Sark.space is live!

And its live! I haven’t worked out all of the kinks and it has issues, but the system does run and generates t-shirts given inspiration from Twitter. Next stop is to keep the system up and running. The milestone I'm aiming for now is for the system to generate a t-shirt that inspires someone to buy it.

So as a reminder my idea was very simple. To look at social media and scrape concise phrases that can then be analyzed and paired with an image as a t-shirt design. This design would then be sent through a drop shipping t-shirt company and finally marketed back to the original source.

Taking an example, let’s say the system came across the phrase: “I love my Mom!” Natural Language Processing is then used to pull out the nouns and verbs and using what it finds it would perhaps find a picture of a mother or perhaps a heart. Stitching the text to the image it then ships the design off to a drop shipping company to create a product that can be sold and finally it markets that product back to the original source of the phrase.

Now this isn’t without it’s issues. Automatically creating t-shirts means that I can easily find a situation where I take something out of context, or perhaps the juxtaposition suggests something else. One example was the system pulled a joke from #oneliners: “Does this rag smell like chloroform to you?” Now that’s not the most sensitive joke there ever was in itself, but you can see where it’s going. Now in my tests my algorithm picked up on rag and in its searching and selecting came back with a little girl carrying a rag doll. It then paired the phrase to the image and voile I’ve offended everyone.
To combat this I’m not going to take the step and market shirts back to their original sources. I think I’m going to spend a few months just posting the t-shirts to my own twitter account to make a record of those ideas that are being picked up and see how offensive these are, or perhaps this was just a fluke.

Overall the whole project was a good learning project that did take a few years. Not so much because the coding was hard, but because the project was just larger than what could be accomplished quickly. This led to breaks being taken after a while, learning different systems along the way and also dreaming bigger than what I could accomplish in a certain amount of time.

Going forward I’ll check once a week to see if the system is till up and running and then work on the issues that pop up and stop the system running. I’ll report back when we’ve sold our first t-shirt. I've been having trouble with my cleanup causing a bit of mayhem in the database so I'll turn it off and manually clean up the data once a week until I've sussed my issues. Here's hoping for our first sale.