Olympic Fts.
Conditional Design, Participatory Design + Interactive Web
→ A crowd sourced animation following the principles of conditional design.
Inspired by Studio Moniker’s “Your Line or Mine” project, Olympic Fts. is a crowd sourced animation that highlights the high intensity and movements of sports. Over a span of 1 week, we crowdsourced 200 drawings ranging from CMU students, faculty to staff.
Driven by the conditional design principles, a practice that focuses on the process rather than the product, our goal was to produce a final visual product that was based solely on participants' input. Within each different set of sports, rules such as pre-assigned colors (that align with the rings of the olympics), pre-disposed stickers, and more scene specific things, are meant to serve as a springboard for the participants to add their own creative flair to a frame.In terms of rules, we had a bit of deliberation between how restrictive or free we wanted to be with them. We started out with an early test run with nothing, but one rule, trace the snowboarder and then do whatever you want. We had a black pen and blue pen with us and some people used their own pen. When we regrouped, we decided we wanted to make a couple changes and add some rules so we could control our end product a bit more. Knowing we wanted to do the Olympics, our color scheme were based on the colors of the rings and each additive element was based on the “aesthetic” of the sport. We used a light watermark of the rings both as a decorative piece, but also as a silent nudge to see if people would interact, outline, decorate or color them in without any rule specifically asking them to.
Project Info
Interactive Website — please explore the site for more details!
Trial Run
Our first trial run started with nothing but one singular rule: trace the snowboarder. Some people traced the mountains and the snow, while others added some of their own flair. We provided a black and blue pen to the participants, but some preferred to use their own.
FINALLY… THANK U 2 OUR PARTICIPANTS!
and of course despite all our backend work, NONE NONE NONE of this would be possible without our wonderful friends and understanding strangers who participated without question, glued feathers on a Tuesday night at 5pm even though they had an exam the next day, and most importantly, had fun and were genuinely interested in our project.
Collaboration with Sherry Wu
Things we learned (via. participants):
people really were stressed out that the color brown wasn’t available
people ask question/need confirmation even post-instructions
people that were more comfortable in their artistic ability had a tendency to use the markers available, while people who were less comfortable, usually went for the colored pencils
for a lot of people in majors that weren’t creative, they were really glad to be doing something that felt relaxing and the opposite of what they’re used to doing