What do we learn about the process of the designers and the artist discussed in the text? What is the role of “process” in their overall activity?
One thing impressed me a lot about the process of the designers and the artist discussed is that instruction’s execution need understanding and coorperation, as is presented in Jules’ article :”To that extent, the expectation of‘beauti-ful drawings’ is no more than another constraint, rule the participants are given and have to deal with together. “(2009) From my perspective, the “process” in their overall activity is also a kind of art pieces, a part of create, as they stated apparently on their home page :”The Process Is the Product”.
Describe how their approach differs from designs or drawings you have created in the past and what the impact on the resulting work is.
When I was going to create something, I used to make a plan/image on paper or in my mind, and then think how to fit the plan with approaches and adjustments. But their approach to create seems to make the process of create itself a work of art, rather than only the result of it. Comparing with results, mine are limited in the original ideas and the process of creating seems almost to stop at the planning/designing stage; While the conditional design artiests’ results are more random and have some unpredictability which makes the results expecting and depart from convention.
The text introduces the concept of the conditional drawing, where the artwork is the result of a series of instructions (rules) being performed. Can you imagine a (short) set of rules that, when followed on a sheet of paper, might produce an interesting, or unexpected, result?
Sometime I can simulate the instructions executed in my mind, so I can imagine what will happen. However, this process is only easy to imagine when the instructions are simple and fixed. I can’t clearly imagine what will happen under instructions that might be changed at any time. And the results are more likely a blurred image in my mind. Just as what happened in Vitruvian Paint Machine, I can imagine the walls finally filled with colorful lines, curves, and shapes, but I can not tell how they will be and how they fit together. Therefore, I think it might be interesting and sometimes unexpected.
Describe your thought process when devising your rules. Can you imagine the resulting image in your head, or are you tempted to act out your own rules on a sheet of paper – just to get an idea of what the result might look like? (If the latter, try to identify what part of your rules made you do so.)
As what I described for the Q3, I like to imagine different processes running in mind more than drawing them down on paper. But sometimes, if the process of designing in mind is too complicated and abstract, I have to draw a draft or find some existing staff (maybe pictures online, things around me, works shared by others) to help get the figure of results. When devising my rules, most of the time, I would like to learn more about what I’m going to make first and gain some simple experience and instructions to make sure the direction would not be too far away off my origin inspirations/goals. Then I will list some basic principles(in mind) as well as the fundamental elements I want to use, which was used in a poster design this weekend for the Lantern Festival next Tuesday. For example, I told myself to magnify the title and consider the content more than interesting stickers. In that way, I made this poster a good joy, efficiently. In this work, I didn’t draw any draft and just followed rules and used elements I collected. (It was my first time to make a poster via PS after going to the university, so I browsed something about PS and posters before I started my work ). By the way, if there comes a great inspiration of results, I may draw down some drafts to catch that feelings first 😀
Through the screen, we can see a simplified overview of my desk cleared for the new semester.
The main sructure is the bookshelf and the tabletop with various things on and in. As we can see, here are obviously a table lamp, a perple mug, and some books; the tiny green rectangle on the lamp is a moisturizer, the green bottle in the right cell is filled with facial lotion, and the big green box in the shelf is used to contain smalls learning tools which was originally the packaging of my skin care product mentioned above:D ; The light green one in the left cell is actually a pen bag; the light colored box above is a candy box put on the lid of another box which is on the top of the shelf, right of a clock; the blug one on the right of this picture is a half-used napkin 😛
Above is an overview of my description for the project.
Demo/Visual Documentation:
Development and Technical Implementation
Coding:
it was a pity that I haven’t take any screenshot of my failures and bewilderments.
1. the lamp’s head
Firstly I asked the LA for the way to realize a oblique ellipse. After knowing that it will be learnt in the future but not so early as now, I come up with the idea to replace rotation by shaping. However, I misused “curve” to locate points and failed to reach my goal. Luckily, with the help of the professor I learnt “curveVertex()” and finally understand how it works as well as “curve()””bezier()”.
After understand how “curveVertex()””bezier()” work, the ideas to use them came into my mind when I was drawing the napkin. With the help of https://p5js.org/reference/#/p5/bezierVertex, I managed to draw an abstact napkin 🙂
After using “curveVertex()””bezier()” and so on, I thought there must be some ways to make round egdes easile(especially when working with regular shapes ). Therefore, I found the guidance from reference(https://p5js.org/reference/#/p5/rect) and succeeded.
From the lessons, I started the journey of creative coding though p5.js for the first time. It is quite interesting to see the code I typed down transferred into concrete figures. It also inspired me to think how I can made shapes better ones and how I can use codes on the first stage to replace something we would learn much later; For example, the oblique ellipse on the lamp is drawed by “beginShape/endShape” and “curveVertex”. And later, I was inspired to use “vertex””curveVertex” even “bezierVertex” to draw the napkin. The process was tiring but amazing! The bigest problem here is that I chose such a complicated picture and eagered so much to do it well that I spent too much time on it. Although next time I might change my way of learning and practice(try to be not so strict to myself ), the plenty of practice did make me quite familier with the p5.js 😀
