Instructional

Instructions:
1: Draw one of the following (Square, circle, triangle, heart)
2: draw another one, overlapping the first . The same shape cannot overlap itself.
3: repeat step 2 until you run out of room or get bored .

I didn’t exactly have an end result in mind when I gave this to people to do, I just wanted to see what happened. When left to their own devices, there is no consistency in what any of my participants did. One of them decided to stop when they got bored; the other two went until they ran out of space. Two of them generated shapes randomly, the third made theirs into some kind of fractal, probably because they’re a math major and that’s how they roll. Pretty much all of them asked if shapes had to overlap/if a shape could be completely inside another shape or if it had to cross lines with another, so probably I would include some clarification in the instructions of that. I also varied the subjects (one writing major, one engineer, and one math) so I could see how different types of people interpreted the instructions.