Vincent and Jon’s Final Project: DE-STRESS
Concept:
The idea we had for our website project was creating a website to de-stress the person interacting with it. We were brainstorming ideas and thinking about how stressful these couple weeks would be with finals coming up, then the idea just appeared. We think that this is important to the audience because during finals week, emotions spike up and the atmosphere everywhere feels tense. Studying in an environment like this would lessen productivity of students, but through this website hopefully the tension would gradually get smaller.
Within our website, there would be a specific action you have to complete, for example popping 15 bubble-wrap with background sound effects. Once you finish the action, the next action appears, for example squeezing a stress ball, etc. These actions are to stimulate a sense of completion for the user, giving them the satisfaction of finishing something and at the same time giving them a feel of calmness. We also plan to make the website look aesthetically pleasing, so it would make the website as least annoying as possible.
Sources:
https://theuselessweb.com/
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/positive-psychology-in-the-classroom/201211/achievement-vs-accomplishment
Our sources are probably pretty weird, we weren’t really inspired by any specific artists, but more we were inspired by the website “theuselessweb”. We were playing around on the website and many of the websites that had shown up were just us clicking or scrolling around, and that’s where our idea of finishing actions had come from. The psychology study above was something that I had read a while ago, and it was something that I wanted to try and put into a project, because finals can be depressing, so hopefully if we are able to achieve what we plan for the website, students will have a better time studying for finals.
Production:
The main techniques we’ll use is probably javascript and maybe some p5. For the sounds within the website, we can look for sounds online or if possible, create the sounds ourselves, but with the limited time it’ll most likely be from online. There will be no video on our website. The user interacts with our project with use of the trackpad, specifically scrolling, clicking, and moving. We didn’t include the keyboard because that would be too extra for a website that is trying to stimulate calmness. The hardest part of our project will probably be thinking up of enough actions for the website so that it is varied and not repetitive.