Week 6, Session 1

20/8
SLIP

We used the 'SLIP' technique to ideate today (Sort, Label, Integrate, Prioritise). This basically involved writing out thoughts, words and insights on post-it notes and then sorting them into categories. From this we found out that the audience-based sections were lacking content/were based off of hunches (thoughts, actions).

We also tried to create stories/lives of our audience from what we know.

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The whole process helped us define which areas we needed to look into more. It also helped us realise what we were guessing and what we knew and to also gain some empathy for writing the post-its.

We did find that we weren't really at a stage to be doing this task as we had other things we needed to sort out first in terms of audience and point of view statements so the exercise was very slow and mostly irrelevant.

Moving forward >>>

We really need to talk to people or at least start prototyping some ideas to get us started.

Week 5, Session 2

14/8
First thoughts on project and research

Sam from Lifehack joined us today to talk about researching and gaining insights from people. We also looked at the d.school framework and how we could use it in order get quality results.

The d.school framework splits the design framework into 5 steps, the first being Empathy which looks at research and understanding. Empathy is then split into 4 sections:

- Observe
- Try
- Learn
- Ask

We used these sections to try and come up with a variety of ideas to use for researching.

We also talked about ethics in relation to other people when conducting our research and filled out some forms.

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I found this hugely helpful as I'm not sure I would have covered all of these sections otherwise. I feel like I came up with a lot more ideas through this process and came to the conclusion that we need to create a more detailed target audience in order to move forward.

I also thought that the ethics discussion we had was important to keep in mind so we don't offend people. It was interesting to see how we really have to be quite careful about how and what we ask people, I feel a lot more confident about it now though.

Moving forward >>>

We realised we need to really segment our audience better to work out what types of people we have and how different they are. After that, we thought we will probably pick the audience with the most/clearer problems to make the solution obvious. We are thinking that some of the audiences may not have huge trouble with urban anxiety, although it is still present with them to an extent, so it would be a lot harder to reach them.

We also came up with some questions that could lead to some interesting ideas:

Could we focus on a specific business/workspace?
What different audience segmentations are there?
What one do we pick?

Week 5, Session 1

13/8

Hand-in

Today was was the big hand-in day. We all set our briefs out on the tables and went around the streams looking at them all. 

Afterwards we went back to our streams and talked about what briefs we wanted to do and sorted out teams.

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It seemed like the other streams all had teams that were testing amazing techniques which really pushed the rest of the stream to up their game. They played with some pretty impressive printing and imagery techniques. I feel like everyone in our stream was on the same level and didn't really push the final printed product very far. Even though I was really pleased with our brief I feel like maybe we could have pushed it further in terms of printing techniques if we'd thought of it. It might not have been possible in terms of the time we had for the project but I think it would have been a good idea to have a critique/interim with all the streams together. Even though we had Exchange, which was good in terms of ideas, I don't feel I got much out of it in terms of visual style and production.

In the end none of the other briefs really grabbed me so I decided to stick with my brief. I am already familiar with the background and am very interested in the topic so it seemed like the logical decision. 

Isaac was pretty keen to stick with our brief too and we worked well together and had already come up with some good ideas so we decided to stay as a team. 

Exchange 2

7/8
Fresh eyes on the dossier

Last time we met, it was the day after we had formed teams so we didn't really have anything to show apart from rough ideas. I was really interested to see how they read it, especially considering the group is only half VCD.

The feedback was really positive. Without me even having to tell them what it was all about they mentioned words like stress (especially in relation to the imagery), city, busyness and isolation.

I asked them about the spread we were having trouble with and they brought up ideas of imagery representing a maze which I thought was really good. It would almost get across what we wanted but just wouldn't fit with out visual style very well.

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All in all I was really happy with the feedback, they understood it exactly as we intended and couldn't think of any major issues.

From here we really only need to play around with the flow of the dossier more and maybe see what we can do with the Audience Needs spread as there have been a few comments that it could be improved.

Week 4, Session 2

7/8
Flow and imagery

We sorted out some of the 'problem spreads' yesterday and played around with the flow of the book. We had a full mocked-up version in class today and were pretty pleased with it. We did more critiquing and got some feedback on the imagery that wasn't working and minor tweaks with the text which we fixed up in class.

The class also commented on the flow of the dossier and how we could play around with it even more as it was working really well on the one spread we had played with.

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The critique on the text was perfect as we were 100% happy with it but had no idea what to do. At the end of the day it was a simply a matter of adding a couple of sentences in on one spread and taking some away from another. We are really pleased with how the text is at the moment and feel that it is probably there in terms of being clear and concise.

There is still one spread (client and motivation) that we are really stuck with and just can't seem to represent it well enough through images without just chucking something on the page that doesn't add to the content. At this point we are wondering if we don't put any images on this spread at all.

Week 4, Session 1

6/8
Visual style

We came into uni in the weekend and created a lot of really emotive, abstract imagery through manipulating it on the photocopiers so we have quite a lot to show. Through critique we found that some people really responded to it and understood it while others were just confused. There is obviously a fine line where the imagery can get too abstract and symbolic.

We also worked through our text issues so got some feedback on that too. It was definitely clearer than before although not quite there yet.

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We were quite excited to get some feedback on the imagery and see if it gets across what we wanted as we really like how it is turning out and would be keen to carry the style through the whole dossier.

Although the imagery didn't 100% work out we were really pleased as we struggled coming up with imagery to fit the visual style we wanted to convey and to find out that it at least worked for the most part we were really pleased.