For context:
Read Jer Thorp’s article, Art and the API: http://blog.blprnt.com/blog/blprnt/art-and-the-api
And consider Jim Campbell’s recipe for new media art. http://www.jimcampbell.tv/portfolio/miscellaneous_references/
This week’s exercise can be done in two ways, you can either approach it as a fictional work or as a piece of design research based on empirical study.
Part 1 – Option 1 – fictional speculation.
You are to write an interview with a fictional character of your choosing. This could be someone from your favorite novel, film or story. You are to prepare the questions and then imagine how this person would respond, they should remain in character and their answers should reflect their personality as we know it from the source material.
Part 1 – Option 2 – design research
You are to conduct an interview with a friend, relative or acquaintance. This interview should reveal how this person uses digital communication technologies to pursue their interests and relationships. You should explore their attitudes towards the various platforms or services they use, what they like about them and what not. What are their personal interests? How might the internet enable them to pursue these? What would they would change if they could or how would they use online tools differently?
Part 2- If this then that receipe.
From your real or fictional interview, you are to sign up to IFTTT and create a project using an IFTTT recipe. For example, if your mother complains that she wishes that she knew what you were up to, you might set up a recipe where you save photos that you take throughout the week to an album on your device and prepare an IFTTT recipe that emails/texts these photos to her. Perhaps your sister is a hoarder, can you connect her to new Craigslist posts? Or you might write a fictional interview with King Midas of Greek Mythology and in response to his obsession with gold, create a twitter account that receives information from the King’s gmail address. You then sign up this gmail address to stock notifications of the price of gold.
A “recipe” is a formula that connects information from some input API to some output API. Browse some of the recipes made by other people.
Create a recipe which pleases you. It may be something useful, whimsical, weird or interesting. Feel free to get fancy if you can (using your own custom RSS feeds, etc.).
Deliverables
- Label your blog post this week as Exercise 3 and include:
- A one line tweetable sentence describing your project.
- A screenshot or image showing your recipe
- A transcript of your interview. If it is very long ( > 1 page) include only the questions and answers that were relevant to your project.
- A description of your service and link to it if possible
- Some image documentation/ screenshots of the results.
Stuck?
- Read this medium post on patching things together without code.
- Also see services like – https://zapier.com/
- See project inspiration on the blog: here.
- Yo is a service that allows you to trigger IFTTT from your mobile device. You can trigger calls etc.
https://medium.com/in-beta/you-can-build-your-prototype-faster-than-you-think-20c76da36f23