🎨Session 1: "Great Artists Steal (With Permission)"

January

Date: Jan 26, 2022, 19:00 JST Meetup link: https://www.meetup.com/Women-Who-Code-Tokyo/events/283171428/ Asynchronous Study: In the Women Who Code Slack #creative-coding channel

💭 Creative Prompt 💭

✨ “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” ✨

“The quote in this form was a favorite of Steve Jobs but he but he was probably (mis)quoting Pablo Picasso who said “Lesser artists borrow; great artists steal” – who in turn might be rephrasing Igor Stravinsky, but both sayings may well originate in T. S. Eliot’s dictum: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.” – The origins of this quote itself is an example of great artists stealing.”

-- https://web.archive.org/web/20220209094627/https://www.uvu.edu/arts/applause/posts/stealing.html

Tonight's goal 🎯

Can you take an existing software idea and "make it into something better" by injecting your own creativity? Example: Wordle is an online word game that's recently become popular. Many people are copying it and adding their own special flair.

Examples 💭

• Accessibility for WORDLE https://wa11y.co/

• Like WORDLE but in Swedish https://glitch.com/~swordle

• Aggregates WORDLE shares across Twitter: https://glitch.com/~wordleshares

• Japanese WORDLE: https://aseruneko.github.io/WORDLEja/

• Google WORDLE easter egg: https://mashable.com/article/wordle-google-easter-egg

If you don't know what to work on:

Try "remixing" https://glitch.com/~worble or forking https://github.com/hannahcode/wordle and changing a feature of the game, such as

• Using a new dictionary

• Changing the rules of the game

• Adding randomness

• Changing the UI

Word Game Resources

Word Lists

• https://developer.wordnik.com/
• https://github.com/wordnik/wordlist
• https://github.com/hannahcode/wordle/tree/main/src/constants

Intellectual Property Considerations 👀

Since we bring up the topic of "stealing," we'd also like to address the ethical concerns of intellectual property. Please consider the following when borrowing or using other's work

• Are you giving credit to the original source?

• Are you changing it enough to make it your own?

• Is the use legal? E.g. does it fall under a permissive use, such as Fair Use (https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/what-is-fair-use/), Parody Law (https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/parody), an open-source license, etc.?
• Is there a power dynamic between the source and the user? E.g. Cultural appropriation, where a dominant culture may take the creative work of a minority group and use it, often without proper context or permission.

There are no simple answers here, but we ask you to be considerate of others and ensure your work is significantly derivative and properly cited. If you have questions, we can help!

Open Source Information

• https://choosealicense.com/