Social media usage in the US has rather entrenched habits at this point. Any given digital activity has a go-to destination. No one wants another site they have to visit to participate in something. An elegant technological solution has the lowest barrier to entry possible, so there’s an incentive to piggyback on those established practices. Real time sentiment from Twitter, personal information from Facebook, pictures from Instagram. With this usage pattern in mind, we were faced with the task of making a technological solution for bridging two locations that are nine time zones apart with $100 and no production team.

Creature has two offices on opposite ends of the Earth, London and Seattle. In an effort to bring them together, we thought about technological solutions that could allow us to share our internal cultures. Our employees are constantly generating their own social media content, so we thought harnessing the pictures they shared would be an elegant solution. We made Cheapstaprint, a PHP script that works with any printer on your network to automatically print out whatever hashtags or locations you specify through the Instagram API. We hooked up a Polaroid PoGo printer and started printing out stickers of the Instagrams that were taken at both offices. We built this for under $100 total, and then we released the code on github, open source. Next steps involve writing up code that can serve as plug and play for a RasPi.

We’ve had a number of people forking our code on github, but the real success for us was seeing that at the time of this writing 4 other ad agencies had begun implementing this script in their offices. We released this as a way of combating the notion that you had to pay top dollar for a closed system like Instaprint or any of its start up competitors, so the end goal would be to see this code used and remixed by more people in place of closed systems. This is another drop in the bucket for open source platforms as viable alternatives to for-profit options.