Technology A — Pratt Grad ComD

Project Description

BECOMING A MICROSCOPE TO CREATE NEW SECRETS This project begins with an everyday object: my phone. I chose five words—anxious, communicative, connective, dependent, and navigable—to explore how it shapes my daily life. A phone helps me communicate, maintain relationships, and find my way, but it can also create anxiety and dependence. I wanted to translate these overlapping feelings into a visual language. Over five weeks, I developed symbols through drawing, digital translation, sequencing, elimination, and chance. Each stage changed how I understood the original forms. Instead of illustrating a phone directly, I explored how shapes could suggest its emotional and social roles. Using four actions drawn from Richard Serra’s Verb List—tightening, joining, layering, and mapping—I transformed five selected forms into twenty graphic experiments. The title describes a way of looking closely. “Becoming a microscope” means paying attention to relationships and details that I usually overlook. “Creating new secrets” means allowing familiar ideas to become unfamiliar symbols, open to different interpretations. Built with HTML, CSS, and p5.js, the website documents the process in the order it developed. It brings the experiments together so viewers can follow how a word becomes a shape and how that shape changes through a set of rules. The project explores how observation and repeated transformation can turn an ordinary object into a personal visual system.

Credits

Design and original artwork: Jiahao Yu.
Libraries: p5.js and MattObject’s p5.svgkit.
Typeface: Encode Sans Semi Expanded, via Google Fonts.
References and tutorials: Richard Serra’s Verb List (1967–1968), Technology A assignment materials, and the class tutorial “making-a-page-with-opencode.mov.”
AI assistance: OpenCode assisted with developing the SVG transformations, writing and revising the documentation website code, drafting project descriptions, and preparing submission images, and also used for local code editing.
The phone selection, five keywords, original drawings, and final design selections are mine.

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