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@chloe-gordon-blog

2199 // RMIT COMM DESIGN // CHLOE

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Reflective piece

This whole project was a really interesting experience. I feel that at first me and my team really struggled for a couple of weeks, because we didn’t really understand what was being asked of us. Also I remember being very confused about how this related to design and why we were doing something that at the time seemed so out of reach and somewhat not relevant to what I wanted to do as a future career. I think this was because I have always been used to designing things based on a final visual product, rather than designing something based on an event. Once I finally understood what was being asked of me it all became a lot more straightforward. I was able to understand after having many brainstorming sessions with my group and talking everything over, as well as having a couple of conversations with Andy. I think a turning point for us was having the presentation after the first couple of weeks, because it really forced us to get our ideas together and organise them enough to be able to explain them to a group of people, which also helped us get our own proper understanding of what we were trying to say and communicate. We faced a lot of struggles in our exploration, because it seemed that literally everything we tried wasn’t working, and it seemed that our idea was impossible to do in the amount of time and budget that we had. After going back to square one we came up with the idea to do a simple idea like a map, but have a more detailed approach on it. From the very beginning we knew we wanted our idea to be fun, interactive, engaging and entertaining, and we knew that even if we did a map, we would still be able to incorporate our values. Since creating something that was 2D rather than 3D meant that any idea we had we could essentially draw on paper, so it still allowed us to be open with our creativity for this approach. Overall I am happy with how we worked as a team to overcome all the issues we faced to get to our final product. In a way, it was also good that we faced so many challenges, because our end result was better than what we had planned to create, plus it was very environmentally friendly unlike any of the other ideas we had considered. It was really different for me to create something like this that was related to an event, as well as having to work with a group, because this was something I had never done before (that was design related). Perhaps being in such a small group made it easier to work in a group, because we could easily talk through and agree on our ideas, and it all worked out well in the end. It was really rewarding to be able to work through our issues as a team and still reach a final product that we were happy with.

Final product

For our final product, we decided to make a map, and the above image is our result. We had so many issues throughout our exploration that we realise an art installation as a means of wayfinding was not practical and even if we were to create something, it was going to be very difficult within our time frame and the materials we had available within our budget. After a lot of discussions of how we can take our concept in a different direction, we settled on the idea of a map. It was evident that everyone, if not majority of people already knew exactly where the locations were that we would be attending for the event, so we decided to take a more abstract approach. So instead of being specifically wayfinding, it would entertain the journey there. This is why our final product seems somewhat abstract. We also wanted to make the food theme a dominant part of the image, using fruit to make up the image and presenting the map on a plate as if it were food.

An issue we came across when thinking about the distribution of this map, is that we had very limited options due to the typical nature of a map. Typically, you would expect a map to be printed, however we didn’t want to print out the map. We took into consideration the fact that all other groups were creating objects or materials for our peers to carry around on the day - we didn’t want our map to become an obstruction to the event, and didn’t want everyone to have to carry another thing around. After considering this, we instantly thought a digital map would be perfect. Assuming everyone has a smart phone and would be bringing it to the event, and assuming everyone is a part of the Facebook group, we posted a link to download the file for everyone to engage with it how they preferred. Doing a digital map was an absolute win win for our group. The pros we came up with were:

easily accessable

environmentally friendly

doesn’t create an obstruction - another object to carry

super convenient - fits in your pocket

gives everyone the freedom to use the map how they like - whether they only want to glance at it, or if they want to print it out and add their own illustrations to it (this also fit in with our value of being interactive and engaging)

After many many struggles with the wayfinding team, we finally were able to get to a final wayfinding method that fit perfectly with our original values, plus was a perfect outcome for our peers and the nature of the FOOD event.

Map Exploration

After chatting on our facebook group, we have a few more ideas about the digital generation of our map. We’ve been thinking about different possible ways of making our map and we thought we could possibly draw it, use craft materials and take a photo of it, or even make it straight away as a vector file on illustrator. We think we have decided on the appearance to be vector based so we can create it on illustrator. This will also allow us to easily change colours to create many different variations of our map efficiently.

Meetings + a new idea

After another meeting, we decided it would be the easiest to continue our chats through our facebook group chat as we thought it would give us the ability to talk more often and we would also have a record of everything we spoke about. During this meeting we went back to square one and thought about how we can create something that is related to wayfinding, that would be easily accessible to every student, that would still allow us to produce a wayfinding method in a fun and engaging way. This led us to the idea of a map. We thought we could do this in the form of a digital map, rather than something tangible. As all of our previous ideas had been tangible and had not worked out for us. We thought about what all the other groups are doing, and many are creating a physical object for everyone to use. We thought about this, and realised that instead of us creating something that illuminated a pathway, we could create something that highlighted a pathway but in another form - digital. We thought digital would be a great method to look into, as everyone is already going to be carrying so much on the event day, and we thought “how can we give everyone something to bring, without making them carry another item”. Obviously, everyone has a phone, which gave us the perfect idea of creating the map and just sending everyone the link (or something along those lines... we haven’t got that 100% sorted yet). This idea is also a lot more environmentally friendly than any of our previous ideas that we had considered doing which is another bonus! We need to decide who will do what job to create this map in a collaborative way since we can’t do trials.

Rapid Prototypes

RAPID PROTOTYPES:

Due to our project being a very physical/tactile thing, we thought making mock-ups of our ideas would be a great way to work out what we really wanted to do, and to simplify our idea. But what this task did for us more so, was getting us talking about what was and wasn’t working - achieving a good end result for us of narrowing our idea down even more. We tried to make mock-ups of some of the things we had in mind, but we were lacking some of the tools to execute our ideas properly. So instead we went back to sketching and planning which allowed to generate our idea more.

COGNITIVE WALKTHROUGH:

This was actually a really important thing four our group to engage in, because we hadn’t actually really thought about the pathway yet, such as the actual route we would be taking, which is actually a crucial part of our project. We decided to walk to the alumni courtyard, where we realised the huge staircase that you MUST walk up to get to the courtyard, there is basically no way to avoid them. This reminded us of one of the ideas that we presented in our powerpoint - we had discussed having food objects (such as an egg or a milkshake) melting down a set of stairs, and have imagery plastered on the stairs such as how it is done with advertising. After doing this, we realised our ideas are much more specific now: we are either going to work with balloons (cheap, effective and easy) or do this stair technique - which will require some trial and error.

HEURISTICS:

We got a bit stuck and confused, so we had a chat to andy - and in our discussion we said that maybe we could focus our ‘wayfinding’ more so on making the pathway exciting, because everyone already knows how to get there, so assisting in the directions could be a little pointless. however andy pointed out that this was in fact heuristics - as it is just an assumption that everyone knows how to get there - because maybe they don’t? We kept chatting and developing on the ‘route’ idea, and thought that maybe our idea doesn’t have to display the most direct route to the courtyard, maybe it could be a fun new and exciting way to get there?

Definitely gave us some things to think about!

'Remixing’ our idea

For today’s class, we had to talk with the other groups in order to ‘remix’ our idea. We found it really handy that we had kept our options so broad and open as it allowed for us to easily work with other groups and make our own idea more specific. In order to narrow down which groups we could work with, we did this little activity with andy:

Our final outcome...

Must be: creative, engaging

Should be: visual, inclusive/invovle everyone

Will never: be misleading, be plain & boring, be unclear.

Case study

Hansel and gretel:

The classic fairtytale from our childhood that we all are familiar with greatly relates to our exploration.

details from the plot that relate to our exploration: When walking into the woods, hansel takes a piece of bread and leaves a trail of bread crumbs to follow home so they don’t get lost and know which way they came. However when trying to get home, the children find that the bread crumbs had been eaten by birds - much like our ideas being ruined by people passing by. The breadcrumbs are the main navigation method within the story, as it allows them to keep track of their whereabouts.

Ideas meeting & prototyping 2

At our ideas meeting, we decided to go back to our main idea which was our ‘breadcrumbs’ idea. However we also needed to create a prototype for this. We simply printed out some pizza shapes and stuck them on the ground and left them overnight to see how they would last. (Used pizza to test how the ink would last in any weather but also because they act like arrows). Initially we tried this breadcrumb method with chalk (drawing pictures on the ground to create a path). We thought this would be a good idea as it is cheap and also washes away, so it would be fine to do in a public space as it also doesn’t create litter or any obstacles for passers by. However the fact that it washes away was not a good thing, because we realised this was the same issue as all of our previous ideas, so this also had to be eliminated.

For the protyping, we stuck the pizza shapes on the ground overnight. After even a couple of hours we noticed that they were already dirty from leaves, and were scrunched up and had blown around. But in the morning they were wet from the rain too. This made us re-think this idea. Because if we were to use it, 100 people would be walking on the design and they would get even more ruined. We thought this perhaps could work if we stuck the design on a wall, to avoid them getting ruined by being walked on. However the same thing happened to this trial as what happened to the painting on cardboard prototype - ruined by rain.

issues & prototyping

When prototyping our ideas, a lot of our ideas were ruined. Every time we tried to experiment with an our idea it rained, making us realise that we had to be VERY realistic with our ideas, taking everything into account. Especially with the Melbourne weather and how unpredictable it can be meant we had to eliminate more of our ideas.

This was a very simple trial, we painted a piece of cardboard and hung it outside overnight, and came back the next morning to see that it had rained. After this prototyping we scheduled a meeting to reevaluate ideas.

Refinement

After our pitch, we realised that we really had to refine our ideas and get them down to a smaller number. We really considered the reality of our ideas, and what things would work and what wouldn’t due to time limits and what was really within our reach. Our main issue was that many of our ideas had to be left due to not working in a public space - along the route from RMIT to the markets. (such as a hansel and gretel like pathway, installations, balloons etc. This is what gave us the idea to instead focus our wayfinding on going from building 9 to the alumni courtyard. Obviously everyone already knows how to get there, so thats why we want to focus our idea on keeping everyone entertained for the journey there. To get this down to just one idea we are planning on doing prototyping to see which of our installation ideas are the most appropriate.

Final idea & skeleton plan

For the final idea we are going to present for our skeleton plan, is the four main concepts we came up with (the last one being our strongest idea and the one we will focus on the most). We have provided a series of research & images to provide the viewer with a visual indication of what we are planning to do.

The values we are planning on focussing on throughout our presentation are the following:

Collective experience

Interactive and engaging installations, gets everyone involved

All ideas are quite versatile

FUN and involving - a creative approach to reaching the final destination.

Installations would work well as wayfinding because they act as markers to show you’reon the right path

We can’t decide on one final idea until we know what the rest of the class is doing but all of our ideas and concepts are versatile and can be changed around to suit other ideas

Interactive as group and individual, acts as experience as well as entertainment.

Our main idea is the combination of way-finding and installations - informative things

Untraditional, more engaging and fun and visual - a modern and fun approach on what would traditionally be very informational.

To back up all of our points and reinforce our ideas, we plan to provide a powerpoint of case studies, own research and our own experiences to help you picture the sort of vibe our way-finding ideas will encapsulate.

IDEA GENERATION: part 4

This is our strongest concept! It came to us when we saw an image of burnt toast appearing to fade like a gradient from burnt to almost raw. Much like the Hansel and Gretel case study, it bought us back to our childhood - like when you would play hide and seek with your friends or brothers and sisters, or would try to find an item in the house, and someone would give you clues if you were getting ‘hotter’ or colder’. We thought this could be a really unique and interactive method of way-finding for the event - and it could be combined with all of the previous ideas.

Very interactive as it’s almost like a game

Start with ‘cold’ clues eg an ice cream, then as you get ‘warmer’ more clues such as it melting, and then as you get ‘hotter’ you get clues like a hot chocolate.

would print out images of toast and stick it around/on ground

This concept can be easily combined with our other ideas

mood board:

IDEA GENERATION: part 3

While researching on Pinterest, we came across a material which we sort of turned around and created a concept from it. We found balloons to be a really popular material, and to work well for the creation of food art. After brainstorming, we realised that we can find different coloured balloons, or we could paint balloons, or we could combine balloons with other materials to create a sculpture.

Could have different shaped balloons, like shapes of food, make balloons into shapes or paint them into food shapes

research: when we went out for our meal, we saw a lot of stores used the balloon technique: Fun, grabs attention out the front of the store, enticing customers to enter.

pros: Very versatile, cheap and easy

cons: balloons could pop or fly away

Balloon mood board and idea generation:

IDEA GENERATION: part 2

Our second concept for our installations/way-finding idea is trails/creating a pathway. To get this idea, we did a case study on Hansel and Gretel - playing on memories from childhood and the stereotype. When you think of a pathway, we all immediately thought of a crumb trail, such as what is found in Hansel and Gretel, and thought we could incorporate our memories from our childhood into the collaborative picnic, and our method of way-finding.

Traditional way finding, bread crumb trail - we can make this alternative though - also wouldn’t use real food as it could look like rubbish

Get people to follow a certain direction up the stairs by having an image of food going down the stairs, such as melting ice cream or cracked egg

Here is a mood board to aid you with a visual representation of what we have in mind:

IDEA GENERATION: part 1

For our groups focus on way-finding/installations, we wanted to keep our options broad and interpretive, so that we could easily manipulate our ideas to work around what other groups were doing. We also wanted to really put an emphasis on the creativity and involvement to our work. Our first main idea for this task was installations.

Our main ideas for this concept are:

Placing interesting looking/abstract food in weird contexts in a sculptural way

Placing an emphasis on the colour - creating a very fun and vibrant mood. We would create a funky and cool vibe with food out of context

We also thought we could use food condiments (such as sauce) to create typography, as it would be quite easy to work with - like paint.

Here is a mood board of inspiration to give you a visual of what we have in mind:

BRAINSTORMING

After going out for dinner with my group (Bella and Kirraley), we looked back on our brainstorm from the first week, of all our possible options. We reflected on our experience at the restaurant, and noted all of the things we liked. We came to the conclusion that we loved the creative aspects of the restaurant. One thing that really stuck out for us, was the neon lighting - it was made in the shape of cherries but also appeared to be a set of eyes. We thought it was really quirky and creative how food had been manipulated to become a creative installation, yet still fit with the theme of the restaurant. We got our interests down to a few options:

lighting design

menu design

way finding

typography

After much agonising and thought and consideration, we came to the conclusion that we wanted to focus on way-finding/installations.

Our team’s vision

We were very confused about the brief at first, and didn’t really know what we had to do. But after talking with andy and brainstorming ideas we got our heads around it. After finalising our idea, we reached a vision or a ‘vibe’ of what we wanted our final contribution to the event to be. We want it to be fun, entertaining, engaging, a visual experience that is also somewhat quirky. Since reaching this final conclusion, we are now excited for the final event as we know what we need to do

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