Software Mash Up:
When I started off with this project I knew I wanted to something that made a social impact. Before coming to New York I had stayed in Dubai for almost 7 years. One of the things that annoyed me the most back home was the fact that a lot of news is fabricated. Reporters are not allowed to report certain things. Most of the news just praises the city and the country. I know all of this because I had a friend who was a reporter for one of the big newspapers and she kept telling us about stories she could not write about. A lot of crimes, financial disasters and poor living conditions go unreported. When I decided to make a documentary on the living conditions of construction workers in Dubai I had to do it in utmost secrecy. This had to be done because if government officials found out I was doing this I would have gotten deported.
Coming back to my project, most of the population (including my family) only read the news produced in the country. There are many websites out there that publish the truth. I want people to know the truth and that is where my website ‘Get the truth’ comes in to play. It is a mash up of news websites. It grabs news articles from the local newspapers and compares it to articles that easily show the lies in the original article. The following sequence shows how the website works.
The home page shows all the latest news articles from local newspapers. Each article has a small summary describing what the article talks about. There are also links to a news archive where you will be able to find all the news articles.
Once the user selects the article, the person is taken to a page where he can read the article. After reading the article the user can then choose to learn the truth. In the article I have chosen to show as an example, it speaks about how the suicide rate has dropped in the country.
Once the user clicks on the ‘learn the truth’ button, the original articles fades a little bit in to the background and a new article from a different source shows up on the right. This article will try and show why the local article is a lie and there is nothing to take from it. In my example, the new article talks about how people have left the country thus explaining the drop in suicides. It has nothing to do with good working or living conditions. The user then has the option to share the truth if he believes in it.
Hardware Mash Up:
For this mash up I originally wanted to do something environmental. I planned to show the problems of global warming by making an internet based game that affected ice cubes in some way. However, with time running out and with no solution I decided to have some fun with this project instead. I started off as a marketing student in my undergrad and decided to make a marketing gimmick that would be part of a bigger marketing plan.
My website here is called ‘Think Stink’ and it would be used to promote air fresheners or deodorants. It would be implemented in work location or schools/universities. Whenever someone enters a ‘stinky’ persons name in the website, air fresheners placed in pre-determined locations will go off. The website will also have a leaderboard system where people with more votes will be placed higher up the leaderboard. The leaderboard is used to give people a reason to return to the website. The website states that everything should be taken as a joke. The following sequence of images explains how this would work.
The home page gets straight to the point. It tells the user what is supposed to happen if they put in a friends name. It also contains the top 10 people in the leaderboard and the locations of the air fresheners.
Once the user enters a persons name, the air fresheners in the locations will go off. This promotes the use of the air freshener as these highly crowded locations will start to smell good. There is nothing wrong with a nice smelling work place right?
The user can also visit a page dedicated to the leaderboard where they can see how high up they are located in it or where the friend they are pranking is located. The user can also enter a friends name on this page.
The last page is a basic contact form where users are encouraged to provide their feedback.
