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.