Computational Creativity Mission 9: Another Kind of CC. The goal of this mission is to gain experience with the Processing programming language and design and build your own casual creator.
Using Bubble Buds, users have the ability to write customized messages. As users type, the message appears horizontally across the screen, and colorful bubbles with the letters from their message bounce randomly around the canvas. Users are able to pause and slowly step through the bubbles progress, change the colors of the message and background, edit the font, and restart creating with ease.
Written words are often very personal. Users can make creative works with the words of their choosing. Users can choose what they want to say, but it's just the right amount of challenge to acheive the right combination of colors/fonts and tostop the bubbles in the correct place. It is continuaously surprising because users cannot anticipate the bubbles movements; Each time one touches an edge it chages it's velocity on the canvas. It is also continuously surprising through the randomly generated fonts and color combinations. There are seemingly endless combinations. Users can also choose the level of sponteneity; They can slowly step through the program to get exactly what they want, or they can quickly flip through lots of random options. Users can reach a state of flow (or "be in the zone") when they are walking through the program to get exactly what they want. They also may experiance an "energized focus" where they are "fully immersed" when attempting to pause it at just the right moment as the bubbles move at full speed. The personalized messages make it valuable to the user, and the sponteneity keeps them engaged and excited to create.
As stated before, written words can often be very personal, and have the potential to convey a lot a meaning. Being able to write short, meaningful messages is a skill, and Bubble Buds is a platform that offers a creative way to share these messages. Users can also be proud of their artistic eye (and potentially their pausing skills). There is some aspect of luck involved, but to spend the time and pick a combination of colors, bubble configureation, and font that is appealing to the individual requires time and thought - which is something to be proud of.
To run the processing sketch on it's own, select the download the proccessing link in https://processing.org/ and follow the instructions for your machine. After dowloading casual_creator.pde from this repository, open it in Processing. In the top left corner select the circle with an arrow to run the program. From there, just start typing the message! In order to pause the loop press Enter (or return). Re-select Enter to unpause. The Left arrow will clear everything and return the user to a blank white canvas. The Right arrow redraws, so while the program is not looping, a user can step through the bubbles movement slowly. The up and down buttons change the size of the main message's font.
To run the processing sketch on a browser, simply open index.html in your browser. If the sketch is not appearing, there are likely some browser policy issues. Solution suggestions are outlined here: https://github.com/jeresig/processing-js/blob/master/README.md#loading-processingjs-sketches-locally. The simplest way I found was to follow the directions on https://github.com/lmccart/itp-creative-js/wiki/SimpleHTTPServer and set up a Simple HTTP Server. This requries python to be installed, which you find instrucitons on how to at https://docs.python.org/3.8/index.html. In the terminal, navigate to the directory in which this project is saved. Use cd ./ in order to do this. For example, this was my command:
cd ./Downloads/Computational\ Creativity/Casual_CreatorOnce there, start the web server with the following command:
python3 -m http.serverInput http://localhost:8000/ into the browser - This should open index.html and allow you to interact with Bubble Buds as long as it's still running!
This project has been meaningful to me because I can use it to create meaninful things in my own life. With the holiday season and birthdays of my loved ones drawing near, I always do my best to make styalized to and from gift tags. I thought it would be a perfect oppotunity to create these tags with Bubble Buds. I can screen shot my messages and attatch them to the gifts. It makes it extra special because I worked so hard to create them. With COVID, I must celebrate remotely with many of my friends. I can screen record the messages I create with Bubble Buds and share moving messages remotely to those who are close to my heart, but pyscially far. I not only learned a lot but I will be able to share it with those I care about.
How working on this system challenged me as a computer scientist? How did I push myself outside of my comfort zone? Why was this an important challenge for me? What are the next steps for me going forward?
Bubble Buds has challenged me significantly as a computer scientist. This project required significant organizational skills. It challenged me to not only think about how to accomplish a task, but why. It allowed me to grow as a computer scientist through the way I slowed down the process. It will prove paramount in my life moving forward to be able to break down problems and tackle unfamiliar tasks independently. For Bubble Buds I brainstormed and created lists of ideas, and then I thought critically about the cost/benefits about each one. Once narrowing down my idea, I then identified what I might need to know in order to accomplish my design. I am not comfortalbe using languages that are new to me - particularly for a design that's all my own. I sat down, watched and read tutorials, and tried to gain a solid understanding before I began coding. I certainly needed to check back and search additional information, but I think that it was important for me to learn the value of actually spending the time to understand, rather than spending the time to just make it work. Adding the sketch to index.html was a significant challenge, and required a lot of reasearch. This project has pushed me to become better at finding sources and utilizing documentation. As for next steps, I would like to learn Javascript and there are certainly additional features I could implement on Bubble Buds with extra time. These features may include: a multi-line message, the ability to change just the font/background color/text color, pausing individual bubbles, deleting one character at a time instead of the whole message/screen. Javascript would be an important piece of knowledge to be able to utilize in the future. Overall, I have learned a lot and challenged myself in a range of ways.
No known bugs.
- https://hello.processing.org/
- https://processing.org/tutorials/objects/
- https://processing.org/reference/
- https://cs.nyu.edu/~kapp/cs101/processing_on_the_web/
- https://cs.nyu.edu/~kapp/cs101/processing_on_the_web/processing.js
- https://github.com/processing-js/processing-js
- https://github.com/lmccart/itp-creative-js/wiki/SimpleHTTPServer
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
- https://docs.python.org/3.8/index.html