In his apartment overlooking the city, the designer, sitting at his desk, folded his hands together. His creative process was starting to come together, but he still felt that something was missing.
It has only been a week since he had received the order. As lead designer of Hanaka's Autonomous Division, his job was presentation, to be the artist painting his canvas. In many ways, it was the most important job of all. Yes, there were the engineers who put the pieces together and the programmers who created the digital infrastructure that would hold the whole mess in place, but without the designer, it would all be for nothing.
Taking a deep breath, he unlocked the interactive screen presented before him. The basic parameters were already set: the model was female, and it's age would have to be around 30-45. Easy enough.
The screen's display presented him with a large blob of plexyfoam. At least that's what he called it. The stuff looked like marshmallow fluff, but beneath its milky-white exterior was the company's revolutionary growth medium, capable of forming smooth, human-like skin over any surface. Not only that, but it could also be used to create hair.
Next to the blob, the display formed a 3-D image of a standard female skull. The designer took hold of the plexyfoam and put it onto the skull, carefully working it so that it spread out into an even layer.
The first issue he confronted was what the color of the skin should be. Plexyfoam could create tones in almost any color, but internal policy dictated that only a few shades were acceptable. No red, green, purple, or blue.
After careful consideration, the designer decided to go with plain-vanilla white. It wasn't very creative, but he was impatient and wanted to move on to the exciting part.
To start, he began pressing and rolling the plexyfoam to determine the size of the face. The end result gave him plenty of space to work with, but no so much that it would resemble a cheap Picasso.
The designer stepped back as he thought about what feature he should make first. Maybe the ears? Or the eyes?
The ears were more complicated, he thought. So he took two large folds of plexyfoam, on either side of the head, and stretched them to form large, curved shapes. He rubbed the edges to remove excess material, molded the interior canals, and put some of the excess goo on the bottom to make earlobes.
The head now had ears, but nothing else. The designer decided to make eyes next. He moved his thumbs down the front, and plunged them through the skull. Upon removing them, he sized the holes until they looked like human eyes. Armed with a black coloring pen, he made imitation eyelashes and drew eyebrows that were full, but not too thick.
Now for the difficult part: the nose. As the designer knew, there were many, many different variations of how a face looked, and the nose was an integral part. It alone decided what the rest of the face would look like.