Unwind.Explore.

Pigeouli (2018)

https://pigeouli.com/opens in new window

Source: https://github.com/hexelberrystudios/pigeouliopens in new window

Summary: A social media experience stripped down to its barest components.

How much of the social media experience can you take away while still being able to satisfactorily express yourself? What if you didn't have much to say, but you still wanted to participate? What if you're too afraid to speak, but you can't hold it in? Pigeouli tries to address these questions.

We took the bare essentials of the social media experience (very bare, as this project is in its infancy), looked at every potential vector for harassment, abuse, and general discontent, and tried to replace it with a fun interaction instead. We wanted to see if with a combination of an expression, a very limited vocabulary, and punctuation, users could interact in a pleasant and meaningful way. (Bonus: It's a PWA built in VueJS, so you can install it on your home screen on iOS and Android! You'll need to use the share button in the latest version of Safari to do so for iOS.)

ScribDen (2017)

Summary: A social media application focused on simplicity, understanding, and accessibility.

Inspired by the era of BBSs, we collaborated with the excellent Liz Collins Leonopens in new window to design an experience that encouraged intimate, healthy conversations over whatever it is you're into. A great deal of research was done to understand the pros and cons of each kind of social media: Twitter, Reddit, forums, Facebook, IRC, etc.

The design for this concept is ongoing, as we believe we haven't quite nailed the solution to this complex problem. The full case study can be found hereopens in new window.

How Did I Get Here? (2015)

http://howdidigethere.info/opens in new window

Summary: An experiment in interactive storytelling.

The beginning of the story was presented, and at the end of the page there was a prompt or question for the visitor to respond to. Over the week, responses would be collected, and one would be chosen to move the story along. In addition, each submission had a dice roll automatically attached to it, which would indicate the effectiveness of the content of the suggestion. The project updated every week for about a year and a half.

Hexcolor RPG (2016)

http://howdidigethere.info/public/hexcolorrpg/opens in new window

Summary: A social game experiment tested during a convention.

The idea was a dungeon crawling game where each dungeon was represented by a color, and a pleasant color scheme was dynamically generated for it. The mechanics were a simple rock/paper/scissors (attack/defend/magic) setup, but every enemy had resistances and weaknesses for the different available actions. You could also speed along your progress by recruiting other players by sharing your player id. We collaborated with Liz Collins Leonopens in new window to create the promotional materials to get people started, which included a QR code to the site.

Sailor Moon Fan Site (2017)

https://squaredog.neocities.org/opens in new window

Summary: A sketch learning from and adapting 90s web design.

This was an homage to the glory days of Geocities, where loud garish designs abounded and tons of interesting and personal anecdotes were scattered about. Here I wondered what could a Geocities style website look like if it was built today. (Make sure to allow popups when prompted, as there's a small bit of that here.)

Polite Pouch (2017)

Source: https://github.com/hexelberrystudios/polite-pouchopens in new window

Summary: A small npm package for reducing boilerplate code in PouchDB

There was a project that I was working on where I was trying to learn about building offline experiences, and I thought CouchDB and PouchDB were really interesting data stores to try out. I found myself repeating a lot of code to manage standard DB fields such as id, modified date, and created date, so I refactored the work into an npm package.

Hexelberry Studios site (2018)

Source: https://glitch.com/edit/#!/snaggly-growthopens in new window

Summary: This site!

This portfolio was built to collect the work that's been done over the years in the name of exploring the web as a communication and interaction medium. Our hope is that we can find healthy, constructive, and ethical ways of using the web to improve society. (This site was built in Glitch using React)