This weekend I took part in the Guardian Hacks SXSW event – a gathering of 100 programmers, coders, journalists and designers at the Guardian’s offices in King’s Cross. Delegates were given a loose brief/challenge – to create a tool with journalistic potential, possibly using information from social media, possibly for use at the South by South West (SXSW) festival in Austin. Developers were asked to consider ways of conveying the “mood” of a post, the nostalgia for printed media and ways of personalising content. Equally, proposals could be aimed at helping the media consumer in some way – possibly by creating more intuitive interfaces and by delivering more relevant information. A list of hacks from the event is available from Rewired State.
Articles on the event:
Guardian Hacks SXSW
Newspaper Club
INAWORD
I worked on graphics for a team project to develop an aggregator of audience reactions to live music. The ap takes the user’s location before asking for a single word review and to further qualify the word with a “good” or “bad” parameter. The results from other gigs are collated and displayed in a tag cloud – green = good / red = bad. Results for other gigs are also shown. We won BEST USE OF CREATIVE at the end of hack awards.
FRIDGE DOOR
Also worked on a personal project to deliver news and personal and social media through a digital wallpaper interface inspired by the organic order of the “Fridge Door”. Content is displayed in layers and elements are moveable, scaleable and infinitely customisable with colour and font choices.
GSXSW Hack Newspaper
On Saturday lunch time Ben Terrett gave a talk on Newspaper Club, whose online system lets individuals publish their own newspaper. They produced a single sheet paper for the hack with a centre spread of delegates Twitter details.
