Bit By Bit: Brendan Dawes Crowdsources Storytelling Via Text for Airbnb

Bit By Bit: Brendan Dawes Crowdsources Storytelling Via Text for Airbnb

Where one of Dawes’ skill sets ends, a new one begins. He transitions easily from hardware tinkering, to front end coding, to back-end database management, and then onto 3-D printing.

Dawes’ project range from a Happiness Machine, to a digital representation the world’s economy in gigabytes. He sees projects from a 50,000 foot view and positions them squarely on the intersection of art and technology.

12 Printers, 1 Haus, Tons of Stories

At Sundance Film Festival, Brendan engineered a network of 12 printers to print random crowdsourced stories which other festival attendees texted in to a Twilio number.  Press one button on a printer, and you had a travel tip or nugget of philosophical wisdom in your hand. Festival goers hung those printed stories on string throughout the exhibit, giving a physical presence to an otherwise digital story.

“I was amazed at the success of it. It was amazing to see the stories people produced. The stories were all pinned up and people are there for hours just looking through them,” says Brendan.

How It All Works

Creative agency, Civic Entertainment Group, commissioned Brendan to help build the installation for Airbnb after seeing his Happiness Machine. They wanted to empower Airbnb Haus visitors to share their stories easily, and immediately. The choice to use text messaging was an easy one. “Everyone knows how to send a text message and everyone has a phone,” said Dawes.

While sharing a story and getting a printed story was simple, engineering the experience was a little more complex. Here’s how it works when you’re submitting a story and receiving a story

The Storyteller

• The storyteller texts a story to Brendan’s Twilio-powered number.
• The story is logged into an Open Shift database built using Node JS
• Twilio sends back a reply to the storyteller thanking them for the story.

The Story Receiver

• The receiver walks up to a printer and presses an Electric IMP button
• The WiFi connected button triggers a request to Brendan’s database, pulling a story from it.
• The server logs that request, and prints a story or message to pass to the printer
• The printer prints out a story to the receiver.

Assembling Bits Together

There were a whole lot of moving parts working in tandem to create one cohesive experience for the Airbnb Haus visitors. Brendan knows how to orchestrate those parts, he’s been doing it his whole life across different career fields. He’s worked (and continues to work) as a photographer, a graphic designer, a DJ, and an engineer. Whether he’s putting together notes, bits, or blocks of code, it’s all the same.

“It’s about all about assembling bits, and that’s really what I’m doing now. I put together discreet components. By themselves they’re mundane, the power is when you combine those things together. Whether that’s a server thing, SMS, or a thermal printer. You stick those components together and get something bigger than it’s parts.”