Digital Salvage is an innovative digital initiative designed around the concept of creative reuse and renewal. Drawing thoughtfully from various elements derived from past research, digital arts explorations, and practical creative entrepreneurship projects, Digital Salvage positively reframes prior insights and resources into a unified, new, and accessible digital tool. It takes components and code from past projects, alongside activities that were previously piloted and tested, repurposing and salvaging them for new, innovative and entrepreneurial-focused creative activities.
This project builds on elements of digital arts and creative entrepreneurship piloted in 2021-2023 using strategic digital arts innovation funding from the Canada Council for the Arts Digital Greenhouse and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design.
At the core of this initiative is an intelligent chatbot, recently developed into an adaptable WordPress plugin empowered by OpenAI technologies, conceived as a minimum viable product to serve creative entrepreneurs and artists who may operate within limited resource frameworks.
Our goal in launching Digital Salvage is to consolidate existing creative research and experimental digital practices, introducing an intuitive conversational chatbot powered by cutting-edge artificial intelligence. Following an initial development phase establishing this chatbot as a stable working prototype, the next step will see it integrated thoughtfully with the CO-STARS collaborative planning and assessment methodology. In this second, upcoming phase, the chatbot will specifically support northern artists and aspiring creative entrepreneurs in crafting, preparing, and analyzing comprehensive proposals aimed at securing grants and funding from organizations including the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and Manitoba Arts Council.
Through Digital Salvage, we aim to empower communities of artists and emerging creative entrepreneurs, providing them with powerful tools, clear guidance resources, and technological insights they often lack when working within constrained budgets or limited infrastructure. Ultimately, Digital Salvage seeks not only to streamline artistic and proposal development processes but also foster confidence, cultivate innovation, and enhance clarity and strength in the broader artistic community, while respecting and highlighting the value of prior research, artistic exploration, digital innovation, and creative entrepreneurship.
Overview and Project Background:
This chatbot plugin will represent a detailed and carefully crafted digital prototype integrating OpenAI’s state-of-the-art artificial intelligence models directly into WordPress, the most widely used content management platform online today. From the outset, the primary motivation behind this initiative is to create not only a functional digital tool but also a foundational learning platform—one that emphasizes clarity, explicit functionality, responsible digital ethics, inclusion, accessibility, and open opportunities to expand and enhance further through thoughtful participation by diverse learners and creative technologists.
Over the course of this collaborative development process, we will successfully implement a secure and robust integration with OpenAI by making use of their “Researcher Access Program,” a valuable initiative allowing community-driven projects, educators, startups, artists, and nonprofit organizations to explore and implement powerful AI models for educational, research, or community-benefitting purposes. By working within the WordPress ecosystem, we’ve bridged the cutting-edge potential AI technology with a platform accessible to a wide variety of creators and administrators, significantly reducing the barriers to entry and encouraging further experimentation, creation, and innovation.
This project itself will be highly iterative, collaborative, and exploratory. We will map out, step by step, the creation of a conversational chatbot tailored specifically for an interview-style interaction—allowing administrators or content creators to define interview flow, write carefully considered instruction prompts, preserve and access conversational memory (history), and serve the content in a structured, easily maintainable way, all within the familiar WordPress administrative context. At each phase, we will consciously focus on providing transparency, security, usability, and ease-of-understanding to ensure the plugin could function not only as a technical achievement but as a powerful learning resource and foundation for future improvements and extensions.
How the Plugin Works:
The chatbot plugin will work by integrating directly with OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 chat-completion APIs to provide advanced conversational capabilities embedded seamlessly into a WordPress site’s front end. Upon activation and setup, site administrators start by securely inserting their OpenAI API key through an easy-to-use settings screen, deliberately designed to encourage learning and interaction from users, youth and creators who may not previously have experience working directly with technical tools such as API keys or coding. The plugin safeguards sensitive data appropriately, only communicating with OpenAI servers via a secure back-end process.
We will adapt this code to work with Google Gemini API keys as well.
Administrators will build their own unique chatbot CO-STARS “interview experiences” through a custom-built interface within the WordPress dashboard. There, they will create, store, and manage an ordered set of pre-programmed questions tailored to their specific goals or creative visions. These questions can optionally include designated “knowledge base content” and carefully crafted “assistant instructions,” instructing the AI assistant on precisely how to respond to user inputs in context-aware, detailed, and friendly ways. Each interview interaction stored through user engagement is also saved directly on the secure and accessible database built specifically for the plugin, facilitating later review, learning sessions analysis, or administrative modification and improvement.
On the front-end website, visitors will use use a chatbot interface dynamically generated directly from these stored question sets and their accompanying assistant instructions. Conversations will start with a personalized introduction greeting defined by the administrator, followed by pre-defined questions. As users respond, the assistant carefully uses the context and carefully crafted instructions to generate thoughtfully responsive messages, creating an authentic, human-feeling conversation. Upon finishing the predefined questions, the chatbot transitions smoothly into a free-form conversational mode, equipped with conversational memory, where the bot recalls earlier user responses in the ongoing conversation for contextually accurate replies.
Educational and Community Value:
Beyond the practical technological uses of the chatbot itself, the design and structure of this plugin prototype create explicitly valuable educational opportunities for creative entrepreneurship students at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design Creative Entrepreneurship Program and northern Indigenous youth artists actively supported by the Manitoba Arts Council. It will be presented in a transparent, modular architecture—complete with explicit documentation, clearly commented code, and a careful breakdown of functionality—so that students, interns, and young learners without prior programming experience can easily understand its inner workings, structure, and mechanisms. This emphasis on arts education, climate and creative entrepreneurship is a significant part of the project’s intent, nurturing knowledge, community growth, practical skill-building, and creative capacity among emerging artists and innovators.
Students and young people exploring this project will find an accessible, carefully designed entry point into the fields of digital content creation, programming, AI interaction design, UI/UX interface design, information ethics, usability testing, experiential design and WordPress development. By consciously separating the chatbot’s administrative controls, presentation elements, JavaScript interactions, secure backend APIs, and database storage, the prototype allows focus on individual elements according to interest or creative capacity—creating pathways into various technical, artistic, and design-related roles and knowledge areas. Learners will extend the front-end user experience through advanced visual design or interactivity, explore new conversational flows and innovative assistant scripts, engage deeply in user interface testing and usability optimization, or directly explore API strategies, artificial intelligence prompting, and responsible-AI implementation best practices.
Furthermore, students working through arts internships can fully personalize and stylize the chatbot’s appearance, interaction methods, or conversational style to match specific creative visions, brand identities, artistic projects, or community initiatives they conceive themselves. Because the core technological architecture will be built solidly with clear spaces for growth, experiential learners have a safe yet open-ended sandbox environment to practice, innovate, refine, and present their own original enhancements and improvements, preparing them for professional opportunities or entrepreneurial projects in technology, art, communication, and social-impact contexts.
Opportunities for Enhancement and Collaboration:
Looking ahead, this alpha-stage concept prototype is an intentionally minimal yet fully operational framework, perfectly primed for creative enhancements, artistic refinement, and experiential learning. It invites future teams of students, programming novices, emerging artists, and creative technologists at MCAD and youth participants supported by organizations such as the Manitoba Arts Council to envision and build additional sophisticated enhancements and implementations.
Future improvements might include interactive animations directly integrated into chatbot conversations, advanced data visualizations that represent conversational transcripts creatively, voice-based chatbot integrations, or personalized conversational experiences powered by context-sensitive storytelling or multimedia content. The backend could also be further developed to leverage analytics, generate conversational insights, or integrate with innovative crowdfunding or fundraising integrations to align directly with creative entrepreneurship and nonprofit outreach projects.
We will co-create something functional yet open-ended, resilient yet ripe with creative potential. As learners, interns, and artists working together collaboratively, they’ll be positioned ideally to cultivate not just technical proficiency but thoughtful digital ethics, socially responsible AI deployment strategies, creative product development processes, brand development and mutually beneficial cross-sectoral, industry collaborations. Each learner’s unique vision, innovations, and experiences will easily find meaningful expression through this openly structured, community-oriented digital workspace.
We look forward enthusiastically to the fascinating directions this thoughtfully developed concept and its prototype could take in the hands of passionate learners committed to creativity, community, ethics, innovation, and the cross-disciplinary growth deeply encouraged by the Minneapolis College of Art and Design’s Creative Entrepreneurship Program and the ongoing support of the Manitoba Arts Council.
About the Digital Salvage Chatbot Tool (Phase 1: Minimum Viable Product)
At its core, the Digital Salvage Chatbot project is an intelligent conversational tool designed and developed as a WordPress plugin, currently envisioned as a functional prototype or “minimum viable product” (MVP). Built upon the OpenAI GPT family of language models (specifically GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4), this chatbot integrates advanced artificial intelligence capabilities directly into the familiar administrative interface of WordPress, the world’s most widely used web publishing platform. The plugin seamlessly embeds AI-generated conversation capabilities within any WordPress webpage or post, offering rich, engaging interactions structured specifically around interview-style dialogues.
At this current concept stage, the chatbot performs several foundational yet powerful tasks. First, it provides WordPress site administrators with a straightforward dashboard to securely manage crucial API connection details, including the official API keys provided via OpenAI’s Researcher Access Program. This ensures that AI interactions remain secure, authenticated, and responsibly managed.
Within this admin interface, the tool also allows administrators to define a set of customizable conversational questions intended to engage visitors. Each interview question can be individually composed, reordered, and managed within the WordPress dashboard. Administrators may also optionally include detailed “knowledge base” information and explicit “assistant instructions” which guide and enhance the chatbot’s responses to user inputs, ensuring a more contextual, relevant, and friendly tone in the interactions.
On the front-end of a hosted WordPress site, the chatbot introduces and guides users clearly through each predefined interview question in a friendly and conversational style. When a user responds, the chatbot leverages the carefully-defined assistant instructions and stored knowledge base content—together with OpenAI’s GPT models—to generate meaningful, contextually appropriate replies. Users experience these responses exactly as they would a human-guided interview, with conversational language enhanced by markdown formatting (rendering bold, italic, headings, and clearly numbered or bulleted lists) presented neatly and visibly. These responses carefully support visitors by providing expert-level guidance, thoughtful inquiries, and well-structured suggestions in the conversation itself.
Additionally, the chatbot captures and securely stores conversation history data directly into the WordPress backend database. Each conversation interaction remains available to administrators, viewable and manageable directly from the admin panel for additional reflection, analysis, and improvement. At the conclusion of the structured interview-style questions, the chatbot gracefully transitions into a free-form conversational mode, allowing continuous dialogue leveraging the conversational history (“memory”). As such, the chatbot sustains contextual awareness of questions and answers already exchanged earlier in the conversation, presenting ongoing, relevant responses even after completing the initial interview questions.
Currently, in a very basic concept and pre-prototype form, the ChatBot lays the groundwork for a sophisticated conversational system that is adaptable, secure, powerful, and user-friendly. It will intentionally provide a stable, extensible, yet simplified baseline from which future phases and broader implementation plans—such as the next phase applying the CO-STARS methodology to support arts proposal preparation and other tasks—can be reliably built.
This tool is explicitly designed to support learning, iterative digital design, and collaborative development efforts with Canadian and American youth and students at institutions such as Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and the Manitoba Arts Council.
