This university project, completed for the IDAT204 module, and led by Hannah Drayson and Chris Speed, was quite possibly one of the most enjoyable I have ever worked up on. We were tasked to create life in any form. My project partner, Pete Hotchkin and I decided to raise the bar, and created a creature in it’s final days of life, and required human input via SMS whilst it lay on it’s operation table to maintain its health.

Brief

The brief set for this project was for us was, in essence, quite simple, and was summarized in two words. “Create life”. We were allowed to use any means, methods and technologies available to us to really show our lecturers and course programme leader just how far we had come as digital artists/designers and coders.

Execution

Pete and I worked together closely throughout this project, with predefined roles to maximize the outcome and minimize any friction. Due to the size and complexity of the tasks we had set ourselves, combined with the fact we all wanted to show off in front of Chris Speed, and by agreeing to set tasks up front, we worked extremely well as a pair.

Our idea was to focus on a specific area of the life cycle. Primarily, the penultimate days before the death of a creature. We also decided we wanted to try and use the latest form of interaction for people to try and change the outcome of this event, to save it, rather than let it die. We reckoned the best way about this would be to represent our creature as a ‘human’. After more brain storming (which you can see in all its glory in the associated project articles tagged ‘Organism’) we finally decided the only way for this piece to run properly would be to exhibit it for 7 days on the large plasma screens in the Portland Square Building of Plymouth University. The project would be loaded in a web browser, and would refresh itself with variables from the database we were using to store data sent in by people who saw the screen and wanted to contribute to the project. We had already concluded by this point that we wanted to utilize mobile phone SMS technology for interaction, for people to physically make an effort, rather than let them sit at a desktop and spam an HTML form.

We used an SMS keyword service provided by a company called AQL. They would forward the message received to our ASP script where the script would get the current values in the database and update the value accordingly. As our creature was in ‘critical condition’, we classified this as intensive care. It would need to survive for 7 days to live. The project starts with some organs in bad condition. To improve an organs condition, a text message with the organs name would need to be received. This would add a random value between 1 and 3 to the organs value. To show the creature deteriorating, every 6 hours, a random value between 1 and 4 would be taken off each organ. With the project working this way, it required a lot of participation from the user to survive.

I should probably bring in here that the values for the creature health were 1-4 Critical, 5-10 Bad, 11-15 Healthy, 16-20 Cancerous. The only way an organ could ever get cancerous is if a person ever text in for a healthy organ with the intention of playing God and giving the creature cancer. We did not tell the audience this was possible, but, believe it or not, they figured it out.

Result

Whilst this presentation of the creature was fine, we weren’t merely after saying, ’7 days has passed, it lived, good, end of coursework.’ We wanted to analyze the data we collected from people’s MO’s (message originators, the SMS from the user) to see how they had reacted to it. We were quite shocked with the compiled results. It turned out some people, individually and at different times, sent about 20 messages in, in around the space of 5 minutes, trying to give as many organs cancer as possible. Another disturbing fact is that Portland Square is the home of stages 1 and 2 of the Peninsula Medical School. From our quantified data, we concluded Med students should be taking their Hippocratic oaths a little earlier.

To summarize, the project was really effective, with a heavy amount of Flash MX and ASP being drawn together in a seamless fashion. The data we collected was too small a sample size to really amount to anything great, but did cast some light on the Super-Organism principle in a group of humans. If you like, you can see the final product still up online right here, and if it is not running a life cycle, click this link to start one up.

Review

Chris Speed, Leader of bDAT released our marks with feedback for this project. Pete and I achieved an incredible 75%, well into the 1st boundary, so thanks Chris! The feedback from the module leaders was as follows:

“An original approach to the brief, supported by your thought about issues around audience, medicine and doctoring specific to the site of the work. Graphically there was a good attempt with the typography – but it needed to be bold. In general a well managed project demonstrating a broad range of technical and creative skills. Well done.”