What Line is it Anyway? explores the way people interpret an adjective through the simple task of drawing a line. We crowd sourced 1300 people to draw us a line by using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, which is an amazing platform to get many people (called workers) to do a simple task without them knowing the  bigger picture or context.

We asked each worker to draw us a line from 'start' to 'finish', the only other information we gave them was that they had to do it according to an adjective. For example, we asked them: "Draw a spiky line". Each worker got paid 2 U.S dollar cents.

We used Processing to create the online drawing tool and stitch it all together. Max/MSP/Jitter was used to create some pre-visualisations, run some tests and do some list processing.

Interesting facts:

Average Time Spent on a Drawing:

creative Line: 55 seconds
smooth Line: 70 seconds
spiky Line: 42 seconds
straight Line: 38 seconds

Collective length of lines (about 150 participants per adjective) :

Spirally Line: 39 meters
Straight Line:  21 meters
Wild Line: 44 meters
Smooth Line: 20 meters