Squawk!

In Fall 2009, I completed work on a prototype for Squawk!, a project for Pat Search's Interactive Narratives course. Squawk! is a web application built around the idea of inspiring spontaneous creation by individuals. There's a daily prompt, which is a usually unusual task to complete in one or many ways. Here's an example: confess to something you didn't do. For each prompt, you can choose to go and create an original submission to "achieve" the prompt. It could be a whole bunch of things: audio, video, prose, a poem, a photo, or even something bizarre, like "food."

The application uses a form system that allows submitters to upload images, embed YouTube videos, and submit various kinds of free-form text, including poems and short stories. All the submissions are supposed to be relevant to the current day's prompt. We collect all of the submissions and present a randomized selection of them upon each page load, so that visitors can create a unique narrative from the submissions they see on the page every time they reload.

All submissions are collected into a huge central column, which is shaped like a bird totem pole. Visitors would click on the bird's big nose to expand it down and see a random set of submissions for the prompt. On-page navigation allows people to navigate back and forth between the current prompt and random days from the past.

The application was built with Ruby on Rails, and uses a cool template system for forms that customizes the experience based on what you wish to submit. I worked with fellow RPI students Billy Dickie, Hannah Dym, Kevin Toledo, Ben Esposito, and Erin Carroll.

I spearheaded development of the user interface and overall site design, though I was fortunate to be able to tap into a wealth of impressive graphics and art experience from my teammates. This was merely a prototype, and thus it is far from being a production site, but we tried something new and did it out way. I'm pleased with the end results.