new / revised prompt

INSTALLATION TITLE: A Hundred Ways Home

WEBAPP TITLE: Kaeru-Chan’s Journey Home

i am creating a participatory art / social technology installation: "help this frog family (kaeru-chans) achieve its dream by helping them travel across japan to return home to komoro! they can't do it without your help". basically people will be responsible for bringing all 100 frogs, seeded in different areas (shops / partnered airbnbs or other locations / gallery spaces / etc) across japan back to our makerspace in komoro (for akiya collective).

create a react vite app to explore this concept and iterate. make it mobile friendly / dynamic so people can look at it on their phones

make a playful + interactive webapp that tracks 100 clay or crochet frog objects, each equipped with an nfc chip. they should be able to be scanned to get the location of the human’s smartphone as well, to be able to record where they are. each frog will be distributed across japan and the goal is for participants to bring the frog to our makerspace in komoro. there should be an active (hopping) and inactive (sleeping) state for each frog (when they “receive” a steward to take them to the makerspace). when they arrive to the makerspace, they will be placed on a nfc chip / reader, and successfully “returned”. we can use placeholders for the locations for the frogs for now, but also include instructions for how to update this with real data. make the # of frogs easily adjustable (we will likely demo with ~10 frogs for now), and also include a component / flow for how to easily add and replace the placeholder with an active one by scanning a nfc chip / location data chip. include some detail here as well for how to do this

the inactive (sleeping) frogs should have a location for where they are, but should also be placed on the map (of japan) locationally / spatially as well

since it might look like a lot of frogs in the country, i want to make sure that the map isn’t too crowded (feel free to group frogs together, like 5 (frog emoji) in one part of the region), and i want to enable fluid zooming + navigation as well. basically i want the map experience to look super sleek, flowy, and glitchless

after the frogs are activated, they should have a different emoji mapping on the map. there should also be two different switches / views for the map to show all frogs, frogs that are not activated yet, and active / “hopping” frogs who have a steward. after the frog is activated, make sure location data is not exact, but within a small mile radius (like how airbnb does it) to make sure privacy is protected

we should also have a counter for how many frogs have been successfully returned or have “kaeru”’d back to the komoro makerspace. maybe a fun percentage meter as well?

after the frog is returned to the makerspace, it should also allow people to contribute to social research by allowing them to fill a survey. if they do, then they can take the frog with them (and then we can officially “deactivate” the frog from the location, and replace it with frog has now found a home with [X]). make sure that the name is not entangled with the research survey results since we want to eventually submit this data with non-identifiable information to research + publish a paper / present at a conference eventually

the survey should also be served in the webapp, and linked to the frog nfc chip id. the data should be easily exportable / accessible, like for instance on a google sheet, or a different, private section of the app that requires log in credentials from an admin. feel free to add placeholder questions for now..

when the user first “activates” the frog (scans nfc chip on frog), they should be taken to an onboarding / invitation page of the webapp that allows them to accept or reject the quest. it should go something like “you’ve discovered kaeru-chan!” and then some short introduction for kaeru-chan’s background, like how his family got separated across japan but they want to have a reunion back in komoro — and how kaeru also means "to return home" in japanaese so also include a small snippet about this and how it relates to the art installation (not super long, make this short), give them some instructions about where komoro / akiya collective is (a bit about our mission too), and whether or not they want to accept the quest. when they accept the quest, then go through a flow activating the frog. the person should not have to log in / create an account at any point during this journey. the person should also be able to tag us on instagram with the tag #kaeruchansjourneyhome or some other relevant hashtag to allow for a social experience as well - also include this in the onboarding. the webapp should have a section for tagged / featured posts from kaeru chan’s journey home, although just add placeholder captions / images for now. have the ability to easily turn this off from an app level since i’m not sure if i want to have it in for now. also include that location privacy is important to us, and will be obfuscated so the exact location will not be shown publicly

if the user is not able to finish the quest, they should also be able to forsake it for another person. ideally they should return it to the original spot, but otherwise, should find another public cafe / area to leave it in with permission from the owner. if they cannot do this, they should fill in a request form or contact akiya collective in the discord for more instructions.

so to summarize, the user flow should be:

user finds kaeru at a coffee shop → scans nfc and gets onboarded / invited on a quest by a frog → user accepts quest → user journeys around japan, tags kaeru-chan in posts → user successfully gets to komoro makerspace → user puts kaeru-chan on a lilypad / “returns” the frog → user gets served the survey prompt upon returning → user does survey + keeps the frog (frog becomes inactive from location, and given to user as a present). if user does not want to do the survey or keep the frog, they can put it somewhere in the makerspace

Participant flow (public, no login)

  1. Finds frog at a coffee shop.

  2. Onboarding / invitation page