This week, I had a lot of trouble with Hack 3. Unlike my usual experience of having random ideas floating around, I found myself completely stuck.

I explored several failed concepts before landing on something workable:

• Emailing Affirmations to Myself: Email is probably the worst way to get my attention. If I were to schedule task reminders via email, it wouldn’t be effective for me personally, though it might work for others.
• Snapchat for Stop Motion: While interesting, this felt more like an artistic project than the subversive commentary I was aiming for.
• Excel for Choreography Mapping: Dancers need visual representations, but choreography is very embodied and mental. Excel might help with spatial blocking but would require confusing layer toggling. I couldn’t fully convey the meaning without including an actual dance performance alongside it.

What Finally Worked:

I reframed my approach by asking: “If I had a goal, what would be the worst possible way to get there?”This required lowering my standards for what goals I could realistically accomplish. I settled on a simple goal: writing in a journal or diary. And what’s one of the worst ways to journal? Coding it. What’s even worse? Doing the math to encode each letter manually. That’s when I decided to work with Desmos for my journaling.

As you might expect, writing words in Desmos by individually plotting each character has been incredibly time-consuming. My current prototype is far from ready, but the tedious nature of the process perfectly embodies the “worst way” approach I was going for.

Looking forward to having a ‘prettier’ project, going forward.

LF