When looked through the MIT database, a project called The Sheep Market got my attention.

I clicked into the website, found there was a ‘map’ consisted by numbers of tiny pictures; and when I put my mouse on any of it, the screen above started to show the procedure of drawing a sheep. The founder Aaron Koblin was hiring workers from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, giving them $0.02 and asking them to draw a sheep facing to the left. The idea first sounds a little bit meaningless, but I actually found it quite interesting when watching how they drew a sheep. I liked to quickly have a preview of a section, find the ugliest sheep, and watching the drawing. Basically, all the sheep are like a huge database, then I was choosing the piece of information that I interested in to read. It shows the benefit of online making that people can view things separately. For example, I noticed that some of the sheep appeared as a tiny black rectangle in the ‘map’, which were very notable among all these sheep. I could move straight to that piece work and figure out the content. This non-linear mode provided a quick approach to view information.

Another point of The Sheep Market is its unique interactive way. Not like the fiction gaming project, my thoughts or choices can’t change the story, nor can I draw my own sheep. However, when I watched the procedure, I found I was thinking with the drawer, I was wondering his/her idea. The finished sheep is just a fixed result, but the redraw process is the visualisation of people’s thoughts. My partner Trista and I decided to use this characteristic into our work to make audiences think when they watch the media project.

When talk about fiction online project, the first idea I come out is role playing games. In MIT database, I found a game that I heard before, Assassin’s Creed. This game is a perfect example of 360° video that designers renovate the Europe cities in 18th century, so players can explore the scene as historical tourists. Compared to The Sheep Market, this project uses interaction in a more obvious way that every player can have different experience.