Joinery

I've been interested in freeform curation; or, colloquially, moodboarding. It's a process of refining an aesthetic space by gathering and situating imagery. By contrasting various inspirations, you can "carve out" a vibe with you and your collaborators, and easily iterate on it. It's a lot like a musical jam session, but with visuals.

On the computer, you can make a moodboard by positioning images on a canvas tool like Figma, or labeling them with a bookmarking tool like Are.na. Canvas tools are designed for precise positioning: dragging is predictable and systematic. Bookmarking tools are designed for precise ontologies: every object is assigned a named tags or folders upfront.

I wanted to produce interactions that support imprecise positioning and ontologies. As I generate or curate images en masse, I'd like to toss them around with low conviction, letting the clusters emerge.

Initially, the system was going to have a predictable way of "snapping" groups of images together by dragging their edges near each other. However, this still requires some precise dragging to happen, and detailed heuristics are necessary to produce agreeable layouts.

I instead opted to physically simulate the whole layout. The interactions became much more fluid, I could literally "toss" images and merge clusters together. They'd settle into place like gravitational attractors.