Lost & Found

Description

In this assignment, my partner, Zhijun, described her lost Nokia smartphone. She told me: "It’s a white slide phone. I remember it has three buttons at the bottom with the silver plastic edge. I lost it in a taxi and it was a gift given by my parents.” Using this description, I created a sketch in p5 recreating this lost object from the given information.

Click here for the link to the p5 editor and sketch

Design Process

Given that I know what type of object it is, I made some inferences. For example, the fact that it’s a smartphone immediately told me that it was likely rectangular and includes a screen and camera. In addition, she told me that it was a slide phone, from which I assumed that meant a keyboard could slide out of the phone body. I included a silver edge on the phone using a grey border around the white phone’s rectangular frame and three buttons at the bottom near the bottom edge. I used rounded rectangles to create the main shape of the phone given what I know about smartphones and made the center button at the bottom the “home” button in the middle of two circular buttons. I used cyan to represent an optical surface, such as the screen and the camera. I used dark lines to divide the keyboard section into different keys. I also included a “NOKIA” label at the top using text. I used push() and pop() to assign features to certain 2D primitives without affecting the other shapes, for example rotating the square camera and confining the grey border to the body of the phone alone to represent the silver edge.

Reflection

One of the most interesting parts of this assignment was interpreting my partner’s language and description. She made certain assumptions, such as expecting me to know what a smartphone looks like as well as what is a slide phone. She also told me the brand name, which prompted me to include text on my p5 sketch. When it came to information she did not assume I already knew, like the color and three buttons at the bottom, she described it in plain language. She gave me limited details, which I believe is because she wanted to leave certain things up to interpretation or for me to use my knowledge of smartphones. My interpretation of the image then became clear, starting with what I thought a white slide phone looked like, then filling in the blanks with guesses that I thought looked aesthetically correct. The shape of the phone and slide out keyboard were based on the image in my head of the smartphone, then I took some liberties with the shape of the buttons, the color of the screen and camera, and including the name brand on the phone.

Using code, I thought of the design of her lost Nokia smartphone and for the most part dissected it into basic shapes, then reconstructed the image through the p5 rendering. Since smartphones are already very geometric and composed of basic shapes, coding it into a sketch was relatively straightforward, and the final p5 sketch looks almost exactly like the sketch I did by hand to interpret my partner’s description of the object, with little lost in translation or changed from the original. However, in coding a sketch of the image I noticed that I had to think about the order of the shapes and creating sections of code to represent each feature without impacting other features, which is not something I had to think about when first interpreting the description of my partner’s object. Still, turning words into an image presented a much greater challenge than then sketching that image through code. Creating the image then making it in p5 were both visual tasks, whereas the first part of the assignment when interpreting words to create an image was less direct. Nevertheless, I believe that the final sketch at the very least resembles a phone, and I hope it looks like the object that my partner once lost.