User:Lassebosch/assessment selfdir01

My self directed research for this trimester has started out sporadic and experimental oriented. Hand in hand with the prototyping lessons/tutorials I've conducted multiple experiments exploring basic JavaScripting.

In following link you'll find the entire collection of this Free-as-in-beer-time.

Experiments - Pragmatic Approach

Since there's a strong overlap between the prototyping-lessions and my self-directed research i'll present same projects here. Examples of experiments:

1) The canvas-crawler
A canvas-script which allows a rectangle to change position on the canvas trough a fixed time-interval. The rectangle moves in one of four directions (up,left,down,right), while leaving behind a 'trace' of rectangles. Also I applied a function which changes the color of the rectangles (from blue to pink) over time.

//VIDEO (CANNOT UPLOAD MP4/+NO ACCESS TO SERVER)

EXTERNAL LINK (working links not guaranteed)

2) Frame-drawing
A script placing an image in the cursor-position of a HTML-window when the user click-and-drags the mouse. While not being fixed, the image changes trough an array of images on the click-and-drag-function, thereby letting the user draw frames of a, once, video-clip.

//VIDEO (CANNOT UPLOAD MP4/+NO ACCESS TO SERVER)

EXTERNAL LINK (working links not guaranteed)

3) Infinite Translation.
A digitalization of a former physical and manually done project. A sentence, here english, is translated trough all available languages of Microsoft Bing translate-service. The sentence is therefore translated from english to español to estonian and so fourth, eventually 'looping' back to english. During each translation the original sentence is slowly morphed and often changes totally meaning.

//VIDEO (CANNOT UPLOAD MP4/+NO ACCESS TO SERVER)

EXTERNAL LINK (working links not guaranteed)

The Crowd - Specific approach

Besides the visual and experimental engagement in my self directed research, I've also started to explore a single topic in a more specific sense.

The rise of the global day-laborer and how the crowd was dispersed.

FYI: I'm currently in the stages of theoretical research and have not yet passed on to any actual writing except fragmented scribbles and a brief description as seen below

Recently I've found interest in the so called the field of 'design producing crowdsourcing services' such as: crowdspring.com, designcrowd.com or 99designs.com.

The number of this kind of services is constantly growing, yet the variety they offer is very limited. Basically each service hosts their own website, allowing agents to post design-contests to attract an in-site 'crowd' of designers. During the contest designers compete internally, and eventually a winning design is picked and one winning designer is awarded a prefixed sum.

The system of these services are characterized by following:

1) The website of a service functions as a central unit for connecting various agents with potential designers, while also acting as a database collecting every entry.

2) Agents, who chose to host a design-contest fills out a specific formulae essentially including: category, award sum, and a design brief which can be more or less described in detail. Also they are bound to transfer the award sum to the service in order to pay an eventual winner. Therefore the service also serves as a 'temporary bank'.

3) Designers are free to search and browse trough the entire collection of open contests. Depending on different options of privacy chosen by the contest holder (agent) the designer are/are not allowed to view already submitted work by other designers. The majority of contest submissions are not 'blind' (term from 99designs) for the public to view. On entering a contest the designer agrees that he/she has read the design brief of the author and that his/her work is original.

4) Eventually a winning design will be picked by the contest holder. The award sum will be transferred from contest holders account to the winners account, after which the winner can chose to withdraw the won sum and transfer to another banking system. Commissions paid to the service itself is various and at writing point I have not done any research on this.

Internal links:

Programmed Spamming (see bottom/4'th project)
The crowd - domain-naming
First thoughts