Empowering creativity through nonsensical fun
Created by Cindy Nakhammouane
Computer Science and Design Thesis
Exhibited at UIC YES! 2026
GraffGraff is a website and community gallery made to empower and inspire being more creative in our daily lives.
Online nonsensical art games were a natural vehicle to push this message as they provide an approachable environment of low stakes and stress free exploration of creative expression.
- 1. Website
- 2. Sticker sheet
- 3. Poster
- 4. Handouts
- 5. Signage Display
Problem: People Want to be more creative!
Preliminary conceptual development started with brain dumping topics related to nonsensical creativity, looking specifically for sources of nonsense and creative inspiration in my own life and in the world around me.
Once I landed on the idea to create an online game, I began shaping a visual identity for the game, focusing on a sticker graffiti aesthetic for its association with creative expression and community that aligns with my project's values.
Thesis Question:
"How can we use digital communities to inspire nonsensical creativity?"
My research first began by exploring methodologies to nonsense and the relationship between nonsensical creativity and forming digital communities.
What I found was that creativity is considered a skill that can be developed with practice and consistency, and that people are often more creative when they are in a social setting or collaborating with others. This lead me to experimenting with what kinds of games to create as well as made me want to implement several modes of socialization/game play per creativity game.
I then shifted to market research, searching for existing platforms and games that encourage creativity and self expression. Some notable places of inspiration were Gartic Phone, Jackbox, and Scribbl.io.
Illustrator
Figma
Photoshop
Indesign
Mural
Typeface: Superpop
Custom letterform based on Boiga
After wireframing the UI in Figma, I transferred over to Illustrator to make formal UI designs. Once the visuals were complete, I began planning the website structure and developing UI components for the website, modularly creating one page or game at a time.
React
TypeScript
Next.js
Tailwind
Data storage: Firebase
Web hosting: Vercel
Six Field Interviews
I conducted interviews with people of various levels of creativity about their creative practices and views on creativity. I also guided them through various nonsensical creativity exercises I made up or researched. Done with physical paper, I tested the game flow of potential games, measuring how much fun they had and how creative it made them feel afterwards.
Findings: People felt doing creative things consistently/daily made them feel more creative, they preferred drawing games over verbal, and preferred playing games with a social aspect.
Survey (30 Responses)
Continuing the efforts of my field interviews, I made a Google Forms survey to gain additional insight on people's current views on creativity and personal creative practices. I used these insights to help influence what exercises/features I should include in my social creativity games.
