Prompts
This is a list of prompts I've collected over the years for inspiration when trying to come up with a project to work on. I've tried to include some relevant work, thought starters, or short comments where relevant, but they are meant to be incomplete and interpreted as broadly as possible. Any question about the prompt would include X or Y can be answered with “yes.” They are there as direction and mild constraint, without either of which there is no creativity.
Blatantly copy something
Get as close as you can to the original. Originally from Molly Soda's Imperfect Pictures class.
Create a means of distribution
The project works when you (and maybe others?) can use what you made to give something to somebody else.
Nothing new except glue
Make something from stuff that already exists. Can't hurt to start by just looking around where you are right now. Found objects? One person's trash is another's treasure. Etc.
Something For Your Desktop
You spend a lot of time there, spruce it up. Desktop Clock, VSCode Pets.
Make a self-portrait
Be yourself? Be fake? Be real? A time honored tradition. Orignally from the same Molly Soda class. Glance Back, Filename Self Portrait, Triple Self-Portrait, The Social Photo.
Undocumented APIs
Find one, use it to make something. TikTok Clock.
Make a video unwatchable
Unopenable? Boring? Gross? Cringe? How about 10 hours of paint drying?
Clock Week
Make one. The Man in the Clock, The Clock, TikTok Clock, Desktop Clock.
Make a pun
The stupider the better. The Phantom Tollbooth, The Punderdome, Looo.lol.
Take a picture without taking a photo
AI? Surveillance? Getting a friend to take it? Do whatever, just don't be the one clicking the shutter. H/t Molly Soda again. Traffic Cam Photobooth, This Person Does Not Exist.
An idea that comes from a book
Self-explanatory.
Text is the universal interface
Text can go in and out of almost anything in a way that pretty much every other form of media cannot. Highlight that.
One million of something
One million is both a lot and not that much. 1 million dollars is life-chaning money. 1 million pixels is a 1MB photo. One Million Checkboxes, Million Dollar Homepage.
Learning through scroll art
An idea from Al Sweigart. Learn a programming language, use it to make scroll art through lines of text. Scroll Art Website./span>
Text is the universal interface
Text can go in and out of almost anything in a way that pretty much every other form of media cannot. Highlight that.
Make something that dies
An exercise in rot, killing, or letting go. Minus.Social.
Text is the universal interface
Text can go in and out of almost anything in a way that pretty much every other form of media cannot. Highlight that.
Write a love letter
To a person? A lover? A game? A genre? A friend? On paper? In music? Mailed?
"I use technology in order to hate it properly"
Make something inspired by the work of Nam June Paik.
Make a way to communicate
The project works when you can hold a conversation with someone else using what you created.
Frankenstein week
Take something that used to be used for X and make it do Y.
Office Space Printer Scene
Capture the same energy.
Lights!
Robin Wobbles, LED Throwies.
High concept, low effort
An idea from LARPA. Deep thoughts lazily executed.
Did you mean recursion?
Did you mean recursion?
One screen, two screen, old screen, new screen
Take something you associate with one screen, put it on a very different one. DOOM on a smart fridge, Pixel art on CRTs vs. modern screens.
Subtract
How much can be erased from something before it's unrecognizable? Picasso's Bull, Erased DeKooning.
Go to a museum
Project ensues.
Artificial Stupidity
Make fun of AI by showcasing its faults. Mistrain it. Lie to it. Make it say something stupid. Your pick.
Take Two
Remember an old project. Do it again. From scratch. No looking.
Are You Human?
Captcha week. Make something to differentiate the people from the machines. The Millennial Captcha, How does this image make you feel?
Put something on a wall
Anywhere. Just touching a wall. Portrait of Ross.
Code as koan, koan as code
What is the sound of one hand clapping? Sit.
Animals
Lions, and tigers, and bears, oh my! Crab logic gates, Fish plays the stock market
Mythological objects and entities
Pandora's box, the ocarina of time, the palantir, the sphynx, etc. The Book Of Imaginary Beings, IRL Mjolnir.
I mean, i GUESS you could store something that way
The project works when you can save and open something. Some fictional storage media, Dookie Demastered, storing data in DNS caches.
I mean, i GUESS those could be pixels
The project works when you can display an image. Bonus points for video. Harvard/Yale football prank, Bad Apple rendered in as many media as possible.
Doors, walls, borders, barriers, boundaries
Things that intermediate two places: opening, closing, permeating, excluding, combining, etc. Border wall see-saw, the door problem in videogames.
69
Nice. Make something with the joke being the number 69. 69 as a creatively generative tool.
Mail Chess / Asynchronous Games
Something turn-based played with no time limit or requirement to be there. Huge list of play-by-email games, another big list.
Twitch Plays X
A group of people share control over the something. The history of Twitch Plays Pokemon, jaywalker reporting, neglected stop sign cam.
Do a lot of math
Time to re-learn wtf an arcsin is. Genuary, shader golf.
Hostile UI
Tired of dealing with the average user? Make them feel your pain. r/BadUIBattles, the password game.
The more things change, the more they stay the same
Reflect on time, difference, and similarity. The first website.
Start at the punchline
Think of something that would be a funny sentence to utter, work backwards to make it real. DoesMyIPAddressHave69InIt.com.
NPC Loot
Take this on your journey / what you drop when you die. Fortune webstones, local poem network.
Workflow Tool
The fun kind. A shell command that makes you smile? A script to automatically screenshot your desktop at an interval? 2 hours to fix an issue that costs you 5 minutes a day?
Borges Week
Something inspired by the Argentine. The library of babel, are.na channel of On Exactitude In Science designs.
The Useless Tree
Make something useless. Inspired by my old professor Sam Crane. The story of the useless tree, exmaple.com [sic].