Spread a message brief

Well, to be honest this didn't go as smoothly as I expected. It was a difficult two weeks, but more on that in a bit. I worked with Luke for this brief and chose the starting point of 'get people to live healthier lives'. We quickly decided to focus on what we saw as unnecessary lift use by students in our college. The research we found backed up our initial instincts that stair use should be encouraged and has real and measurable life long health benefits. It was great to find scientific papers to back up what we wanted to achieve, and we also observed the lift and made our own survey to find out why people did use it rather that walk up the stairs. Again the results matched our initial gut instincts: laziness, a mistaken belief it is quicker (it is, but only if the lift is already at the floor ready to take you up, not if you have to call it) and also a lack of understanding of the health benefits of stair use. This gave use a clear direction to make people think about their own lift use and we started with a proposal for signs that would be placed inside the lift above peoples heads saying these supposed thoughts ("because i'm lazy", "because its quicker", etc). This worked on this perticular lift because it has a large mirror inside that you can see your reflection in.

(test resolution)


This was presented to a crit with mixed results, mostly due to a lack of clear design direction for a final solution. Luke and myself found it very challenging to work together. This was a shame because it greatly influenced the strength of the work we produced, but in the end our working methods and project planning were so radically different we sadly only brought the worst out in each other.

Anyway, after this crit our body of work was handed over to another team to plan a final resolution, then handed back to us with a new spec to follow. This was actually very useful because they made quite a few decisions that would have been difficult and time consuming for me and Luke to agree on. They proposed quite a different solution for us to follow: Postcards and stickers to be picked up from  outside the lift doors to deliver our message, using images of lazy animals on the front and a text description about the health benefits of stair use on the back. It wasn't a solution I would have picked but I could see how it answered all parts of the brief quite neatly, particularly the 'spreading a message like a virus' part which our previous solution missed to a great extent, (the postcards could be sent off and the stickers could be taken away and stuck anywhere to spread a message beyond our initial target area). Also this would create a much needed clear and precise course for us to follow.

After the first week of not really working well together I felt the best solution would be to divide the workload into clear areas of responsibility, and have a timetable of what had to be done by when. This worked to a certain extent as we could both chose how and when to work, but the resolution obviously suffered from this less than collaborative approach. For the record, I designed the back, made the final card holder, took the photographs and made the design boards. Luke designed the fronts with the animal illustration, but was ill unfortunately so missed the final day sorting out the boards and the presentation.

(4 postcard front stickers, and the back design)






(in action)





(presentation boards)


Final crit brought nothing unexpected. I think everyone was very tired by Friday afternoon so the feedback and presentations weren't all that energetic. The lack of connection between the front and the card backs was picked up on, also it was questioned if some of the animals looked lazy enough to communicate our message. The fact that they functioned as both stickers and postcards seemed to go down well and I think I explained the concept well enough when I presented.

So in the end a very tiring and frustrating two weeks that ended in a half baked solution and a friendship severely strained - Ah well, lets just move on...