About
The Identity
The art world does not exist. Together, let us create one.
MyArtPlot.com (MAP) is a global arts and crafts community and movement. Fighting elitism, it is an empowerment platform that offers functional tools to re-design the industry's archaic social, professional, and commercial dynamics. On MAP, any one participant is a crucial element of the global movement.
We are here because, as artists, artisans, and crafters, we've suffered for far too long the crushing blow of global isolation caused by technology deficiency. Being trapped in our respective localities, we are plagued by the elitist elements that prevent the global cohesiveness of our industry while severing the limited bonds within our isolated communities. These days, the focus deviates from the raw passion and genius of creation and rests too much upon simply knowing the right people. Elitism in social capital and other forms of resources has created an uneven playing field amongst us, causing inefficiencies in most of us to inspire, to produce, to connect, and to sell. MAP is our profession's singular honest attempt to combat the failures of our industry while actively incorporating the important partcipation of buyers. Together, we dare to fight against elitism and the absence of a globally centralized support and connectivity source. We boldly imagine a world in which we are no longer disconnected, low-resourced, and financially unstable. In our world, there exists a free flow of affordable original arts and crafts to all public and private spaces.
The Function
By providing functional social, professional and commercial tools, MAP allows disconnected artists, crafters, artisans and buyers worldwide to connect socially while interacting professionally and commercially. On MAP, you can showcase, critique, rate, review, favorite, buy, and sell original arts and crafts while interacting with people from around the world and across all experience levels.
The Mission
MAP attempts to solve a problem that has plagued artists and art buyers worldwide since the emergence of the artisan profession some millennia ago. The problem states that social, professional, and commercial interactions between artists, artisans, crafters and buyers are inefficient, caused by technology deficiency, with all parties suffering from (1) information asymmetry, lacking equal distribution of information about each other, and (2) isolation, having no easy centralized channel to connect and interact globally. Therefore, those who create original arts and crafts are notoriously known for earning substandard incomes simply because they, as independent operators, lack easy access to a global concentration of each other and of buyers. Similarly, buyers, lacking the same access to those who create goods, have trouble accessing original arts and crafts, which are thus only available to those who are well connected to the artistic communities and who can afford the high prices, driven up by the inability to sell in large quantities. This situation of inaccessibility from all sides and high prices results in a majority of the arts and crafts professions earning low incomes while original arts and crafts buyers become an extremely elitist group which excludes perhaps a majority potential buyers who, lacking social and financial resources, resolve to buying reprints. Facing this problem, MAP offers itself as a solution.
The Team
Minh Nguyen, Todd Lipcon, and Kim Jackson have devoted 3 years to building MAP. They started when they were still students at Brown. In 2007, Yasuyuki Goto, another Brown alum, joined to lend a helping hand.
Minh designs and manages MAP's identity through its movement, sustainability, and empowerment models. He conceptualized MAP and continues to design its user interface. He has a degree in organizational studies.
Todd directs and manages MAP's identity through its technical and security models. He built and continues to improve MAP's technical platform and backend. He has a degree in computer science.
Kim manages MAP's identity through its community model. She defines and supports MAP's role and responsibility to its global community. She has a degree in cognitive science.
Yasu helps implement MAP's sustainability model and provides general support. He has a degree in international relations.
The Numbers
Together, the team drank 1503 cups of coffee, spent 91 nights without sleep, produced 35,000 lines of code, chatted online for a duration of 459 hours, created 1.1 GB of design data, and had countless hours of laughter. There were 214 instances of Todd typing "hmm" in response to Minh's messages on chat. There were 94 instances of Minh saying "you're making my eye twitch" in normal conversations with both Todd and Kim. Kim considered professional help for her caffeine addiction after 43 instances of begging Todd or Minh to let her have coffee. They feared that she would overdose.