When the Random Word Picker gave Dahyun Hwang the word “diary”, she was instantly transported back to when she was in elementary school, when writing a diary was a regular task defined as homework. “At that time, it was boring and not very fun to do every day,” she says. “So I was ‘over-writing’ a week of diaries the day before they were submitted. Dahyun decided to design the perfect web tool for his childhood. It’s a diary that can be quickly adapted to produce different stories by selecting random words from a drop-down menu. You can also scribble around the words using the mouse. “It’s similar to the journal format I used as a kid,” she explains. “I think it’s fascinating to see something that was once analog now being digitized and viewed online.”

Another nostalgic project came to fruition when Naree Shin got the word “child” from the random picker. To find inspiration, she started leafing through children’s drawings on the Internet. “I suddenly realized that a lot of weather elements were drawn in their sketchbooks,” she tells us. Their pointed suns and scribbled clouds were much more interesting than the boring icons that tell the weather online. So Naree decided to use these drawings to create a weather forecasting tool. Coding four different weather pages (Clear, Clouds, Rain and Fog) with animated children’s drawings, she then linked the pages with the weather API. If you type a city in the prompt window, the current weather for that location appears on the screen, charmingly illustrated with the little doodles.

In response to the “young” prompt, Yunseo Go decided to take us back to the early 2000s when “text faces ruled the internet before emojis came along”. She created an “Expression Translator” tool using a webcam. This nifty little device translates your expressions picked up by the webcam into text faces using the ASCII code method. You can also see other users’ activity on the translator as it works via WebSocket in real time, Yunseo adds.

With eight contributors creating different answers to a random word every two weeks, the alphabetically organized website is quickly becoming a vibrant web of pure, pure originality and randomness. The collective is now on the letter “Q” and nearing the end of its alphabet project, so they’ve started drafting ideas for “more fun and effective” ways to get their voices heard on the internet, Yeoleum says. . “We believe that the web space offers endless possibilities for artistic expression,” she warmly concludes. “As long as there is internet access, these things can be achieved anywhere in the world without restrictions or discrimination.”