Project Discovery

Transform your world and discover beautiful, local art.

Comment

Inspiration

We are discouraged by how routine and uninspired our everyday lives can sometimes be, even though we are living in a vibrant city full of colorful characters and even more colorful works of art. On the other hand, we have wonderful local artists with works that are often little appreciated, we cannot remember the last time we went out of our way to discover something beautiful outside the four corners of Georgia Tech. However, sometimes all one needs is a little push and a shift in perspective to be inspired by our art, what if we can look at our own city with a new pair of eyes, ready to explore and appreciate new things?

What it does

Project discovery has two major components: the newsfeed and the discovery map. The newsfeed connects you to a list of the latest work from your favorite local artists, with individual descriptions, up close descriptions as well as where to find that piece of art. After you are ready for a shift in perspective, you go to the explore page to begin your adventure.

On the explore page, you are hit with an inspirational quote and a regular old map of Atlanta. Just as you move around the map wondering what this is all about, you notice an interesting pin button on the upper right corner of the map. You hit it and it takes seems to not be working....then the map transforms into a watercolor tiled view of your current location with colorful art markers all around you. The effect is to literally shift your perspective of the world to a vibrant and beautiful one. From here, you can discover points of interest to you, click on the markers and either learn more about the location via its website or click on one of the 4 transportation mode icons to find out how to quickly get there. And once you are done visiting the museum/statue/gallery/street art, just come back to the site, relocate yourself and keep on discovering!

How I built it

The bulk of the site is built on the Weebly, with the additional map component coming from custom javascript input with help from leaflet.js.

What's next for Project Discovery

For our next step, we would like to pull in museum/gallery data from Google and have user submissions form for adding new and interesting works of public art that cannot be easily found on the web. We would also like to have individual pages for artists and have a way for users of the site to comment/donate to their local artists. We would also like to leverage the powers of machine learning to create a powerful recommendation engine that connects people to their soon-to-be favorite new artists. Ultimately, the goal of the project is to support the local art scene by better connecting the art viewing public with the artists themselves.

Share this project:

Updates