As a durable and useful writing tool, the fountain pen can be considered an important invention in the history of communication. And there are some small-scale but delicate technologies involved in fountain pens.
We create this plaque to show the technology of the fountain pen:
To explain this system to aliens, we try to jump out of the box, which turns out to be really difficult. To illustrate the interior structure of the fountain pen, we part the pen and show all its different components of it. Nib, feed, nib collar, ink reservoir, cap, and barrel are illustrated in the plaque separately. And the working process of the fountain pen is: the ink flows through the feed, down to the nib, and then lands on the paper to write down/draw things.
The composition of the elements is centripetal, all pointing to the center of the plaque as a way to attract the attention of the aliens. Also, as is depicted in the reading, the aliens may not have a linear system of language and can interpret images as a whole by their linguistic system. So the composition is considered as a whole to represent the technology of a fountain pen, but not a linear process. In this sense, we don’t think having the whole technological working process of the fountain pen is necessary for the plaque.
A human hand holding a pen is on the right side of the plaque. It is designed to show how human beings utilize a pen to write as well as the complete look of a typical fountain pen.
In fact, throughout the working process of creating this plaque, some more questions came to my mind. As the plaque is targeted to what we call “aliens”, I found it hard for me to guess the communication methods of species other than humans. In this assignment, we only utilize visual elements to convey the message. And the assumption of our design is that the visual elements make sense to aliens, which is almost impossible from my perspective. Therefore, after finishing this assignment, I get a feeling that this kind of “communication” is mostly based on human perceptions, like all fictional things are ultimately targeted to humans ourselves.
For the “real communications” with an extraterrestrial civilization, maybe it can only be observed when something like the reading occurs but is not prepared beforehand.