Visual Approach 5

I did this story board rough sketch to show an example of what my project may look like in the non digital world. It follows the idea in the "By Other Means" assignment by showing a wall that has a huge timeline on it. Anyone can contribute by adding photos with the story behind it. Each person can pick a color of their choice to show the diversity of the events and people. It would be neat to see different perspectives on events that happened on the same day, whether it is the same event or something different. This would be like a giant scrapbook that is created by a community sharing their stories.

Logo and Favicon

I'm not much of a creative person as far as logos go but here are my tries... This first one has the name of my project (this one tentative for now) and scissors since they are what you use for scrapbooking. I thought the scissors would be a neat idea since they cut out different memories for use in a scrapbook or otherwise.

Here is the favicon that goes with the logo:


This is a second logo I did that I don't like as much, but I was trying to do a representation of time with the wavy lines...

By Other Means

This is actually an interesting time to have this assignment since I attended an all day scrapbooking festival yesterday. While there, I kept my ideas in mind and looked for ways that a capstone could improve the scrapbooking experience. All through the day, the women there would ask what other's were working on, and would usually tell a story about the event. I believe that the story telling aspect of scrapbooking is one of the most important parts, and one of the values that I would like to maintain whether the project is digital or not.

The part of my project that i am particularly interested in is creating a history of events and memories using scrapbooks. Most people are not remembered in the grand scheme of things, except by family and friends. What if there was a way to create a history that allowed these people to speak out about themselves and let others know who they really are? Not only would this be good to have so that others can learn about a person, but it would also be a great way to learn more about everyday events that go on in peoples lives, and to see on a larger scale how that event fits into life.

As an alternative vision of my project, I would start by creating a timeline at a scrapbooking event like the one I was at yesterday. This would be a massive timeline, drawn out either on a large sheet of paper hung on the wall, or on the wall itself. I would divide the timeline into decades and years, leaving plenty of blank space. Then, I would let the scrapbookers fill in the rest. They would take pictures of the events that meant a lot to them and tape them to the proper part of the timeline. Each person could have a different color that would be the background matting for the pictures. Underneath, they would write a short story describing the event and something interesting and unique about it. In the end, there would be a large timeline that would include all the events in history that are important to us. After they are all posted, we could look through and discuss the events, learning more about each other by seeing what is important in our lives. Because of the colors, we would be able to see how many different people are involved, view people's individual legacy's, and see how some people could have more important events in one decade than perhaps another.

I think this project would speak in the same ways as a digital one since it is still about sharing stories and creating your own legacy. With this timeline, you would be able to share the events important to you with others who have also shared their stories. This would be like creating a time capsule that others could happen upon years from now to see what was important to people in that area. It would be interesting to take a project like this into a larger city and posting it on a wall like graffiti is. Passersby could add a picture and a description, or as many as they want. I think it would be neat to see if people were at the same events, and the different takes on them. Creating a timeline like this would really be a different twist on the traditional histories that are written.

Intents

Capstone Intent 1: Online Scrapbooking Community

My idea for capstone is to create an online scrapbooking community that will be a unique experience for traditional scrapbookers and non scrappers alike. In this project, I would like to carry the values and ideals of scrapbooking into a new realm, allowing users to express creativity and to connect with each other in new ways. Scrapbooking is all about sharing stories with friends and family and creating a unique legacy that depicts a person's life. This process is done by being creative to make an expression of yourself or someone else.

There are many sites dedicated to scrapbooking. Both the sale of products for traditional scrapbooking and the creation of digital scrapbook pages are popular topics for sites. For example, [ http://www.scrapblog.com/default.aspx ]scrapblog is one site where people can create online scrapbooks using the site's templates, embellishments, and word boxes. While the scrapbook pages created on scrapblog (and other similar sites) are a fun, new way to view pictures, I feel that the community is not developed enough. I would like to create a community of users who share stories about their lives. Users should be able to create a profile and have a presence in the community; they should be able to read stories, comment on what they enjoyed, and tag or link to their own albums.

An online scrapbooking community would be a great way for people to make connections and meet other people. With traditional scrapbooking, crop sessions are held for croppers to share ideas and stories, often creating lasting friendships. In the digital world, it is easier for scrapbookers to meet people not just from their own region, but from areas all around the world. Not only could users view photos and words, but sound bites and video could be added to enhance the experience and create an interactive, immersive environment. With an online scrapbooking community, people could be drawn together by laughing, learning, and connecting with other people's stories.


Capstone Intent 2: Creating a Lasting Digital Legacy and History

Another approach to the same idea of online scrapbooking is to create a digital legacy of yourself. When you are gone, how will people remember you? Too often, too little is left behind, and eventually a person can be forgotten or never known by most people. Creating a scrapbook of your life is one way to make a legacy of yourself that will be a unique expression of who you truly are. Scrapbooks are often treasured by family members by allowing them to relive fond (or not so fond) memories. By creating a scrapbook of your life online, you are creating a legacy of yourself that will essentially last forever.

With an online scrapbooking community, a new history would be created. As the community grows, so would the database of events, places, and people. It would become a history of those that are not typically documented in the histories we learn about in school. When a user creates an album, an event or life will be saved in a timeline. Users will be able to view an overall timeline, or specific timelines by area, interest, or person and be able to create new friendships with users who have similar experiences, or who perhaps were at the event, but never made a connection to this person! The timelines could be linked, creating a web of time that connects stories and lives. This would be a new, interactive, unique history that is different from normal texts and timelines.

A couple different sites.

In my continued research, I thought of a few more ideas that will hopefully make my project unique. The first was found by looking at the Firefox Extension Scrapbook, which Gary tagged for me. Now this isn't really a scrapbooking site, or really much of anything to do with scrapbooking in the sense that I'm working on, but the extension is called scrapbook because that is what you make out of a collection of web pages with this extension. I actually found it neat to read about because what happens is that you save a page, parts of a page, or a whole site to this extension, and organize it like you would bookmarks. Essentially it is a scrapbook, a collection of various things (web sites) that are all organized together. What I liked about this was that you did not just save the url, you save a part of the site that you want. It is a really good use of the scrapbooking methods. This got me to thinking that you can really scrapbook anything. With my digital community, I would like users to be able to scrapbook not only photos, but videos, sound, links, and other digital media. Think of the possibilities that digital scrapbooking opens up for users! These scrapbooks can truly become an interactive, immersive experience for other people to see into your life. It's like taking a basic album and kicking it up a notch. Very cool.

Another idea I had was to add an RSS feed to the scrapbooks. RSS feeds are becoming more popular as they are easy to use to skim through headlines. Just think, you could have an RSS feed of your life, headlines of important things that happen. That would be really cool for family and friends who could subscribe to your feed. They will be able to keep up to date on the important things that go on in your life. I tagged a site with a good article on how to create your own RSS feed. It has some good links on it and seems like a helpful resource. Hopefully it will come in handy if I decide to pursue this idea a little further.

Finally, Picaboo. This site lets you scan in your own scrapbooks or create your own. You can make beautiful albums to share. They look very pretty, I like how this site is easy to use. There are so many good sites out there like this one, but so few that offer good communities to share these lovely scrapbooks. I would like to break those barriers, both my making digital scrapbooks more interactive and by making a community of users who share stories and albums easily.

Woah del.ico.us links!

I had so many links posted in the for me section of my del.ico.us account! How happy :) There is definitely a lot of information on scrapbooking out there, that is for sure. It has become such a popular hobby! I checked out the sites that were linked for me and found a lot of similarities and some unique differences. Here goes some thoughts:

Digital Scrapbook University is one site that I had come across before, but had not investigated too much into. They offer a bunch on online classes on learning different aspects of Photoshop and other design software, as well as design techniques. You do assignments and pass in homework, and so on. The classes vary in price range from $15 to $60. There is one class for free called Introduction to Digital Scrapbooking. I checked it out and found it to be a step by step guide for creating scrapbook pages on Photoshop or another photo imaging software. I am curious to know how many people enroll in those classes and do digital scrapbooks. I checked out the pages in the gallery and they were very good looking, I wonder how long it takes to put those pages together?! There is software that you can buy to create these pages and a bunch of tutorials so it seems like there are many options for those who want to do all their scrapping on a computer. Good ways to make scrapbooks, but my main goal is to create a community to share and view albums and stories with others.

Unforgettable Memories LTD. was neat because it had some unique community aspects added in. There were a lot of forums on everything from what was being sold on the site to ideas, quotes, techniques, and photography. Most impressive was that Frappr was used to show where community members were located and what kind of member they were (newbie, scrapper...). Some had a shout out looking for fellow scrapbooks, others just said who they were. I thought that was a cool way to get to meet some people (if there were more members of the community, closest to Maine was a New Yorker...).

One Scrappy Site is a pretty basic site with forums discussing ideas and other scrappy things. I did find two things really interesting though. First was that there was a virtual book tour that went on (earlier this year I think?) with a woman who writes about scrapbooking. She stops at different scrapbooking sites everyday and participates in chats, challenges, contests and so on. I had never heard of a book tour like that! What a neat way for someone to get a lot of publicity and to promote digital scrapbooking. The second thing I found to be cool was that there was one book someone wrote on scrapbooking yourself. Often, the person who does the scrapbooking is the one taking the pictures, and rarely has herself in the album. I want to dismiss that in my project by making the person the center of attention! These albums are about your life, and your legacy! That way people will know just what you are all about!

Virtual Scrapbooking is a list of sites that are all about scrapbooking. There are so many! How overwhelming! Just by looking at the summaries though, it seems like it is more of the same that I've been looking at: stores, ideas, and talking about scrapbooking.

Scrapbook Bytes is another digital scrapbooking community that has a store, forum, ideas, articles, and so on. I never realized that digital scrapbooking is so popular! That solves the problem of how to get scrapbooks onto the computer. Now I know that I want to create a community to share these scrapbooks. I am tired of just seeing nice pages in a gallery. What are the stories behind these lovely layouts???

Whew, what a community there is out there!!! Now my problem is to figure out how to bring them together. How can I interest more people in this new fad? Will I be able to create a community that will have not only women, but men creating legacy's of their lives as well? These are all questions that I am sure will be answered in time, as I continue to work on my capstone to create a new community for people everywhere who just want to have a creative piece of themselves shown for the world.

User Rated Interesting Photos

I checked out the link that Jon sent me from Flickr that has the most interesting photos of the past week as determined by users. When a user's photo is put in this pool, then they have the option to post it to the top ten most interesting photos (which is actually way more than 10). Upon further investigation, I found that there are many things that puts a photo on this list. Users can tag photos as being one of their favorites; you can look at a photo to see how many people have tagged it as being a favorite, and can look at a user to see what he/she tagged for favorite photos. The photo's interestingness is also based on how many people view it, who comments on it, the tags, and so on. It is very dynamic and changes often.

I really liked the way this user input system is set up. I found most all of the pictures to be interesting, and enjoyed looking through them. The fact that it is based on many things and not just votes is really neat. This way, only the photos that are the most popular on all accounts will show up. It would be great to have that feature on my site so that people will be able to find interesting albums and stories easily. This would be great for those who are just browsing. The other albums that are not awarded with most interestingness are still treasured by friends, family, and those searching for certain events and people. This is another feature that should definitely be implemented into my system in some way.

01001 Presentation

I enjoyed the presentation given last Thursday night from the artists 01001. Because of prior commitments, I could only stay for the first half of the presentation, but I was really interested in the "United We Stand" project. It is crazy to think that such a simple thing as putting up posters can create such a big statement. The posters looked very realistic, and so did the site. I wonder how many people went to the site to check out the movie...

I love that their art is so unique, and it uses many different types of media. It does not have to be the most technically advanced media, just so long as it relays a powerful message. Their creativity and craziness makes me wonder how I could add that aspect to my project. I like the idea of using something simple as a promotion, like putting a poster up that has a hint, but does not explain everything. That way the viewer is curious and may want to look into it more to find out what it's all about. The poster and website that 01001 did was just enough to get their point across. I would be interested to learn about more of their projects and the impact that they have had!

Visual Approach 4

This is a simple logo I did that I thought might be good for the site. I'm not sure yet if it will be called my legacy, but the name is not used for any other projects (that I know of yet) and it seems to fit well for this project. I used the same kind of idea from my first parti with the large legacy being displayed in a font that I find appropriate; an older looking, majestic font. I put the my in a more fun font because that is the creative aspect of the project. This is only a first draft, but is something that represents the kind of logo I would like to use on the site.

Visual Approach 3

When users create scrapbooks, I think they should have a representation of what their life is all about. This should be an image composed of a few pictures that will interest users into viewing someone's albums. For example, for my profile, I might use this picture to represent me. It is simple, but the blue circles show that I am a fun person, and the pictures are some that I think might interest people in viewing my albums. They could be interested in the Grand Canyon, what is going on with the paddle boat, what happened to the guy being whacked by the stick, and what race I did and for what reasons. The ideas that surround this "preview" could also be used to interest users into finding more information about albums. By using just a part of a picture, the album creator could intrigue users into viewing more of the story. The image describing the person also goes a long way into showing what the person is all about. While my image is just something simple, others could be more complex, depending on what level of creativity that user decides to go with!

Visual Approach 2

For my second visual approach, I thought I would create an outline of what ideals I would like to have in my project, based on the values that are represented with scrapbooking.

Values for a Digital Scrapbooking Community

• History
• Document a history of people who you would normally never know
• Create a new, interactive, unique history
• Connect with other people from the same time and places in history
  
• Family
• Share albums and stories from a distance
• Stay better connected to family members
• Create a family legacy online
  
• Friends
• Share stories from friends both near and far
• Create new friendships based on shared experiences
  
• Creativity
• Express yourself
• Be unique
  
• Legacy
• Create a legacy that will last forever
• Create a unique legacy that truly expresses who you are
  
• Fun
• Have fun looking at other pictures
• Enjoy creating a legacy of your own
• Express yourself creatively
  
• Connecting with others
  
• Sharing ideas
• Sharing stories
• Meeting new people
• See what other people are doing, feeling, and going through
  

Visual Approach 1

I found this picture online and thought it represents a database structure that my project would have beneath the surface. I remembered what Jon had said the other class about a Titanic database that had lists of people and what involved them with the Titanic. These people were able to connect with each other by finding relationships that were not apparent otherwise. It would be great to be able to have my project create databases like that for people to connect. In a way, it would end up being this web of connections, like the picture on the left. Each table could be an event in time, including a person's life stories that go along with that event. People would be able to find other people related to the event that they never would have found before, whether it is a long lost friend or someone who has had similar experiences that you can now be in contact with. I think it could be a powerful tool if the database structure were to have a lot of depth, a way for people to really connect with others.