Categories
briefs

Create a BookTok video

Students get assigned a literary work, and have to create a short promotional video. The aim is to get viral and improve book sales.

Note: BookTok is a subcommunity on the app TikTok that focuses on books and literature.

Categories
ideas

Follow the Genuary prompts

The first edition of Genuary was launched in January 2021: the website genuary2021.github.io provided 31 prompts – 1 per day – to invite participants to “make beautiful things with code”.

GENUARY aims to make it possible for people to do 31 daily prompts, one every day, during that day.

On the Generative reddit board, Piterpisma writes:

it started in Inktober, when a couple of generative artists remarked they found it difficult to apply the prompts of Inktober to generative art. Then I thought I came up with the name “Genuary”

Productions were to be shared on twitter using the hashtag #genuary2021.

Some participants documented their creations on a website, such as data scientist Ram Narasimhan (who codes using the Python extension of Processing).

Genuary 2022

Another edition takes place in 2022, the website being genuary.art and the twitter hashtag #genuary2022. Some of the prompts:

  • Day 1: Draw 10,000 of something.
  • Day 5: Destroy a square.
  • Day 6: Trade styles with a friend.
  • Day 10: Machine learning, wrong answers only.
  • Day 11: No computer.
  • Day 16: Color gradients gone wrong.
  • Day 18: VHS.
  • Day 21: Combine two (or more) of your pieces from previous days to make a new piece.
  • Day 23: Abstract vegetation.
  • Day 24: Create your own pseudo-random number generator and visually check the results.

A github issue collects prompt suggestions for the 2023 edition.

See also: Plot Party

A similar five-day prompt was launched in November 2021 under the name “Plot Party” by the pen plotter community. The prompts were:

  • Nov 8 – Weather
  • Nov 9 – Multiple Line Widths
  • Nov 10 – Glitches (errors/bugs) – “Embrace mistakes, whether in code or during the pen plotting process”
  • Nov 11 – Postcard – “A postcard sized prompt, make any small, postcard sized work. There is also an optional postcard exchange”
  • Nov 12 – No Pen – “Forgo a pen for any other tool”

Results are gathered on the Pen Plotter Artwork Blog, and can be found via the #plotparty hashtag.

Categories
briefs

user empathy challenge

A brief created in January 2018 by John Maeda, then Head of Design at Automattic, for members of the design team:

“Our task was to pick one of our fellow designers’ blog posts and come up with a plan to get it over 1,000 views on a financial budget of $20 and a time budget of two hours.”

Read more on the Automattic Design Blog.

An evaluation of the results was written by professional blogger Kitty Lusby.

Some context on the rationale of the exercise:

The design teams at Automattic like to do periodic exercises called Empathy Challenges. The goal in these exercises is to get us thinking in our customers’ shoes, to understand their contexts and challenges.

Thomas Bishop
Categories
briefs

Internet Famous

An assignment created by teachers Jamie Wilkinson, Evan Roth and James Powderly, at Parsons (The New School for Design). It was carried out in 2007 and 2008.

This course is dedicated to learning how to spread your work to the widest possible audience online. We study the art and science of getting hits. And in an academic first, students’ grades will be awarded by a piece of software that helps students track their websites & online accounts and monitor their popularity in real-time.

Sites like Digg, del.icio.us, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Technorati, Alexa, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter and many more will be mined for data relevant to the amount of attention a student is receiving, such as view counts, friend counts, inbound blog links, the length and intelligence level of comments, and more. This raw data is calculated into a “Famo Index Score” that will be mapped onto the Parsons Graduate Grade Scale Description, and each student given a grade from an A to an F.

Dedicated website (Archive) : https://web.archive.org/web/20111103100655/http://internetfamo.us/class/about

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