Elective is an app that students can use to make a physical magazine about university life. Upload photos into the stream and vote on the photos taken by others. Our promise is to publish whatever photos receive the highest scores. In short, we are ceding editorial control of Elective magazine’s visual content to our users.
Elective magazine will be made available on four campuses: UBC, UVic, SFU, and Emily Carr University. It will publish seven times over the course of the academic year.
The voting interface is simple. If you like a photo, slide it to the top of the screen. If you dont like the photo, slide it down to the bottom. If youre indifferent, slide it to the left. You can vote on a photo once, every vote is equal, and all votes will be kept completely secret. We chose a democratic method because we aim to create a communal record of university life. It’s an organic process that is under your control. So, the best way to end up with the magazine you want is to vote on everything.
In the top corner of the app you will find a clock. It will start at approximately five hundred four hours (three weeks) and count backwards. When it gets to zero we will accept no more submissions and no more votes will be counted.
At that point, the design team will check the scores, pull the winners off the server, and get to work laying out the magazine. If nothing goes wrong, the issue should arrive on campus about ten days after the clock hits zero.
We chose to make a magazine because print is the best format for viewing photographs. The user interface is elegant (turning a page is really easy), they require no electricity, and a magazine can sit on your coffee table starting conversations for years.
You may not realize it, but you’re experiencing a portion of your life that much of society idealizes. We want to help you document it.