walkie-talkies has been around since World War II. it is one of those inventions that is incredibly wide-spread. me and my partner decided to try and create a plaque that could explain what this object is used for and how does it look.
as for my plaque itself, i decided to depict the signal coming from one walkie-talkie to another as waves, cause I thought that is something that any creature with any sense of space of direction. even though the waves have a certain destination that they are flowing at, there is no embodiment of space. moreover, i believe that placing two faces on the left and right side of the “canvas” eliminated the necessity to explain how human body works. i decided not to highlight the fact that people hear with their ears or speak with their mouth (it can be seen however is not essential to the design).
speaking of the object, i figured that elaborating on the exact shape and how the system works is not necessary: the main point is that it receives and delivers the “waves”. i also highlighted the difference between two walkie-talkies by changing the second one’s color. this points out that there are, in fact, two objects that are involved in the process.
as for the depicted humans – or to be precise, their heads – i have chosen to use different skin colors and also leave just the outline of their faces in order to create as vague representation of human appearance as possible. this, in my opinion, is more representative of the variety of nationalities and races that we, as a humanity, have. furthermore, I illustrated different genders that is also contributing to this idea of depicting inclusivity.
i believe that this plaque also does not have any relation to time or the way people speak. this also is supposed to give a freedom of interpretation to the aliens regarding the way people speak or comprehend information. this lack of definitive mechanism, i guess, is the best way to actually explain something.
overall i am quite satisfied with my design, however there are some things that I could have done differently. for example, i could have depicted a whole human body so that the aliens understand how people look in their full height. moreover, I could have created an illustration of how the walkie-talkie is structured inside and how people are perceiving sounds. but that is a totally another story. 