Extension 1: Automation (John Caserta)
The main challenge for the final product was to find a way to convey all the complex information of this new universe in a more natural and comprehensive way, embedding the prototypes I made in sketch without giving them an air of work in progress. After extensive discussions with Dinah and Tim, I decided to try my hand at coding a prototype version of a tech article site called Techlite, modeled after extant sites like Tech Crunch and Tech Insider, which could offer glimpses into various aspects (as categorized in the news feed) of this new hypothetical world. I sourced for relevant imagery and wrote 6 articles in an attempt to touch on some broader categories, such as satire, economics, the opensource coding community that finds new creative solutions, the hacktivist movements that aim to re-democratize information, and novel uses for mindware such as spirituality and meditation. As I was relatively new to html and css (I’ve only really done it during John Caserta’s web programming workshop), I was actually pretty nervous about how it was going to turn out and was so worried that everything would fail because the code wouldn’t work. Thankfully, it went rather smoothly, and I learnt a lot from the entire process both in terms of content generation (an extensive thought experiment) and the actual gritty details of coding in the html/css language. I intend to continue working on this idea over the summer as a personal coding project.
