APD (4); Place/Play

THEME 

Play/Place

CONTEXT 

https://www.google.com/earth/

When I was in high school and left unattended at the computer me and my friends used to play a game with google earth street view, we’d drop ourselves off on a random rural road and then we’d race to find specific landmarks using the street view navigation. E.g, who can get to an airport first, or find a river, ect. I wanted to incorporate that into this weeks object, as it is the first (personal) example of interactive play/place that comes to my mind. 

https://what3words.com/guard.cling.radio

With maps and apps being on my mind I had a look around for interesting/novel ways app developers have been interacting with place and navigation and I found this app. Rather than giving you latitude or longitude coordinates for a specific place it gives three words.

https://www.spore.com/

Spore’s creature generator is a more robust version of what I was envisioning being attached to the hypothetical app, specifically the way you grab prefab body parts/cosmetic additions and can simply slap them on a little jellybean body to build your own Frankenstein. 

METHOD

I really wanted to come up with an app/interactive concept this week, as I haven’t really put any focus on that area in any of my studies this far. Having no experience with creating interactive pieces or apps I decided I’d just try and come up with a project pitch rather than an actualised prototype as I have exactly zero of the skills required to create one. 

Bearing the weekly theme of ‘place’ in mind I started thinking about games I played that focused heavily on environmental aspects, and google earth and the ‘get lost and find something arbitrary’ challenges was the one that best fit. Having a place to start my conceptual development I was considering how I could use that in a novel manner, and then decided I’d like to incorporate my love of creature design as well. So my idea became an app that you would be dropped into a random location via google earth, and through visual cues the app could figure out what kind of landscape it was in and provide appropriate creature parts for you to build a little friend, or a whole speculative ecosystem if you had enough time to kill. E.g, it sees a lot of water; flippers/fins are offered as options alongside legs. 

After surfing through google earth for a while though this idea hit a bit of a wall, there’s a lot of interesting biomes that aren’t really mapped out because they don’t have roads running through them. So I went back and forth a bit, and decided that simply taking/uploading photos directly from the phone would probably be a more achievable method. I decided to do a little mockup on top of a picture I took a few months back at my uncles farm, and quickly found that minimalistic interfaces are actually harder to make look nice than busier ones. 

In my mind the UI for this app would be very pared back and simple, and the modelling for the little creature parts would be similarly stylised. I had an idea that probably wouldn’t work particularly well, with a drop down menu showing the various areas of parts to be added (head, extremities, tail, weird squiggly line) with a rotating preview of the model down the bottom but in practice I don’t know that that would be particularly attractive. 

RESULTS

I’m not overly jazzed with my mockups of my concept, but I think the core idea is solid. I’ve always loved apps that don’t really do much but are a) pretty to look at and b) don’t require a high level of investment to see results with. An app where I could snap a picture and build an army of odd little friends while I’m killing time/relaxing is very much appealing to me.