Communications Lab Final Project Proposal
Jannie Z
As the digital age approaches with exponential amount of information based on the Internet, everyone is now able to create their own content and deliver their thoughts to the world. Just as the Internet has opened up the world for each and every one of us, it has also opened up each and every one of us to the world. So, for our final project for Communications Lab, me and Justin decided to make a platform where everyone could create and share their own content.
Our final project will reflect the different aesthetics within our users. We want our project to be self-explaining, interactive and have limitless possibilities. The users could create their own poems using our project by filling in the blanks of our default template or create their own template. They will have different themes to choose at the beginning, each theme contains a deck of words that you could use to finish their own poems. After filling up the poems, they could choose to save it and share it to the Internet or not. And they can look at others’ works as well.
Personally, I always want to create a project that has multiple possibilities, and the poem or lyrics have always been my inspiration. Poem or lyrics are relatively short and abstract, so it is open for interpretation. Everyone could have their own understanding of a poem or a song based on their inner aesthetics and personal experiences, it does not need to be uniform. So, we decided to let the poem be the carrier of our project.
During the discussion period, we came to a lot of different projects. Mad Libs is our major source of inspiration. It is a phrasal template word game where one player prompts others for a list of words to substitute for blanks in a story. Our project borrows the idea from Mad Libs, but we have slightly different goals. While Mad Libs is usually played for fun or enhancing language ability, our project aims at reflecting the different aesthetics of users. After completing the template, you can save and share your work, and read the ones that have been shared before. It will be really fascinating to see how others interpret and finish the poem. Another project we draw inspiration from is “Blacknegative”. It is a web-art project that involves a lot of animation, pictures, soothing music and great design. This project serves as the UI design inspiration. We want to make the process of our project soothing, almost like a meditation. And Blacknegative sparks a lot of design ideas for us.
Our project is going to be a website-based project. We will mainly use HTML, JavaScript, and CSS to accomplish this. JavaScript will cover most of the interaction part, from choosing themes at the very beginning and the “save&share” function in the end. The “save&share” function will be the hardest part of this project. For animation, we will mainly use Processing/P5. In order to make the website dynamic, we need to work on the transitions from pages to pages and also, the interfaces. There will engage audios to give users a soothing experience. We will also use CSS to design the interface. It requires a lot of work both on JavaScript and CSS.
Sources: Mad Libs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mad_Libs
Blacknegative: http://blacknegative.com/#!/loader/