Lost and Found

Description

My Name is Jiujin Feng. I received the object description from my partner, Yiwen Xu, and her description is following:
A glass bottle I used for water storage. I often take it out with me. It's a thin bottle covered with a green sleeve. There is a long belt on its silver lid for me to grab, so the bottle is very portable.

Design Process

I first illustrated the image based on the description on a grid sheet. A glass water bottle is a very common item in daily life, so I just followed the description t o create shapes needed to compose a bottle, including lid, bottle body, base, and a stripe with a belt to grab. The grid helped me precisely locate the position of each shape. After the sketch on paper, I created a high-fidelity illustration in Sketch and fill with colors. The step helped me set the color palette and had a sense of the final look. More importantly, I can directly have the RGB color code without adjusting back and forth.

Reflection

My partner described the item from a objective perspective in English. Based on the description and image, I believe the water bottle is the kind of small stuff that adds a little pleasure in our daily life. It must the item my partner used very frequently and carried it everywhere she went. I can feel how upset she was when the moment she lost the bottle.

While using code to depict the image is totally different to feel or draw the image on paper. The experience when I input code to computer is less emotional compared with drawing on paper. Also, there is no feedbacks when I type codes and I can only expect results when the code is processing. I also had to input very carefully to avoid errors.

From initially writing my own description, interpreting my partners description to finally inputting codes to computers, the methods of communication is constantly changing. Writing my own description is a self-expression with no restriction. Interpreting description from my partner is to read image in a form of text. Input to computer is to convert text in a way that computer can understand to generate image. During every stage, there is no direct illustration of the image, but through code (text is a way of code) we are able to exchange information between human and human, and also human and machine.