Project #1 Lost & Found

Jasmin's lost object

“I used to own this piece of black magnet that is shaped irregularly like a small boulder. It’s about one and a half inch in size and can fit easily into my palm. On one side of the magnet there is a sticker with green and white stars on it. A little quirky object.”

Design Process

I first drew the object on paper and figured out how I want to place and arrange the stars. Then I started the p5 sketch with the magnet shape. According to Jasmin, it is shaped irregularly so I applied different radii to each corner so that it looks like “an irregular shaped boulder”. Then I filled the shape with dark grey to imitate the color of a magnet. Secondly, I made a r ectangular shape as the sticker. Next, I learnt how to draw a star from the p5 reference page and added the stars onto the sticker. Jasmin mentioned that the stars are green and white, so I arranged the two colors of the stars to form a designed pattern. Finally, I filled the background using a group of even sized grey rectangles with a scale of transparency. I chose grey specifically based on the backstory of this magnet: Jasmin said that her parents own a business of making knives, the magnet was used to sharpen the knives and it was given to her as an amulet. I used the grey to represent the reflection of the blade. I rotated the grey rectangles to better mimic the blade reflection and to echo with the oblique stars.

Reflection

The language my partner used to describe the image is very brief. Jasmin told me the shape of her magnet and the sticker on it. She also shared the backstory of the magnet, which was mentioned in the process. With her description and story, I thought I could easily sketch it out because I got the idea of how it looks in my imagination. So I sketched along. However, in the process, I realized that there was actually some missing information about the object, such as the background color of the sticker. So I asked Jasmin, but she could not remember these details because she lost the magnet so long ago that the memory has become fuzzy. I had to fill in the gaps with my own imagination. In the process of coding the image, I realized that what your sketch represents sometimes cannot be the same as what you think of in your mind. And your interpretation from the description might not be the same as what the owner thinks. There are always gaps between each individual mind, and the gaps might still exist after through communication. Humans have invented languages to create bridges/connections between each other, but these bridges are not perfect - some information still leaks out in the communicating process and we can still misunderstand each other. The same applies to the human brain and the computer. We use code to communicate with the computer but it is not always perfect. Machine learning is making the computer smarter, and the gaps between the computer and us are becoming smaller. I think in the future, the computer will be able to think in ways that are infinitely close to our ways of thinking, and communicate with us with minimal misinterpretations.