Assignment 2: Abstraction

The Abstraction assignment was about creating a pictogram/sign which can be placed around NUS. When this assignment was flashed during the lecture, many random events flashed through my head, like creating signs during Arts Orientation Camp telling Engin seniors not to crash the camp, a sign for Rag & Flag featuring the respective schools "stabbing" each other but I finally settled on a more practical one.

In the Arts society rooms, I noticed that some students like to place 6 chairs together to form a bed to sleep on, which was rather irritating since you only need 3 to sleep comfortably. This resulted a lack of chairs for people like me to sit/sleep on. Therefore, I got one of my friend who always uses 6 chairs to pose for me for a photo as shown below. And hence, the abstraction process.

From the abstraction process, I picked the 3rd abstraction to develop into a prototype.

The universal sign of the red circle with the slash was used to show that sleeping on 6 chairs is not allowed. To further emphasize that the 6 chairs were redundant, I shrank the stickman to and allowed some parts of the chair to extend out of the red circle.

This assignment taught me the importance of graphic representation, as different people might interpret the same graphic differently, especially since words cannot be used in this assignment. The abstraction process allowed me to better identify what is really crucial in an item, which distinguishes it from other items. An example would be a human, where the facial parts are not needed to be there for the audience to know that they are looking at an illustration of a person. Even though the illustration has to be highly simplified, its distinct feature must still be present for people to know what is being represented. Chairs without legs would not look like chairs at all and may be mistaken to be just a plank or floor especially since my illustration involves a person lying down. However, in the event where the person is to be in a sitting position with just a rectangular plank placed on the bottom, it may still look like a chair. Hence, context is also crucial when identifying distinct features of an item.