ENGD240

OrigamiShare

ENGD-260, AKA 'Studio 6', is a combination of three courses: object-oriented programming, design, and a cultural localization humanities component. Teams were tasked with identifying a cultural artifact to localize through an application to a culture other than their own. In my team's case, one of our members enjoys origami, which originates from Japan, and several of us have German friends. Thus, the concept was created to create an 'origami app' for German young adults. We named this app OrigamiShare.

I took object-oriented programming a few years ago and I'm done with my humanities credits, so my participation in this project involved the cultural aspects of design as well as writing code and performing integration, particularly for backend features.

The OrigamiShare homescreen

Being Americans, our team happens to be uniquely unqualified to speak for the particulars of German culture and lived experience. In an attempt to bridge the gap, the team chatted with our German friends and relatives and researched German history and cultural context. In addition, the team performed user testing with German people on multiple iterations of the application. It would be innacurate to say that any application developed without the direct involvement of the target audience is truly representative of their interests. However, the app generated is one created in collaboration with our target audience and performed well in testing.

OrigamiShare functions as a database. Users open the application, select a language, and are greeted with pre-uploaded origami patterns. From there, users can learn about the cultural context of origami, recreate the sample origami from their instructions, or filter through the origami collection with a tagging system. Finally, users can upload their own origami designs and instructions to the database.

My personal favorite feature I contributed to this application is the image metadata system. When users upload an image, they choose image files, tags, and a title for their work. Once the image is submitted, the application automatically saves the images to a local database and correlates them to the user selected metadata in JSON format, also saved locally. This allows users to dynamically sort through images with various tags on the homescreen. I used the 'jsonsimple' library for this.

In short, OrigamiShare allows both English and German speakers to engage with art from a different culture, learn, and share joy.

OrigamiShare's source code can be viewed on GitHub.