Tings

Tings is a silly little unfinished prototype that lets a user choose a topic and then encourages and facilitates Rabbit-holing. If you've ever wondered how the iPhone is connected to Stalin's early poetry writings, this is the prototype for you.
Basically, it searches Wikipedia for a topic and chooses an image from the Wikipedia page to represent the topic in space. Clicking on a topic box adds a child to that topic that represents another article linked within the body of the parent article. Clicking on the same node multiple times will add more linked children. Mousing over a topic box shows the first paragraph of the topic article, and you can click through to the full Wikipedia article.
The end result is a toy that makes it trivial to follow a thread down a rabbit hole in just a few clicks. I often find it useful when exploring ideas and brainstorming as it allows me to quickly wander around adjacent topics extremely quickly. Why is everything a little springy and chaotic? No idea whatsoever. It just seemed funny to me that these ideas might be chasing and running away from each other, dragging other concepts along for the ride.
This particular prototype was inspired by something a friend of mine (Ray Mazza) made during early development of The Sims 3 as part of these bi-weekly "idea jams" we called Senseless Prototype Mondays. Essentially, I'd propose a topic that was vaguely abstractly related to The Sims (e.g. relationships, genetics, etc.). I'd announce the topic on Friday, and the designers and I would spend the weekend pontificating and all day Monday coding. At the end of the day Monday, we'd sit together and demo them to each other, discuss our thinking and launch into brainstorming for the game they were paying us to make :). Most never turned into anything concrete, but many found their way into the shipped game as smaller mechanic or influenced future designs. And even when they didn't end up incorporated directly into the final product, thy were key to getting us thinking differently about a franchise that we (and players) had been soaking in for so long.
The topic that led to the original prototype was "ideas"... with the thinking that we could explore how ideas, concepts, rumors, etc. are formed, propagated, connected and shared. Unfortunately, the original no longer works due to changes in Wikipedia's API (the original also incorporated Google image search for more diverse images, and that has also evolved away), but be sure to check out the Senseless Prototype page for more examples from those efforts.
Download it from itch.io here --> Tings
Basically, it searches Wikipedia for a topic and chooses an image from the Wikipedia page to represent the topic in space. Clicking on a topic box adds a child to that topic that represents another article linked within the body of the parent article. Clicking on the same node multiple times will add more linked children. Mousing over a topic box shows the first paragraph of the topic article, and you can click through to the full Wikipedia article.
The end result is a toy that makes it trivial to follow a thread down a rabbit hole in just a few clicks. I often find it useful when exploring ideas and brainstorming as it allows me to quickly wander around adjacent topics extremely quickly. Why is everything a little springy and chaotic? No idea whatsoever. It just seemed funny to me that these ideas might be chasing and running away from each other, dragging other concepts along for the ride.
This particular prototype was inspired by something a friend of mine (Ray Mazza) made during early development of The Sims 3 as part of these bi-weekly "idea jams" we called Senseless Prototype Mondays. Essentially, I'd propose a topic that was vaguely abstractly related to The Sims (e.g. relationships, genetics, etc.). I'd announce the topic on Friday, and the designers and I would spend the weekend pontificating and all day Monday coding. At the end of the day Monday, we'd sit together and demo them to each other, discuss our thinking and launch into brainstorming for the game they were paying us to make :). Most never turned into anything concrete, but many found their way into the shipped game as smaller mechanic or influenced future designs. And even when they didn't end up incorporated directly into the final product, thy were key to getting us thinking differently about a franchise that we (and players) had been soaking in for so long.
The topic that led to the original prototype was "ideas"... with the thinking that we could explore how ideas, concepts, rumors, etc. are formed, propagated, connected and shared. Unfortunately, the original no longer works due to changes in Wikipedia's API (the original also incorporated Google image search for more diverse images, and that has also evolved away), but be sure to check out the Senseless Prototype page for more examples from those efforts.
Download it from itch.io here --> Tings