research design laboratory

Artifact2

An experimental project of sorts created by Jeff and I for the 2010 winter Olympics in Vancouver, Artifact2 was our effort to create a social media scrapbook of what it was like living in this city that was hosting this big global event. In the period leading up to the games there was excitement and uncertainty about how social media would be represented and used during the games - this was after all touted as being the first true test of social media during an Olympics. Initiatives by both True North Media House and W2 (initially a joint effort between the two) were created to be hubs of social media during the games.  At the time Jeff and I had been talking through a few projects related to mapping and social media and developed Artifact2 on a very limited timeframe (two weeks before the games) in an attempt to put a few of these concepts into action.  
The technical premise of the project was to create a scrapbook of social media content for each day of the games.  It was designed to suck in favourited content from a select number of social networks feeds and include our own first had account. The result, it was hoped, would be that one could flip through the days of the games and get a sense of what was going on a specific day based on accounts from the social network community along with our own. In many ways it was an effort to somehow preserve “real-time moments” as a means determining their value in representing experience over time.
While limited time and a few technological barriers prevented the project from fully functioning as was intended, it was no doubt a valuable exercise which continues to inform many of our design and ux ideas. You can clearly see where we got some of the concepts included in the achinodes.com redesign.

Process
Web
Social
Mobile
Research
Project: 
node/46