Nomadic Labs is now Dreamside Digital! Read more about it in the blog post 👉
The home page of Directions to Nowhere in ParticularTwo screenshots of the app homepage and one of the prompt screensScreenshot of user contributed art

Directions to Nowhere in Particular

The description from the website does this project more justice than I ever could:

Directions to Nowhere in Particular is a game of chance that alters the ways you sense, make, and navigate public space. Anyone can play. Simply go outside, pick a random prompt, and follow the directions for interacting with your surroundings. Perhaps you’ll feel something new or create something special that you’ll want to share.

As part of the Digital and/as Public Space Initiative, this project explores how people and places relate through software. It proposes ways of playing that might test and transform our conceptions of a public — directing our (mis)use of everyday digital tools to produce new socio-poetic moments. Hopefully, through this kind of play, we may catch a glimpse of a different future. The Directions are exercises in tying intimate relations within our networks. If we can attune ourselves closely to our ecologies, if we can also be more attentive to our digital affordances, we’re better primed to wonder what people and publics are capable of being and doing.

The technical stuff

Directions to Nowhere is a progressive web app (PWA) designed for mobile-first. It is built on an Airtable backend that allows the team to easily manage the content. User-submitted content also comes in through Airtable, and goes through a review process before being published on the app.

The illustrations are custom drawn and animated SVGs.