Week 6

In the weekends we were encouraged to go off and interview our audience using the matrix table "ask, learn, look, try". Our group created an anonymous survey (broad questions only) to get a general idea on what people think about technology. Since our target audience are students we only posted our survey to student forums.

Coming to class, we separated off into our groups and started unpacking our ideas further. We used post it notes to sort, label, integrate and priorities all the information we had gathered from the survey. Through this exercise we both realised that we might need to generate more broader questions to help us find the issue and target audience that we want to focus on. Over the study break we decided to form more surveys and generate more ideas for us to unpack (especially limitations which will be an important factor that we have to consider when we come up with concepts). The survey will help to progress our project further as the information will help us create some concepts that can help people with their well-being in relation to technology. It will also be interesting to see how people view technology, and how their opinions may differ to ours. 

Week 5

In the lecture today, we explored different issues and how they used visual communication design to solve these issues. One example was saving Troy library, and the designers used a strong negative approach to motivate people to wanting to save the library. They used methods such as signs (burn library books) to create awareness and people took it to their own hands from there e.g. putting the issue up on social media (social presence). 

For today's class, all the streams put out their briefs and went around taking notice of the briefs that they might want to pick up for the next assignment. After reading through many briefs, I found a few that interested me and I may take up on it, although going towards a different approach. 

On Friday, our group decided to go split up to do different topics. I eventually partnered up with another student because we were both interested in the technology brief, but wanted to explore the positive idea of technology rather than the negative. I decided on the technology brief because I find that our generation is heavily influenced on technology and we only really look at the negative side of it but never taking notice how it is improving our well-being. As a constant phone and laptop user, I find that technology has allowed me to find information quicker, contact friends from long distances, endless storage etc. Things that people take for granted sometimes. As a team, we decided to research more on technology and how it improves our well-being, while also listing possible target audiences.

Also had a look at an IDO video about a group of people with different disciplines who came together to reconstruct a shopping trolley. Their dead line was 1 week which put a lot of pressure on them but in the end they came out with great outcomes, some concepts that didn't work back then (grocery bar code detector), now exist in our supermarkets and are used daily by some people. I learnt that to generate great ideas, we first have to put in crazy ideas (thinking outside the box) without judgement, so that we can develop them further and not being too attached to one "great" idea from the start. I also took away the quote "doing then asking for forgiveness", something our group should consider for our project.

Week 4

Lecture:
Clearly identifying that design students are the users brief.
The things that we wanted to get out of this was:
-clarity, defined, tangible stuff, legibility
-understanding, well written, effective
-relevant, refined, crips, enough to go on, succinct
-hierarchy, differentiation from heading and context, overview, context position, navigate
-fluidity, flow

One thing I noted was that design is more than just pretty pictures. We have to consider all the elements (above) and making sure everything is relevant to the topic.

During the weekends we all split the work evenly between us so that when we came back together we can decide what is working well together and what isn't. We can then go ahead and further refine our layouts to make sure everything is cohesive. Some of our photos and type composition was not working well together as a whole so we decided to focus on one specific layout and then applying it to the rest of the spreads with small changes. After the lecture we wanted to play around create more hierarchy within our spreads as they were all the same sizes and it was hard to differentiate the heading and context from each other.

In studio we presented out layouts and received feedback from each group. One thing that was often noted was our type composition (blurry text) and how it really gives a sense of being sleepy. Although type was our main strength it had also became our weakness as we had too much variety with our type composition and it was starting to look a little random. We decided to focus on the one that worked the best and develop it further. After our class feedback, we had a talk with the tutor  about our visual rhetoric. We had a discussion on layered text and how it looked more like repeated text rather than it being blurry. He suggested us to play about with gaussian blur tool on photoshop to really make it seem blurry. However one problem that quickly arise with this effect was legibility. In the end it was really up to us to decide on what approach we wanted to take, and after discussing as a group we decided to combine both the old and new idea together to gain a stronger approach (make it more relevant).

Week 3

We had a lecture on photography which I found particularly interesting as our group had decided that we wanted to use photography for our rhetorical approach. One thing I really took away from the lecture was being able to capture the perfect shot (perfect moment) when you have a free control (using auto) and constantly taking shots of your subject. The mistaken shot may possibly become the one shot you were looking for. During studio time, we presented our 8 points on a3 visual pieces. It turns out that our points were still quite broad and we had to narrow it down further. A lot of our information needed to be re-arranged as it had fit better with other context. To back up our statement, we tried to find statistics that works well together and helps prove our point. In terms of audiences, we decided to focus primarily on tertiary students. Our group also decided to not have a person feature in the images (only featuring sleep related objects) to let the images speak for themselves. I think with this process, it really help us understand our topic a little bit more (applying visuals with context).

On Friday we went through our 8 points again and tried to refined them further and make them more cohesive for printing next week. After pitching our idea to the tutor we were asked to find our core message. We discussed that although students have an awareness about having 8-9 hours of sleep, they don't necessarily understand the necessity of sleep and how it can have an huge impact on their well-being. We eventually decided that our core message should be "is it worth it". An example would be "was your project worth it after having 6 hours of sleep". 
We also went through our photos with the tutor and he suggested for us to experiment with cropping and composition to really convey our idea. One of the blurry photos we attend to retake, happened to be the photo that conveyed our idea the best in terms of being sleep deprived. As previous stated in the photography lecture on Thursday, one of our mistake shots happened to create a brand new idea that works a lot better with our concept. Over the course of the week we are thinking of nailing our layouts and share them with each other next week for some final touches.