MDDN 242: Inspiration Transformed

So, after looking at some precedents for this project, I decided the best way to figure out what I could do for the project would be to start sketching out my potential forms. Taking heavily from the inspiration that I looked at in the last post, I want to create something that is fun to play with, something that creates something beautiful, and something that really engages the user, giving them an aspect of interaction rather than control.

The idea on the left draws from the Natzke Ribbons, but removing the static nature of the interaction. The idea there is that the form would be defined by you, but none of the ribbons would actually fully follow the path that you created, in stead each of them would kind of follow the path, but still definitely illustrate a unique and slightly erratic path.

The idea on the right looks more at creating connections between randomness. The idea is that the user would click across the screen, and each time the user clicked a point was created, and this point would then drift in a random direction, creating a connection with other points that it got close to. This would then result in an ever-changing web that grew as the user added more points.

This idea is a little more straightforward, as the user would paint and have a line appear, resulting in a simple aesthetic inspired by some of the more textural generative pieces I looked at previously. The result would be something that ideal has both texture and direction that the user could layer up. Perhaps the colour of the tangents and the lines could slowly shift, allowing the user to layer up the various colours too, creating a dynamic scape.

This is the idea that I like the most so far. It's a spin on the previous web idea, where the user would paint across the screen and the points would form and start moving in the direction the mouse was traveling when the point was created. The points would then create connections between each other when the mouse was released, and drift across the screen, making more and more connections as the thing progressed.

After talking to my tutors, some of whom loved the last idea, I then talked to the last tutor. She looked at it and then told me she "knew I was capable of so much more" and that I should take a step back and find some inspiration in Nature and perhaps plan a little less and let the writing of the code and discovery of what else it could do take me places. So, step back time.