Pixel Painter

Right, well me maties its talk like ah' pirate day t'day so I hope ye have all been gettin' in tah the spirit o' things, if only by yellin' Yaaaaargh t' the passers by.

It has been an interesting day today, it seems people at work actually read my blog, a surprising fact I'm sure. It has led to a few pirate phrases being yelled out but nothing too exciting.

So on to the actual topic of this post, my new social project called pixel painter. I have been wanting to do something that involved random strangers for a while but up until today I had no idea what it would be. Inspired by the tiny icon factory I went on to spend a few hours over lunch designing my own version. The original uses Ajax weirdness which I'm not even going to attempt to understand (I may in due time but at the moment I wanted to get the job done well and quickly), so my version uses slightly lower tech methods, however the end result is the same, you have a blown up drawing area which is aprox 20 times bigger than the original to make drawing that much easier, a form with which to give your drawing a title, and previous peoples attempts in a gallery on the right. Already a few people have been submitting their creations which is great!

I am hoping to get at least 1000 participants so as to have a nice large cache of icons to analyse, what I want to do is create a small documentary on symbols and their use and importance to every day life. I want to also see what symbols have default cross-cultural meanings and this is a great way of doing so. With 1000 or more people you are bound to have themes pop up in the postings, such as certain symbols being drawn again and again. One such symbol I guess would be in the top five would be the heart symbol, followed by smiley faces and then possibly characters from the alphabet – I look forward to seeing what people come up with.

The second part of the experiment would be to create a survey containing a selection of user created symbols; asking what meaning others see in them, to discover wether the arbitrary meanings that one person associates with an icon is the same as that another person would think when shown the same symbol. Universal symbols will be thrown in such as pictures of knife and fork meaning food and WC – the globally acknowledged symbol for public toilet.

The project shall run for a minimum of 6 weeks I am hopfull that I can collect 1000 symbols by christmas so I can begin working on the documentary and theisis – I shall keep you guys updated.

Other Similar Projects i've found on the net:

• Tiny Icon Factory
• Wiki Art