Week 12

Hand in done! And by gosh does it feel good?!

This week was super productive and I'm so proud of how it's all come together.

We went into this week in a pretty good place, knowing what we had to do and with a plan for how we were going to get it done.

Tuesday was a long day and it was pretty much solely focused around getting our dossier ready.
Wednesday the dossier was finessed and test printed.
And then everything happened on Thursday!

We met up at Katie's to finalise our dossier and send it to print, and prepare our presentation.
Stressful times with the dossier but we managed to get in touch with Full Stop who were able to have it ready for pick up this morning. Unfortunately, being such perfectionists we asked for a nice quality paper and we created a reasonably large document so it cost us $60 which was way over what we had budgeted! We practised our presentation over and over and over on Thursday night and got it down to 4 minutes and 3 seconds!

Then we arrive at Friday - today - the final day as a 3rd year - and the final day working on Project Boost.

In terms of the presentations; I was pretty disappointed in how poorly these were run. By the time each student downloaded their file from stream, made it full screen, and presented we were running WAY behind schedule. This meant it was a really long time spent sitting in the same stuffy room. I was also disappointed in the fact that they weren't timed and so a lot of people droned on for a lot longer than 4 minutes. It had been really pushed to us that 4 minutes was the max for our presentation and the girls and I worked really hard to get our presentation down to this timeframe so the fact that so many people ignored this and took way longer seemed unfair and I hope that they do somewhat get penalised for their lack of preparation in this aspect.

Reflecting on the project overall, I'm kind of sad it's over!

There is so much more to Project Boost that no one has seen yet but that's also exciting as it creates this future potential - and who knows? Maybe we will actually get it off the ground one day!

My biggest learning from this paper was the importance of wellbeing and I advocate it now to myself, friends, and family. It is quite a simple concept that we were taught but it is so undervalued in society at the moment but really needs to be present!

It would be hard to pick one thing that I am most happy with for this project. I really love our concept and our angle. Listening to all the presentations today it was really interesting to see that everyone directly targeted their audience in order to get their message across whereas Project Boost targets employers in order to help employees which was really unique. I think we all fell deeply in love with our visual style and we applied it really consistently across all our platforms. I think our touch points were really interesting and am happy that we stayed away from doing a poster and got to do something a bit more creative. And I'm also really pleased with our presentation. I think it was engaging, succinct, informative, and most importantly FUN - just like us.

Thinking about what I'd do differently is hard, I think over the past 6 weeks this project has developed so much that I truly believe in everything we created. Rather than do anything differently, I'd just love more time to do MORE and get a chance to look into the events and the interactions there further.

Overall, the first 6 weeks of this paper were really difficult for me and not very enjoyable and I came back after half semester break unenthused, but I found my way with new team mates and a fresh idea and created something really amazing that I am proud of which speaks a lot.

Week 11

Everything's starting to come together and it's the absolute best feeling!

Monday we got together and did all the activity filming for our promo video which was super fun and the weather was super nice so I'm looking forward to seeing what Lauren can do with it.

Tuesday was a bit of a write off this week as everyone was stressed about Creative Enterprise which was due on Wednesday. Katie did nothing for our project the whole class, whilst Lauren and I planned out our dossier content, wrote the video scripts, Lauren was starting to play with the footage we'd taken on Monday, and I continued developing the journey map.

We met up on Thursday as well as we all know how much there is still to do to be ready for final presentation's next Friday.  Katie and I started working at about 1pm and made some good ground, I started designing the flyer and we browsed some business cards and then when Lauren arrived later in the afternoon we did the re-filming for our landing video.

Friday has been such a great day! Katie's sick and had work this afternoon so hasn't been that much help, but Lauren and I have been powering through this afternoon, finalising our videos/music, flyers, business cards etc. We all have jobs to get done over the weekend ready for our next meet up on Monday morning so hopefully everyone gets their part done.

Week 10

EPIC WEEK!

On Tuesday, we had a super great day in which  I found some really great stats to support our idea, and we built our hologram device. Building that with help from Gus at the Industrial Workshop was so much fun and really exciting!

We were very prepared for super crit on Friday however it ended up being a crazy day. We had really mixed feedback and ended up dropping the hologram idea (which we'd spent so long making!!) so it was heartbreaking, but I also think it actually pushed our idea for the better.

Big couple of weeks coming up, lots to do, but the girls and I are working quite well together and delegating tasks so hopefully we can make it all come together.

Week 9

Another really positive week, however at this point I am definitely starting to feel the pressure.

We have picked the box template so now need to make a stronger prototype and start to design it, our website is starting to look really good, and we are slowly making progress on the video.

It has been a bit of a rough week in terms of motivation, Lauren has been a little sick and everyone is feeling under the pump for the Creative Enterprise paper however Friday's session was really good.

Today we had a really good feedback session with Lee which put us all back on track.

We also had EX-CHANGE. Shockingly there was only 4 people at my whole EX-CHANGE group so we had a chat together and whilst it wasn't super helpful in terms of "testing" it was good to hear some feedback on the idea.
The points of value I took were that we need to make sure in the presentation we are clear about how it relates back to the initial brief of stress in the city and the ideas of well-being. The other point from Donald and Phoebe was that especially for our project, it will be really useful to produce some journey maps to map out the whole experience and show where we have focused our project.

Week 8

What an awesome week!

On Tuesday we had our interim presentation which was fantastic. We got some really helpful feedback from Jason and our idea has made great leaps and bounds and absolutely flourished! The girls and I are working really well together which makes it even more fun.

We struggled a lot over the course of the week to all agree on a logo as we all have slightly different tastes and really wanted to achieve a result that we would all be happy with. On Friday we finally got there which is great cus it now gives a starting point for all our designs.
We also now have a defined piece that kind of states who/what Project Boost is which we will find really useful to refer back to.

Having made a lot of drastic improvements since Tuesday, we had another chat with Jason for feedback on our new approach/direction and he seemed really positive and had more good ideas for us which we really valued and has put us all in a really good place.

Everyone has one task to work on from here on out, with input and decisions being made as a group, I am in charge of box/packaging, Katie is in charge of the website design, and Lauren is taking the reins on the video.

Week 7

I'm feeling quite a sense of relief at this point.
After a rough break and a lot of struggling with the elderly brief I had chosen, Katie, Lauren and I decided to all partner up and work on their brief together as they too had been struggling to come up with fresh ideas. They have run me through their brief and we've come up with what I think is a really exciting concept, designing a facilitation company. We are meeting up over the weekend to protottype ideas for this and I'm feeling excited again which is awesome.

Week 6

Studio this week hasn't really helped me a whole lot. I am feeling very lost with what I am going to do for my brief and hope that the break might refresh me and my ideas.

Week 5

This week has again seen the highs and lows.

On Tuesday we had our presentations which didn't go as well as I would've hoped. I am pleased that this part of the project is now finished so that I can move forward with a new brief.
It was interesting looking over the briefs done by the other teams as in our stream we had been told not to do students as our target group whereas a lot of the projects from the other streams did use students as the target group. This made choosing a new brief far less exciting as I wasn't really interested in doing a student project. I ended up choosing a brief from my own stream group: Wilma in the City. I really liked this one as it was targeting elderly and was the only brief I saw with a brief designed around this group. I also felt that it had a lot of potential with the 3 How Might We provocations it identified.

On Friday, personal circumstances held me back from attending class until late. However my lecturer and good friends helped me out and offered me support and a recap on the session.
My friends took me down to Tussock to get food as I hadn't eaten yet that morning and ran me through what they'd done and what I needed to do moving forward which was really good of them. This meant we all missed the EXCHANGE session that happened but for me I didn't really want to be around a group of strangers at that time so I really appreciated my friends helping me out and missing it too.

Week 5 Rationale

Not really sure what's meant to go in this but here goes...

Our concept arose when using the SLIP approach to arrange our ideas in one of the early weeks. When using this method to synthesise our ideas about driving stress, we stumbled across the never ending debate around equality and how women have been introduced into the workforce to support the earnings of the husband, but are also still expected to run the household. We then had to relate back to the idea of stress whilst driving. From conversations with working mums what we discovered was that working mothers don't find driving to/from work stressful, and that their commute is actually the only time during the day they get alone. This led us to basing our brief around the need for working mothers to embrace their time alone and get some "me time". We kept our style consistent across our presentation/document platforms, utilising a bright colour palette and illustrative style to communicate our points.

Week 4

Oh the highs and lows! This week has definitely had it's moments.

Hannah and I have made a lot of progress in refining and synthesising our project as well as making a lot of advancement in our visual style thanks to a push from Lee to really work my graphic design skills.

On Tuesday, we spent most of our time away from our classmates as we weren't as far along as them and found it to be a really noisy and stressful environment. We found a quiet spot on d-floor and made a lot of progress re-drafting our document.

Between classes Hannah worked on her illustrations and I did a lot of the work putting together the document. I feel like this project has been a little one-sided in terms of work load which has definitely been a little frustrating. Especially as the only real thing that's made this project different by working with a partner is that I have to work with a style that is not one I personally like. This is good learning however as it helps to push me to create good design out of styles I don't necessarily like.

On Friday morning we arrived to class with a print out of our booklet ready for some feedback. We got some initial peer feedback before the class started and then when it began we saw Mark headed our way and so asked him for some feedback. He not only requested we move it to the floor but made us lay it out in a specific way to suit him, then he requested our presentation which we haven't yet designed as we wanted to get our visual style throughout our document right first. This wasn't good enough for him though and he rudely walked away without giving us any feedback. Gray however came to our rescue and looked over it, giving us some great feedback to go away and improve on. We spent an hour and a half making these changes before reprinting to show Lee. As much as it hurt, Lee cracked down on our design but she was right when she pulled me out for not using my graphic design skills. She also helped us to really get down to the nitty gritty and define our project in a really concise manner. We have a lot to be done over the next few days before presentation and I was a little frustrated by my partner claiming her "busy weekend" would restrict her from being able to do much, however I will do as much as I can and hopefully meet with her on Monday to prepare for presentation on Tuesday.

Week 3

Now I''m feeling like we're making progress!

We are now finished our third week on this project and I feel that Hannah and I really understand our concept, we've both done a lot of research both primary and secondary that has developed our individual understanding of our target audience and when we come together our discussion flow so easily because of this shared knowledge.
We have a really clear visual direction and we both seem to have a very clear direction for the brief as a whole.
We've made a couple of really great insights over the week, discovering firstly that working mums don't seem to find driving to be a cause of stress, which lead us to have to really dive into our concept and work around how we were going to pose this brief given our initial assumptions were wrong. We worked around that to come up with the idea that working women are stressed trying to balance work and home life and that the time spent commuting is their only alone time which a lot of them appreciate, however they do resent that it can't somehow be used more productively. So Hannah and I have come up with a brief that is all about developing a design solution to utilise the time working women spend in their cars commuting.
Going through the class exercises has really solidified our concept for us which has definitely helped us to understand our position really well which hopefully means we will be able to communicate it well.
Even though the exercises have been really helpful, Hannah and I have found the class times to be somewhat unproductive and frustrating. They are broken a lot and the tutors talk at us a lot when sometimes we just need some quiet time to nut through stuff. We feel that a lot of our time is spent being talked at and half the stuff that is being said is just a repeat of things we've heard and is too broad so not all that useful to the class as a whole. When we went into the private room on D floor to work on Friday we probably had the most productive session we've had so far which was really critical at this stage as the Week 5 hand in is coming up really quickly.

EX-CHANGE | Week 2

Today was our first EX-CHANGE session which I surprisingly enjoyed.

My group included 3 VCD students (including myself) and 1 Photography student. We started off by sharing what our majors did and then got into the kind of nitty gritty about individual projects.

When discussing my project I got a lot of great feedback from Bethany who used to nanny and had some really useful insights into driving with children on board and dropping them at schools.
She mentioned the stress of safety and how at primary schools and where there are young children around you have to be super alert as you never know if a kid's gunna run out in front of you and there are so many variable that could go wrong. She also told me about a rule that she'd heard of from family's with lots of children, where when getting out of the car there was a "hand on the car rule" in which all the kids would stand with one hand on the car until the mother was out and ready to go. She mentioned that there is much more to it especially if you're dealing with really young kids and you have to unbuckle them and get out strollers etc and still watch the other young children.
To be honest she made it sound like a nightmare, and that was a super useful insight for me.

I also shared with them some design for good that I had brought along to share which was a beautiful campaign called Comic Sans for Cancer. I had found out a lot about this and I really loved the campaign. The idea that a typeface designers avoid like the plague was celebrating it's 20th anniversary and in doing that was supporting a really good cause. It was great to see design come together with such a worthy cause and such an unexpected cause. And the ways in which designers were responding to their love or hate of comic sans in relation to this subject of cancer was really really cool.

Something really interesting that came out of this was how Comic Sans was designed for a cartoon character and it is not a font commonly used by designers because of it's visual style and connotations. All of the pieces in the exhibition were bright and playful which reflected the lightheartedness of this font.

What blew me away was that Bethany then pulled out her 18+ card and went look at the sub header's type face and it was Comic Sans! We were all shocked that such a proper/legitimate document would use such an inappropriate font. She even mentioned that when she received a letter from them the whole thing was typed in Comic Sans which I find absolutely shocking.

I really enjoyed this first EX-CHANGE interaction and am looking forward to discussing the insights Bethany raised with Hannah.

Week 2

This second week has definitely been more helpful in terms of starting to get an understanding/feel for the project.

After Tuesday's class Hannah and I were able to identify that we were both interested in looking into working women as a group and how the stress of driving impacts them and we went away and each looked into a different age group. I looked at young professional women, and Hannah looked at working mums.

When we came together in class today and looked at our journey maps the discussion came up that I had identified the young professional women doesn't give us as many opportunities as the working mum and she also didn't reflect the issue of equality that kind of spurred our desire to look into females as a group so we decided that working mums was going to be our direction. From here we discussed how the shift of women moving into the workforce has been a great thing for female independence, but as well as having these new work responsibilities women are still expected to take care of the home - managing both her personal and professional life when there are not enough hours in the day, and not enough opportunities to enjoy personal time/hobbies.

The ability to do more has resulted in women having more to do!

A woman's work is never done.

We then formulated some questions that we'd like to chat to the mums in our lives about in order to better understand our audience.

I'm feeling much better about the project now that I feel a sense of direction.

In terms of the class structure though I am still frustrated at how the tutors seem to be on the same page but also not fully on the same page. Every time there is discussion they all add things on at the end of what the last person has said and it tends to really drag on!

I also felt that a comment made today that we had not done enough work was a little bit unfair as everyone in the class was probably in the same situation of not really understanding what was going on and it's not been until today that I feel I have direction and know what to be doing in my independent study hours for this studio.

Week 1

After the first week of this paper I was very apprehensive as to the project. The brief was withheld from us, I didn't know my partner, the lecturers didn't all seem to be on the same page - all adding things at the end of each others points, and I wasn't really sure what I was meant to be doing to try and begin working on this project. The angle I initially liked was that of looking into driving stress for tradesman so I did a little research into this, but also some general research as I wasn't sure whether my partner would be interested in this angle.
It's only week 1 so I just kinda went along with it to see what will happen in week 2, and hopefully we will consolidate a better direction.