2023-10-12 –, Bazar
In 2021, during a cultural hackathon named Coding da Vinci, I developed with my colleague the web application “Plantala”. With Plantala you can create your own mandala from aesthetic plant parts, save it, print it and colour it afterwards. Along the way, you will also learn something about the special characteristics of individual plants. All items are based on original biological educational panels from the collection of Göttingen University and were published under a Creative Commons license.
Since then it has been used also by biology teachers or by stressed people to calm themselves down by painting “Plantalas”.
Originally designed as an open-source application for a media station in an exhibition, the underlying framework of Plantala offers cultural institutions the opportunity to develop their own media station for creating item based mandalas. This framework called Media Station as a Service (MaaS) gives you an easy way to combine the technical benefits of Plantala with other digital images.
This approach was successfully tested in practice just a few months later. “Julala” was the first desired after-use of the application - so in three simple steps “Plantala” became “Julala”. With Julala you can create your own mandala with dragons, whales and unicorns. Along the way, you'll learn about an important political wedding in 16th century and how people celebrated festivals in the Renaissance.
In my lightning talk I want to encourage cultural institutions to re-use the Media Station as a Service (MaaS) to create their own “Yourlala”.
Software Architect, Culture Enthusiast, Open Source Lover
Since my youth I am enthusiastic about the possibilities offered by software development. For 15 years, I work as a developer, software-architect and trainer. In the context of the Coding da Vinci cultural hackathon (2018-2022) I expanded my skills in a creative diverse environment. Since 2022, I use my expertise for my job as software developer at the Leipzig University Library as in my company, Digitalwarenkombinat, which is dedicated to the creative use of open cultural data and develops web applications with GLAM institutions under the motto „Shaping digital worlds together“.