IDAT204 - A Digital Organism

For the first of three IDAT204 projects our task is to create a Digital Organism that is interactive and can be run on any platform.  The project is a pairs project and so I will be working with Sara Barber(http://sara4barber.wordpress.com/).  Firstly lets define the concept of organism:

1. "a form of life composed of mutually interdependent parts that maintain various vital processes."
2. "a form of life considered as an entity; an animal, plant, fungus, protistan, or moneran."
3. "any organized body or system conceived of as analogous to a living being: the governmental organism."
4. "any complex thing or system having properties and functions determined not only by the properties and relations of its individual parts, but by the character of the whole that they compose and by the relations of the parts to the whole."

(http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/organism)

My partner was away for the initial concept lesson and so I began the ideas process. With these concepts in mind I considered different types of organisms that we could make.  I listed a large number of different animals but also wanted to try and approach the more social aspect of an organism, such as that in definition 3.  I thought this would be a more individual approach to take and so tried to keep this in my thoughts as well. It occurred to me that ants act as both individual organisms in the physical sense, but also work together as a single body alike to that of the government as suggested in definition 3.  This choice of animal therefore covered all the concepts and so I settled for that.  I then had to invent a name for the organism that my partner and I would create and so chose the title Org-ant as this summed up the aim and the product together -  to create and organism, which in our case is ants. I next took this idea to my partner who agreed that it was a good concept and so the next step was to investigate both the conceptual and technological sides to the project.