Turn This Into A
Turn This Into A is a website that enables users to create remixes around the simple structure: Turn ___ into ___. Turn a photo into a pie. Turn a story into an song. Turn that empty lot down the street into a garden. The experience is designed to push the boundaries of remix, and redefine the act of remixing by using it to bridge our digital and physical worlds. Try Turn This into A prototype.
Turn this into A is a project created in collaboration with Designer and Artist Sarah Hallacher and Researcher Andrés Monroy-Hernández at FUSE Labs, Microsoft Research. Turn This into A was presented at CHI 2013, as a video submission and work-in-progress paper: Mixsourcing: A Remix Framework as a Form of Crowdsourcing
Remix Framework
A simple remix framework of turn something into anything as a way to explore people performing creative tasks.
- Explore assignment based interaction
- Expand the scope of remixing/user generated content
- Unify the remix communities and remix content, each siloed based on medium and network, YouTube, Flickr, or Twitter.
Internet Remix Culture
People are developing really refined creative work that crosses digital/physical, offline/online mediums. What if you could create a community around this interaction where users were encouraged to steal and copy in order to make something entirely new.
Pilot Investigation
Can remixing be used as a mechanic to crowdsource creative tasks? In simple email we decided to test out the framework. A creative task was given out to 22 art students, Turn this drawing of a moonicorn into anything.
The Results
Participants were incredible creative with their tasks. The framework seemed to offer people enough of a starting point to simple make something rather than spending time coming up with an idea. We learned participants wanted to see how others interpreted the task.
User Interface
Main Gallery
The website's home page features a list of available challenges that invite people to remix. The system relies on the social media ecosystem for content hosting and "Turn this into a" simply facilitates the linkages between the people through creative triggers.
Forms: Create Challenge & Submit Remix
Fill in the form to create or remix a challenge. Submit the challenge or remix, viewable by the entire community.
Details
Select a challenge from the main gallery to view the details, associate remixes, or add a remix to a particular challenge.
Tumblr Prototype
We created a prototype using Tumblr and Wufoo forms. The public release generated 29 challenges and 34 remixes.
In addition, we asked people to create a challenge and a remix on the tumblr site and a click through a flash prototype of the original design. The user test appear in our CHI 2013 video and work-in-progress paper.