in order to re-use the wood we already own.
Structural + Design
With our theme selected, we have weekly meetings as chairs to discuss the room flow, design the experience, and structurally decide feasibility. We landed with this flow: Exterior → Central Park Zoo → Grand Central Station → Boat Room → Landing on the Beach → Jungle Staircase → Inside the Tree (King Julian’s “I Like to Move it scene + game room) → Foosa Territory → Escape from Foosa → Leaving/Bon Voyage Staircase.
We take pride in the complexity of planning our booths. Taking inspiration from another organization’s previous booth, I really liked how their booth made the visitor go through the inside of the booth like a maze, snaking around in the inside having the visitor unsure where in the booth they are (maximizing the same with numerous, but small rooms).
The build chairs were in charge of doing the structural calculations and creating the build plans, which includes all measurements and calculations in order for our booth to pass as structurally safe for visitors. These plans are due in December, which are then reviewed by the Spring Carnival Booth Head and Committee in order to make sure that the calculations are correct. The design chairs are in charge of creating the flow of rooms, sketches/ visual plans for the rooms, and craft guidance. We then release these plans to the rest of the organization along with a survey asking for which room including being a part of structural build that people would be interested in participating in as well as any special projects they could take on individually. We took their responses and determined room leads and room members. These members support the leads as the leads execute our plans.
In order to help our room leaders as much as possible, aside from general planning of the room experiences, Sam and I also did inventory of the plywood we could use for murals, and determined for the room leaders which ply they would use for their murals (Sam is quite advanced in Google Sheets. Impressive). In addition, for booths to be structurally- sound, the frames have to be sheathed on one side with either oriented strand board (OSB) or thick plywood so Sam and I re-created the booth measurement layout/ blueprints in Figma and determined which sides of the frames would be sheathed (determined by if it was mural side or not needed). Furthermore, Sam and I taped down the floor plans of the booth in our basement, giving the members a visual look into how large their room is.
Execution
Leading an organization of women might seem like a difficult task. But I am fortunate to have led a group of women as driven and enthusiastic about booth as I was. We don’t require people to participate, and we don’t have mandatory hours, but you could always find people crafting or building frames at the house. Over the stretch of about 2 months, the members built and crafted everything needed. Certain members had their own special crafts depending on skill such as paper mâché or making seaweed.
Personal Projects
Aside from a point of leadership, one of my tasks is inherently as a designer: to make. I was in charge of two larger projects (and some smaller miscellaneous projects) on top of planning for the overall booth.
The Sign
One of the projects I took on was to make the sign for the booth. It required to have the name of the booth as well as our organization name. My organization, being my sorority, I decided to create a sign that represented both the organization as well as the booth theme. Our organization colours are black and gold and one of our symbols is the kite. I decided to use that as a starting point by having the back form be a kite and the lettering be in black. To play with depth, I had the letters sit on top of the leaves that represented the Madagascar jungle. These leaves painted in neon colours to match the jungle room and game room, the hope being to capture the funky playfulness of Madagascar.
All shapes were laser cut out of spare wood we had around. The most difficult part of this assembly was deciding what adhesive would work the best. Due to some mishaps that occurred, the kite had to be spray painted with multiple coats of paint, unable to dry completely. Most adhesives would not work on the coated surface, and we ended up drilling the pieces into the kite.
I wanted to line the exterior of the kite with neon EL wire. However, the wire is not malleable and does not stick to surfaces in sharp corners. It looked messy, and we decided to use the EL wire in one of the rooms (ship room) instead.
Jungle Balcony
After planning and sketching out murals for the rooms (as a majority of the murals were not scenes from the movie, but more of abstracted mural pieces), I assisted in the mural for the jungle balcony. I sketched and painted the mural of Gloria amongst jungle leaves. The room leader finished it off by topping it with 3D leaves in order to make it a hybrid mural. This mural was the background of the balcony. At the bottom of the stairs, the visitor is able to see a little past the balcony railing and see Gloria’s face looking down at the visitor.
Miscellaneous
I also worked on smaller crafts for the rooms. From smaller paintings, to small paper mâché crafts, I worked on whatever needed as well as fine tuning other people’s crafts if needed.
