Pradintadir!

Ever used the graphical language ‘Pradintadir’? We did! I created with a group of students a graphical language called ‘Pradintadir’. The goal was to let someone draw a picture without knowing what it looked like. We were not allowed to tell the person something like: “A house with two windows, one door in the middle and a flat roof”. So we had to create a specific language for it.

The drawer had to create a coordination plane. This plane had to be 8×8 big. Every time he gets an instruction, the letter will tell him what shape, the first 2 numbers will tell him where it needs to be drawn in the plane and the last two numbers were the width and the height.

B = basis  = basic block.
R = raam=window
D = deur = door
S = splitsen = split previous object in the number that follows.
SS = schoorsteen = chimney
Δ = driehoek = triangle
½Δ = halve driehoek = half triangle
D = dak =roof
ΔT = blok dak = diagonally stacked blocks roof
Hr = herhalen =repeat
Π = cirkel =ellipse
Int = insert = put something within the previous object

The language did work, but some things did go wrong. For example we made a system where you begin with a letter/symbol, than where it had to be, and after that, what size it should be. The printer(Aschwin) did get a little bit confused, when we used a coordinate system of 8×8 blocks, because he didn’t knew if we were talking about the coordinate system inside the “Basis” or the coordination system on the whole paper. The “basis” is the first big block you draw when drawing a house of example.  Within this “basis” we used a coordinate system for the windows etc.

A second thing that went wrong, was we didn’t made an agreement about how to transmit what size a circle had to be. The printer used the radius and the descriptor used the diameter.

A strong thing of our language was the short instructions. For example pie sounds very different than B “basis”. So the printer did know what shape he had to draw.