Project #1 Lost and Found

Description

Seven years ago, I lost my necklace that I had cherished so much. The necklace is composed of a 18K yellow gold chain and a little butterfly pendant charm. The butterfly charm is not a solid chunk of gold but a flat sculpture with delicate cutouts like a net. Its wings are made of beautifully curved lines which constitute a butterfly shape on the whole. The chain is a ball chain. The size of the ball is small. If I might be extremely fortunate to find the necklace, I would wear it everyday and run around here and there so that the butterfly can literally fly.

Design Process

I would like to categorize the whole design process into three steps.

First of all, after I received Joy’s description. And I read her description carefully. And I highlighted some keywords in this description, which I thought would be very important for helping me to realize the sketch.

Secondly, I started to draw the necklace’s shape according to her description by handdrawn. After I finish the sketch of the shape, I tried to define the color of the necklace. And then I considered how to express the gloss in my drawing.


















After finished the drawing, I began to interpret the image in computer language. I separated the butterfly shape into pieces of ellipses. In order to show the details of the wing hollow, I put a smaller ellipse with the same color as the background in the middle of the wing. I chose blue-green color to express Joy's mood. And I set the location and direction of the chain.

Reflection

My partner’s description is very emotional, I can feel that how much she loves this necklace and how sad when she lost it. The summary I just wrote above depends on my human understanding according to another human’s description.

When I drew the image by using hand drawing. I only can draw the shape of this necklace and how it looks like in detail. But I cannot express the emotion in my simple sketch. So I decided to use a blue-green color for the background to represent the depressed mood.

When typing the code into p5.js, the process is different from when I painted by hand. The randomly drawn lines are disassembled into basic geometrics. Every geometric shape has precise size, coordinates, and angle of rotation. The blue-green that represents emotion is transformed into an RGB value. This process reflects the difference between humans and computers when interpreting the same object-there is a difference in the logic and order of computing and human understanding of things.

I gradually realized the differences in the whole process of this assignment. When interpreting from human language to human image, I transformed a paragraph of text into a visual image in the brain. And then I drew this image by hand. The difference in this process lies in the different ways of human expression. Although language can accurately and emotionally describe a thing, it cannot express itself straightly compared with images. Compared with the process from human image to interpret to computer language, the difference between them lies in the order and logic of the understanding of things. I think this assignment is very useful to help me to understand the interaction between human and human, and also human and computer.