design practice: OUGD406. Design Practice. Speaking From Experience.

today we were introduced to the third part of the Design Practice module. the brief is a live brief that will be presented to next years first years at the start of that year.
dont do it about staff.

Produce a graphic response/graphic product/piece of work that makes a statement, comment, observation or gives advice about your experience on your first year of this course.

the point of the brief is to consider how my first year has gone: what i have done well/not done well, what i have enjoyed/disliked, how i have become accustomed to student life/struggled living independently.

the brief is asking me to come up with some way of improving or making easier one or multiple aspects of uni life that i had difficulty with/feel i could have used some advice on.

i began by looking at the brief and its basic requirements and general advice and began to highlight and consider the main points and what spoke out to/interested me in terms of a potential path to take in resolving the brief.

having read through the brief a couple of times to gain a basic understanding i then went over and just picked out the main points of interest without any real thought as to why. the blue lines indicate the more appealing ideas all of which are aimed at giving advice and helping to assist people in their learning process

so from this general idea of what i wanted to achieve (advising/helping new students) i thought about all the main problems i had incurred at the start of the year and what things i would have appreciated being told about. for example; i had some difficulty in understanding the module splitting and the relevant blog sectioning. i also didnt expect the levels of commitment and organisation required and feel these would be good things to know as a new student.

from these initial thoughts i went on to concentrate the number of ideas to a few main ones of which i was most supportive and interested in. i considered how i did cope and what methods i used to get myself used to these new things. i then thought how these resolutions could be translated into interesting and useful graphic products in support of new students. i wanted to maintain the aim of assisting and advising but make my resolution engaging and new so the audience might be more attracted and committed to my outcome(s).

i wanted to get down some initial thoughts based on my intuition and before any research and so i considered some basic resolutions to the brief: how they might look, function, be successful/useful. these initial sketches were helpful in giving me a visual representation to my basic ideas in order for me to then improve on something.

having considered these areas and forming a basic idea for a possible project and solution we were asked, as a class, to re-group. we were each given a concept sheet to fill out to have a more formal plan on record. from this we were each asked to stand up and present our initial ideas in short to the class. i was happy with my ideas and felt quite confident from peoples reactions.

i want my product to be accessible, useful and informative about the course in a way thats understandable to new students who dont know about it. due to the fact that we had the choice of working in a group or alone there were aspects of the fill-in regarding peoples roles and responsibilities within the project. because we recently finished the communication is a virus brief, and that was a group brief, i decided i wanted to work in a different way and consider all aspects on my own and so am working alone. i feel that i will be able to achieve a more personal connection to the cause of the brief and so should be able to produce more focussed and successful graphic responses in line with my aims.

for friday we were asked to each produce 3 idea boards to communicate our project ideas. one about my concept, one detailing potential or attractive methods of delivery, one regarding the production of my solution.

in the crit we were each asked to provide feedback on our ideas and write it dow on paper below.

i think the crit was really useful in telling me straight that my idea was overly ambitious, unrealistic and not really appropriate to the brief. so then i went back to the design sheets and re worked my ideas.