fried chicken, beef jerky (and other things)
Instructions:
Please orient the page vertically.
Unless otherwise stated, you must use your non-dominant hand to execute the instructions.
- Draw a small square with sides that are longer than the length of your nail.
- Draw a rectangle, with a length of that of your index finger, beside the largest shape – leave a small gap between them.
- Draw a shape next to the square and rectangle. The three shapes together should have the form of a square. Ensure that the three shapes are not touching.
- Repeat 2-3.
- Repeat 3-2.
- With your dominant hand: Inside each of the empty shapes, draw contour lines until finished. (remember to switch back to your non-dominant hand afterwards)
- Outline the figure.
- Take a deep breath. Hold it.
- Repeat 2-5 until you cannot hold your breath any longer.
- Repeat 2+5.
- Repeat 6-7.
- Write, in capital letters, what you recently ate at the top of the page.
So, it turned out that some parts of my instructions ended up being more vague than I had intended them to be – mostly because I myself was not completely sure how to describe certain steps. This resulted in a huge amount of variation between the drawings, which may or may not have been a desirable outcome. In the future, I should aim to give my instructions more specificity, without completely omitting the element of ambiguity.
At the same time, the intentional vagueness of some instructions – more specifically ‘draw contour lines’ – had worked the way I wanted them to and produced interesting results. What I found particularly fascinating about the ‘contour lines’ instruction was that you can (for the most part) discern those who have more artistically-oriented backgrounds from those who do not, which was exactly my intention.
Some other things I noticed:
- Putting things in bold does not necessarily guarantee that people will follow the directions.
- Many people tend to follow instructions like interpreters – they simply carry out the instructions line by line, as they go along. This was interesting for me because I personally have a ‘compiler’ mentality when following instructions; I read everything through once, and then perform the tasks afterwards.
- Twins are not at all very identical.
- People can’t hold their breath for very long.
