Week 9: Concept development | Methodologies for thinking and development processes
Weekly learning objectives
By the end of this week you should be able to:
- Distill your initial project concepts and select one route to deliver as a final outcome.
- Research innovative design thinking, production, media and format relevant to your project brief, to ensure you develop a fresh insight.
- Design initial visual routes for your selected concept that utilise your research into innovative design thinking.
Lecture introduction
For the ninth lecture we continue to present our creative practitioner interview series, offering insight into identifying, developing, project managing and completing an industry focused project.
This week the creative practitioners answer the following:
– Please describe a case study when innovative design thinking and fresh insight enabled a surprising project outcome.
FELD
Reebok in Boston. The company bought a huge building, employing artists and designers to create murals and ‘cool lifestyle’ thing. Nobody thought about the reception area…
What was planned just sounds like a default answer: big screen showing continuous Reebok ads.
FELD got in touch and were asked to come with an idea for an alternative. Straight away their ideas go them all excited, a large kinetic Reebok logo, working alongside the designers at Reebok, they all loved it. The logo breaks into pieces, moving around in all directions and then coming back together to show the full logo again. Working with/for likeminded people they went all-in to get the project to where it needed to be with 3D, animations, anything it needed. Then the time comes when it needs to be shown to the next set of people, in this case the not so likeminded – the CEO of Reebok.
After two minutes the CEO doesn’t like it, it’s “destroying our logo”. Two months’ work, ‘failed’.
The interesting moment, coming up with a new strategy. To do this, the original idea had to be completely forgotten about so it had no influence over what was to come next, this time incorporating the reaction of the CEO, not completely, but he’s the person who they need on-side to sign off the project.
One positive from the first answer was that they had learned about new technologies, this allowed them to take that knowledge further to produce the new answer to the brief. Using these moments means you come up with the unexpected.
“A lot of technical yada-yada”
One major thing which had to be considered was that there’s someone sat in front of the piece all day; the receptionist, the brief asked for sound to be used but for FELD this was a bad idea. Someone sitting all day in a reception with a soundtrack repeating over and over would eventually be driven mad. Thinking beyond the end result, they had to fight for this not to happen.
Accept & Proceed
Project for Rapha… a cycling brand with a huge reputation for design quality and excellent production. Expensive, but really well made. When you have one you can see why they’re the price they are. As sponsors of Team Sky cycling, they made all their garments. Everyone loves their aesthetic.
Team Sky had just signed a new cyclist, Peter Kennaugh, and Rapha were producing a whole range of items around him. He was seen as a new breed of cyclist, very technical, and Rapha wanted to celebrate him being part of the Sky team. The point of difference in this new campaign was the data around Peter, a lot of cycling now is about the data, the data produced by the stats from a rider, monitoring their performances and improvements.
A&P took the data from Peter’s Tour de France performance and made a graph from it and turned it into a pattern showing the distance, elevation and the stresses on the body of the rider over all 21 stages of the Tour. The pattern was applied to a whole range of products but made no attempt to explain where the pattern came from, people bought the products because they liked the pattern.
However, if they bought the jersey, there was a label inside one of the pockets which told the story of where the pattern came from. It would only be discovered, likely by chance, as the jersey was used. It became a story between friends, the knowledge was good to share in your own club. That makes a story stronger, rather than launching the brand with the story, it was left to be developed.
Leaving things to be discovered makes for stronger work, A&P like to do that whenever possible. On the water bottle from the Rapha range it has a few keywords from the language of cycling, little slogans, etc.. They were able to get ‘Accept & Proceed’ as one of those phrases. People who don’t know who A&P are would just see it as a phrase vaguely linked to sport, to keep going, “but we know”, we designed it.
Dumbar
Asked to design the logo for a university in the Netherlands, the full focus was on creating a distinguishing mark. It’s primarily a learning centre for the sciences and it’s the only university in the Netherlands which has it’s own campus, while walking around it to get a feel of the place Dumbar realised the campus itself was much more interesting than the expected science-based identity.
Their answer was to create a simple word-mark which would be surrounded by a ‘universe of elements’, which looked like chemicals and molecules and formed a map of the university, the starting point for the identity came from this. Taking, zooming in or colouring various parts of the map focussed on what was special about the campus, these are what was used as the key parts rather than the name.
Reflection
A lot this week shows brave clients having trust in the agencies to come up with the right answer, especially in the case of FELD with their Reebok disaster. It wouldn’t have been a surprise if they’d been dismissed and a new agency brought in to fix it. Instead they could take what they’d learned and come up with a new solution.
Trust is a vital part of coming up with the right answer, both a trust from the client and a trust in yourself that what you’re proposing will be the right answer – it’s easy just to do what you’re told and follow a brief. If you can persuade a client to keep and open mind (also an open chequebook) then a project can be taken further than they ever expected.
Week 9: Resources
Read | Watch | Listen
Michael Beirut
How to use graphic design to sell things, explain things, make things look better, make people laugh, make people cry, and (every once in a while) change the world.
AWWWARDS, (2018)
Redefining Reality with Geoffrey Lillemon
- Take cold technology and infused it with art, to try and give a bit of life into it.
- Interactive, art for brands, installations.
- Fabricate other worlds
- Escape the mundane
- What happens to your data after you die?
- Lay down ideas which could one day become realities
- Giving something a personality makes you want to look after it more
- -Vending machine as the entrance to the other worlds-
- The Senseless Fairytale – a new perspective – a new audience
- Look at alternatives for reality -vs- technology
99U, (2019) Joel Beckerman: Designing With Sound
- Makes or breaks emotional connections
- We respond to sound quicker than any other sense.
- Sound can influence behaviour; increase or reduce fear, etc.
- Most designers forget about sound
- Sound can change the mood – redefines what we see
- We often don’t understand the roll of sound until it’s gone.
- Electric car: use a sound to alert pedestrians, make that sounds enhance the vehicle.
- The right sound raises brand awareness – Apple’s startup fanfare.
- Add sound to Oppo?
What sound would that be – calming?
Sounds of chosen moods?
Glug, (2019) Marcello Google Creative Labs
- We only know what we know
- Pull together completely different skillsets, their collision helps do the wonderful things
- Spark of an idea with some knowledge of tech.
- Oppo learns about their user the more it’s used?
Design as Idea with Bob Gill
- The hardest thing is not to be influenced by the culture which tells everyone how good design is supposed to look.
- Communicate something really interestingly
- Most people just don’t seem to be interested in breaking new ground, they regurgitate what the culture tells them to
Week 9: Workshop Challenge
The Challenge
- Select one of your design concepts, which you think will successfully answer your chosen project brief.
- Research innovative design thinking, format, media and production methods to gain a fresh insight into your project direction.
Focus on a small amount of information gathering – too much at this stage will slow down the project.
Current Mood
Sleep
Day/Night Shift – this might show an effect on the sleep and mood
A comment of feeling or a key incident?
A measure of overall feeling could be added at any point in the day, would show changes in mood which may show a pattern?
Points from interviews during transcription. Any points which the tone or language style come from?
Should colour theory be applied for screen backgrounds?
Data: Show shift pattern -vs- mood?
Mood -vs- hours on duty, how many extra hours has the user worked?
Feeling tired? Any effect at the start of the shift?
Comment or key incident during the shift: burglary/assault/domestic, etc. – add common callouts as a drop menu or buttons?
Include thresholds which trigger a text or email along the lines of the Mind 5 Question Mind Plan Survey?
Set up data:
Name
Job
Start date – worth stating how long in the job?
Email – for notices: go and chat to the boss, take a few deep breaths, etc.
Mobile – rather notices by text?
Shift patterns – might develop a common result as shift patterns change, ie. more negative moods during night shifts -vs- day shifts?
Monitor:
Mood start -vs- end of shift
Key incident – RTA’s might get more mentions than persuits, develops a pattern highlighting cause of stresses?
Responses over set thresholds could initiate a response from the app? Smiles get you a pat on the back, red faces trigger a text or message to speak to someone.
Introduce a ‘help now’ button? Takes user through to the helpline on the keyring?
Visual styles
Simple screen – use colour theory for background colours?
Single screen or scroll down? Use ‘next’ / ‘skip’ options from single screens?
Names
The app needs a name 🙁
Giving the app a name for reference – something simple which users can relate to, some character, something familiar?
Look for keywords in the interviews, anything repeated or used by more than one officer?
Who/what do the officers go to to help with problems?
- Briefings
- Colleagues – your ‘Oppo’
- Higher ranks
- Mentors
oppo
noun (plural oppos) British informal
a colleague or friend: an old oppo of mine.
Talk to your oppo
Tell your oppo
Look at car liveries, uniforms, etc., for any influences for visual styles.
Possible colours?
Type styles?
Use familiar colours. Recognised meanings?
Use simple face icons to represent the mood of the user – creates a character for Oppo
Progress and Reflection
I’m pleased with how the project is moving forward. It’s looking like it will have an unexpected outcome, I’d expected the results to be led by a print-based campaign with technology as some sort of back-up to that. My research has turned it on it’s head, the app is going to be the leader and any literature will be pushing people towards that app rather than just highlighting the issue of mental wellbeing.
