DTArchive

This Final for Fall Studio is a tool to help students in the Design+Technology Program understand what other students are currently working on. It came out of frustration during final when I learned than an MFA student was working on a nearly identical project and later when my roommate AND classmate was working in a nearly identical problem space. How was it that in a community as tight knit as D12(the physical hub for Design+Technology students) I could be so unaware of other students work.

How might we design a platform that allows DT students to collaboratively share and spread awareness about their work in progress?

xWhen starting this project I wanted to figure a platform that would not be adding to the noise and chaos created by the overwhelming number of platforms. I therefore would need to build on top of the existing most popular platform: texting!

In addition to texting apps being a popular platform, it is also built-in to every phone, so using messaging as submission platform would a good choice for low-friction submission.

The platform itself is primarily a site that complies all of the images into a single site.

I utilized this project to learn two technologies, Twilio and creating a Raspberry Pi web server. Twilio,an API for Voice and Text, handles all of the incoming MMS. The Raspberry Pi both is used as web server for Twilio as well as a web server for the front-end, built on the Django framework. The Twilio code is primarily based off example code provided by Twilio. The webserver is a LAMP(Linux,Apache,MySQL,Python) stack. Usually this would go off without a hitch, but it took me about two weeks to realize my home router, provided by Optimum, has a really convoluted way to open port 80!

After continuing to work on both the back end and front end, I talked to some devolopers and designers at tumlbr. and Facebook and got feedback on how to further develop the product. Below are the mockup for the next steps for the product.