Connect the Dots is an instrument to make World building NOW. It is a way of connecting people distributed around the world, in pursuit of shared values and convergent interests. The goal is to raise awareness of the importance of taking action in your street corner.
What happens at every point in the network has a holistic impact. Interconnection occur when one node registers an action and others join it, generating a narrative that begins to circulate and transcends the source environment.
An individual's message becomes the inspiration for the cause of a large group. Connect the dots identifies these "specials" and helps them bond with others to cause a high-impact movement. By visualizing the emerging narrative, which a person shares from his corner in the world, he manages to amplify the call to be part of a globally connected coalition.
Guided by designer Alex Mc Dowell, professors from Universidad Austral (Argentina) brought together 15 undergraduate students and accompanied them in exploring the World building methodology and giving rise to Connect the Dots. The process was nurtured by the contribution of special guests, such as Alan Gershenfeld, Karl Bauman and Jeff Gomez, who supported the iteration and divergence stages, and added their visions to the project to generate and strengthen new ideas. Interviews were also conducted with representatives from companies committed to triple-impact generation (Stefano Carluccio Wallis from the Direct TV company) and a young activist who fights for ocean cleanup and gender equality (Martina Alvarez). The project completed its conceptualization phase and passed into the hands of professors and engineering students from Universidad Austral, to start a new stage of development.
Alex Mcdowell accepted Mg. Teresa Bosch's invitation to give a talk on Worldbuilding for her students of the Content Management Masters Degree. Teresa invited high school students to participate in the talk. Alex McDowell explained World building’s methodology and its various applications. At the time of the questions a student asked his advice for the young men starting their working lives. Alex replied that she had the power to take action by the world they want to live. That was the first provocation. Alex McDowell invited Teresa Bosch, the student who asked the question and other students to participate in a class with USC students where the provocation was "World build the vote". The goal was to find a way to get young people to take responsibility for voting in the 2020 U.S. election. It was a very rich encounter with ideas and questions. In Argentina it is mandatory to vote and in the United States it is not. In turn we studied cases such as Animal Crossing Videogame where different users used the video game as a space to demonstrate in favor of the Black Lives Matter movement during the COVID-19 pandemic. Alex McDowell met with professors and students from Universidad Austral and he proposed a new provocation: Your Vote Matters. Students and professors at Universidad Austral made a Sprint and generated new ideas to raise awareness that young people are responsible for their own futures.
Inspired by Chip Heath's “Made to stick” and Malcolm Gladwell's ideas, we created a story and an animated GIF. The story was about a young girl who lives in Cordoba (Argentina) near an ecological reserve. This reserve catches fire and its village is also set on fire. She and her friends who handle social media very well manage to raise funds to rebuild their hometown. She became aware of her power to change the world and the responsibility she has in voting for the directors of her people, province and country. In addition to this story, an animated GIF was created in which different points are displayed on a map that are activated and expanded throughout the world. The GIF started in the United States and then Alex McDowell suggested that it should start in different parts of the world randomly and slowly and then grow and increase in pace. These GIFS, or animated dot-activated maps, were called the Sneeze project and the goal was to show the contagious effect of different narratives around the world. The virus became the metaphor to explain how a message can be spread to others and how it grows around the world. By following the same metaphor, we decided to connect the Specials. The objective of this project was to link different activists (called Specials) for their local challenges revealed in a narrative map. We wondered if there was any way to discover these people scattered around the world and invite them to interact with each other. Page Break The way these people connect is a prototype of an interactive open-source web that promotes collaborative creativity linked to the 17 sustainable goals of the UN. A user can choose the challenges by their relevance, geolocate and connect with people who live nearby and have the same concerns to take action. The idea is that users become aware, meet and act to generate a positive impact in their territories. All this with the possibility of knowing and visualizing the effects on a map full of interconnected points in a large network.
We finished the conceptualization stage of Connect the dots' open-source, interactive website and began the development stage. The innovation laboratory of the faculty of engineering from Universidad Austral is now working with Connect the dots concept and ideas with students and professors who specialize in software engineering.
Under the guidance of academic and industry experts Mariana Falco and Martin Salaberri, Connect the Dots development started in early 2021 in the Innovation Laboratory of the Faculty of Engineering from Universidad Austral.
As a result, passionate software engineering students driven and inspired by Mg. Teresa Bosch, Florencia Aguilar and the Austral WB member's vision of worldbuilding worked together with Connect The Dots expert team to build a revolutionary platform that had the ability to empower people all over the globe to create the world they wanted to live in.
These students; Pedro Araoz, Alejo Ramirez Gismondi, Rocio Ferreiro, Elias Lenov, Tomas Lopez and Sofia Sidañez; worked thoroughly for over 2 months to plan out Connect The Dots app architecture, cost structure and development. It was decided that Connect the Dots will be an inter-platform project that meant that the goal would be of developing both a web and a mobile app that would perform correctly in all operating systems.
Furthermore, it was also decided that the platform will be created over atomic development months, called Sprints. At the end of each month the team will collaboratively decide which features they wished to develop next sprint, giving the most important aspects of the platform priority.
This is how, with both Alex Mcdowell and Mg. Teresa Bosch's fantastic conceptualization and the Development Team’s technical ability, our journey began to turn the Connect The Dots dream into a reality, step by step.
With the help of Lucia Frugoli and Guadalupe Garcia Sanmartino, both Austral University Design students and CTD`s previous team members, the CTD project got the aid of Design excellence to imprint CTD`s identity into its layout and visual aesthetic language.
During the first Sprint we decided to tackle the following challenges:
It was of utmost importance for the development team to earn valuable knowledge and experience in both creating the first iteration of the interactive map and implementing the architecture in a real world setting. These goals were reached and the team was more than ready for the next step in the creation of Connect The Dots.
During the second Sprint we decided to tackle the following challenges:
During the third Sprint we decided to tackle the following challenges:
This Sprint is still in progress and we look forward to sharing more results.
Developed by Austral Worldbuilding Lab's Design Experts and CTD's Team Members Lucila Frugoli and Guadalupe García Samartino the CTD Moodboard represents the visual language we want to convey in all of CTD`s multiplatform apps and brand products.
CTD`s Design Team crafted these beautiful designs that served as a roadmap for the Development team for the creation of CTD`s first mobile platform. The features we decided to design where Create Challenge and View Challenge. These were also the work of the incredibly talented Lucila Frugoli and Guadalupe García Samartino.
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The Challenges Creation and View Challenge Feature were successfully implemented according to the mockups shown above.
During the fourth month of development we decided to aim for the following objetives:
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In the CTD Home screen we integrated new gameficaton elements to put enfasis on colaboration and comunity.
The idea behind the Create Post Feature is to give CTDs user base a tool to communicate and Connect, outside from challenges. Our focus is always aimed to create socially and environmentally conscious communities.
In the implemented user profile the user can access their progress bar, their posts and their Challenges. Also here is where the user can change the language , set their favorite SDG`s (Sustainable Development Goals) and see their total number of Connected Users.
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In the Fifth Month of Development we worked on:
During this Sprint we worked colaboratevily with the CTD Design Team, the CTD Faculty of Enterprise Science Team , the Austral Worldbuilding Lab and The Development Team to tackle the following objectives:
In order to make the most of our team we decided to host two brainstorming sessions, mixing team members from Engineering , Business and Design to get a broader perspective and create innovative solutions for each issue.
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During this meeting we designed our Challenge Verification Feature. We created the mechanic where when a Challenge finalizes the Mentor who created the Challenge will be given a QR code which will then be scanned by all participants to verify their participation in that particular Challenge.
During this meeting we reimagined how gamification will be further implemented on the CTD app. We analyzed three user archetypes:
We determined that to make CTD reach a broader user audience we will need to implement new Gamification features to cater to each different type of user. This is included in our Next Steps seccion.
The concept behind the challenge 0 initiative is to jumpstart CTDs social provocation with a colaborative activity in Buenos Aires. We named this activity Challenge 0. During this meeting we defined what this undertaking will consist of.
We got in touch with several local ONGs or organizations whose pursuits aligned both with CTDs values and with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We finally chose CECAM Pilar, Women's Center For Education and Formation, whose objetives align with the UN's Sustaibale objetive of ending gender inequality.
The campaign will take place in the near future and the idea is to collaborate with CECAM Pilar to create and carry out the Challenge itself. We will scout volunteers in CTD Interdisciplinary Team , Austral University and beyond!
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CTD is about creating the world we want to live in, pushing for social and environmental changes all around the world. We believe it is only fitting for the app to offer users a way to share and prove their participation in this movement. This is why we implemented the Dowload Resume Feature which gives the user a pdf with the timeline of their participation in Challenges in CTD.
We designed a way for all participants to verify their participation in a Challenge. After the Challenge ends the Mentor user who created the Challenge shares with the participants a QR code. The participants then scan the code with their mobile phones camara an instantly gain experience in their CTD profile and add that Challenge to their Finalized Challenges list on their timeline. The idea behind is that by giving the user a reward for their participation they will be further motivated to participate in more Challenges.
Based on our conceptualization of CTD as an app with Gamification, during this Sprint we added the Level Up Feature. When a user gains experience after verifying their participation in a Challenge by scanning the Mentor's QR code he might level up and reap the rewards of their efforts!
We had the pleasure of showing our mentor Alex McDowell; USC World Building Media Lab Director, Designer and Producer; our progress during this Sprint. He gave us priceless expert feedback based on his brilliant background to make CTD a better platform and project the future of this social provocation.
While proyecting the future of CTD these are the Next Steps we as a team, decided upon:
In order to support the big worldwide user base we aim Connect The Dots at we designed a software architecture that could support big traffic spikes and that also would make the platform available for everyone around the globe. To begin with, we will need to store data from all our CTD users, that's why our platform will be using services like Amazon’s DynamoDB and Amazon RDS. Secondly, to make this data easily accessible we also will be using Amazon CloudFront.Lastly, to ensure our service can be easily maintained throughout its life cycle we will be using Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Gateway API.
Bearing this in mind, if we approximate the costs of all the necessary services to support our architecture, with 500 000 users the cost would roughly be of 38 000 usd monthly.
