Side Quests

This is a page of small futures; projects, experiments, and ideas that would be fun but I probably haven’t had time for yet.

Think of this page as an invitation to any friends, mutuals, or enigmatic strangers to collaborate with me on a weekend project. Reach out on twitter or email if something here sparks your interest.

• Linguistic analysis to find the longest compound word square (or chain)

• Make an iceberg video on computer history or increasingly obscure interfaces

• Experiment with collaborative echo chamber for ideation, communication, etc.

• Make a text editor you can interact with without a keyboard (voice + AI)

• Japanese version of abstract orange lice game Would love to collaborate with a native Japanese speaker on this, even just to brainstorm whether it’d be possible
  
  

• Small platform for people to propose learning experiments and find people to join

• Write a song (or album) related to computer history, future of computing, urban design, etc.

• Make a little social internet radar, keeping track of changes (not just RSS) across friends’ personal websites and links between different posts

  • This would also be useful for keeping track of changes on my own website over time, or as a community hub for a webring

• Contextual paste, using language models to experiment with a smart contextual paste that matches the style of things around it

• Return to visual mnemonics (for Hanzi/Kanji) using more modern image models, and automate to generate visual mnemonics for thousands of characters

• Finish APL Cards

• Exploring directions in which English can be naturally extended to enable thinking new thoughts (inventing/mapping out generative affixes, playing around with agglutination, shapes of meaning…)

• Make a book of bad design — with the intention of carving out the rules so that we know where to break them

• Platform where you can find people who have shared interest in small projects (the simplest version of this is getting a bunch of friends to write their own “side-quest” pages and then collecting them all together into one place, much like the trend of /now pages)Something I learned from running several learning groups is that gathering around a specific shared goal is stronger than gathering around a shared topic. It gives direction. And it’s easier to shift directions as a group than it is to decide on a direction in a group that has none.
  
  

• Make a drawing tool for ipad where you can sketch an interface and then immediate be able to interact with your drawing. Say you draw a slider, you can start dragging the handle.

• Design posters for really mundane, every-day objects

Events to host? - Je m’apparel: a short apparel design session to create a piece of clothing that is unique to you, or communicates some aspect of your thoughts/personality

This page is still under construction, more links, context, and ideas soon to come!