Creative Coding: Group 4 Case Studies

By Rachele Barazzetta, Alicia Invernizzi, Arianna Lacroce & Giulia Ravasi

2016 Make Me Pulse

This code was made by the interactive production company Make Me Pulse. The aim was to make a digital online greeting card to wish a successful 2016 to all the clients and visitors.

The question that arose was: “How are we going to wish our clients a happy new year with a digital greeting card?”. The intent to kickstart 2016 was to show their creativity, identity and allow the team to express themselves freely. Just for fun. Also, the message has of course a great importance and the page shows a list of keywords to inspire who’s reading them.

The 6 words are:

• Imagine — Break the rules, exceed the limit.
• Dream big — Be a child at heart, more than a job it’s a passion, it’s our duty to keep it fun and fascinating.
• Think — Inspire and be inspired, think of the best solutions to offer the best user experience.
• Work hard — Put ourselves out. Pay special attention to every detail, each animation.
• Strive — Struggle to reach perfection. Never let technology slow creativity down.
• Proud — Be satisfied with your achievements and qualities.

The main goal was to find an easy and intuitive way to navigate through the experience, a kind of gameplay to immerse the user into the company’s creative and technological universe.

Who marries whom

Adam Pearce and Dorothy Gambrell in 2016 scanned data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2014 American Community Survey to design a visualization about the most common marriages according to jobs. Every work has a net and it’s linked to the most common employments of their spouse.

The user can easily mouseover the grid of jobs and find out the most popular matches. The thickness of the bar increases or decreases based on the frequency and the color changes based on the gender.

Other than just exploring around the user can directly use the search bar situated on top, where they can directly type in the job they are interested in and would like to know more of.

This data visualization, because of its original and funny topic sends us the message that when it comes to falling in love, it’s not just fate that brings people together, sometimes it’s their jobs.

Thinking Machine

The artwork is an artificial intelligence program, ready to play chess with the user. If the viewer confronts the program, the computer’s thought process is sketched on screen as it plays. A map is created from the traces of literally thousands of possible futures as the program tries to decide its best move. Those traces become a key to the invisible lines of force in the game as well as a window into the spirit of a thinking machine.

When it is (White’s) user’s turn to move, the chess board will gently pulse to show the influence of the various pieces. Each white piece causes light ripples on the squares it attacks; black pieces, in turn, add darker ripples. When the machine (Black) is thinking, a network of curves is overlaid on the board. The curves show potential moves — often several turns in the future — considered by the computer. Orange curves are moves by black; green curves are ones by white. The brighter curves are thought by the program to be better for white.

It’s interesting because everyone has played with a thinking machine at least once in their lifetime, but never has the chance to see how the computer thinks and this case study shows the though of the thinking machine.

The artwork is written in Javascript, and based on a part of Java code from 2004.

Way to go

Way to go allows you to take a break from the routine for a virtual walk in the woods. It is recommended by the creators to every human being between 5 and 105 years old. It is a game, an alarm, a wake-up call for today’s risks. The message the creators want to communicate is to take a break in this time when we have access to everything, and in which we see so little, inviting us to remember everything that lies before us, within us, in the sudden pleasure of discovery.

The experience, as described by the initial screen, can last 6 minutes but can also go on indefinitely, until the user is tired. Nobody keeps the time, nobody waits at the end of the path, since there is no real end and no one holds the score. It is a simple invitation to create your own path, stopping when you prefer to observe more carefully all the little things that are usually ignored.

The interaction is very simple, using a few buttons and the mouse to move the strange character that accompanies us inside a grey tone forest. The “w” key makes the character walk, “e” key makes him run, the spacer bar blows him and the mouse is used as a pointer to orient in space. If you click, short videos will show you details of the forest. If you direct the view to the sky our character will start to fly.