That was the question I asked for all of these drawings.
The participant drew the pineapple from memory alone, without any reference.
The participants cannot use colors and I tried to keep the stroke widths constant (not entirely enforced)
The drawings are typically from 10 seconds to 1 minute long
This is the question I get asked the most. There is a short answer and a long answer.
The short answer is I don't really know, it started out as a request to obtain about a dozen pineapple pictures for a mockup, but I've taken it to the extreme and just kept going for fun.
The long answer is that I want to explore the artistic direction that it doesn't matter which "direction / theme" you choose, as long as the magnitude is outrageously huge it's going to be interesting. So drawing pineapples is just an arbitrary direction I've chosen to magnify to the extreme.
Another long answer is that drawing a sketch of a pineapple is a very interesting cognitive proccess, it involves planning which aspect of the pineapple exists inside a person's mind, and how the person elect to render these features.
All in all I believe someone would find these collections useful, either for art or as a dataset for science / engineering.
Yes. Go nuts.
No. I feel there is definitely an interesting analysis in that direction but it would dilute the focus of this work, which is to collect for the sake of collect, until the collection becomes huge enough to be interesting. As soon as I collect these "secondary" datas, there would be the inevitable question of "but why didn't you collect these other secondary data like how big is their hand as well?" So I thought to avoid that altogether.
I have tried to vary my sources as to include multiple demographics for the sake for an interesting collection though. People of different colors, ages, and genders, from different countries were asked to participate.
I try to find people who look like they have the free time, and I ask my question. I have had to explain in English, Chinese, and Spanish on occasions to get the message across, it was fun! I gave them my phone to draw on and after they draw the pineapple I offer them to see the other pineapples from other participants. I reassure them that their drawing is statistically unlikely to be the best or the worst, but I loved it all the same.
Often they would ask if it is an experiment or a survey or a study, I usually play along and ask them "So what kind of survey do you think it is?" and continue on anyways. It seems like people have a hard time believing I am literally just collecting for the sake of it rather than using it for some advanced computer vision or psychological tests :D