When I started my final project (NMP), I took a while to find my feet because none of the ideas I initially had, seemed good enough. It was also January, a time when I was thinking of taking a year off because of my emotional instability and health problems. Anyway, I decided to stay on and finish the year, considering I did so well last year. One of my first ideas for my NMP was to do a big project on handmade typography. I felt like much of my work was very minimal at the time, and it didn’t have much colour, so I wanted to show diversity in my portfolio. I looked at a lot of work by Sagmeister & Walsh, and Morag Myerscough for inspiration. I also started drawing type every day as a small side project.
When I pitched the main concept to my tutors, they said something was missing. I needed a more substantial idea to bring it all together so I went back to the drawing board, and kept on doing some more research. The more research I did, the more I discovered that I wanted to work on something meaningful. A project that could benefit society. Then reading through the news, I saw how the conservative government wanted to cut the arts and humanities budget in education, so I got an idea to make a project about the positive benefits of being creative, even if you don’t work as a creative professional. I wanted to create a campaign to encourage people to find time to do creative things at least once a week. I found lots of statistics and information about positive outcomes of art therapy, or doing things like dance, theatre, music, drawing, etc. For example, drawing and painting helps you to look at problems in different ways. I thought I was going in the right direction, but I was still struggling to really nail down how I was going to do it.
A few weeks later my tutors, posted a creative opportunity on our Facebook group called Collabology. “Collabology is a two-week creative workshop led by UAL Professor Fred Deakin (University of the Arts London). As one of a hand-picked selection of creative practitioners from across the UK, this workshop gives you a unique opportunity to collaborate with talented people from other disciplines to imagine and create an incredible project that you’ll be showcasing to an audience of students, academics, industry and investors. The workshop will turbo-charge your
creative process and set you up to become one of the industry’s trailblazers.”
I immediately signed up for it, because even though it was during our Easter break, I thought it would be completely worth it. I always wanted the opportunity to collaborate with people from other creative courses because I think you can get some interesting results. Plus, someone else might have useful skills in areas you don’t have such as product design, or fashion design so you can complement each other. I also thought the workshop would help me develop my NMP further.
The first week of Collabology was all about learning how to collaborate well: this was a lot harder than it sounds. The whole point of the first week was to incubate new project ideas, and as a group choose which projects we actually wanted to make. We did many exercises to understand what makes each of us tick. For example, one of the exercises was: To write down three things that make us feel alive in life. We had to give three different answers and then choose the one that was the most meaningful for us. We then would be asked “why?” five times by the rest of our group. The whole point of this exercise was to dig deeper and find the root of what makes you think a certain way. It was a bit nerve wrecking at the start, but it did help me in understanding who I am, and what I stand for in life.
The second question was “If you can fix/solve anything in the world (had to be a social change issue) what would it be? My three answers were gender inequality, helping the homeless / the most unfortunate in society, and pollution / global warming. Again, we would be asked why time and time again.
We did all of these exercises using online applications like Fuze (it is like Skype but better for video conferencing) and Slack (a great application to chat, share documents, etc) because Fred couldn’t be in London, Falmouth, and Manchester at the same time. Each university, had their own private Fuze group and support staff which were very helpful during those two weeks. They were very supportive and were always there when we were stuck or were stressing out.
We then had to each come up with a project based on our interests and pitch it to the rest of the Manchester group. Once we pitched the project, everyone voted for their favourite ones (most favourite to least favourite 1-3). When the three projects were chosen, we then each could choose what project we wanted to join. I joined the “Radical Empathy” project that I originally pitched, which was an organisation/charity that creates campaigns to educate young people about diversity and tolerance in issues such as class, gender, sexual preference, and race. There were other good projects like “Be a Bee” (saving the bees), and “Idea 22” which was about changing the way kids learn at school.
The second week was all about making those projects/ ideas that we voted for happen. Various digital fabrication tools and other resources were available to us in case we needed them (3D printing, cameras, printing). Another added extra was that we had access to a small budget for costs. We had four days to come up with a logo, a mock up website, any other extras and a launch (Kickstarter style) video to pitch to investors. At the point we started meeting up in person and working on the project 9am up to midnight or longer every day.
Fred Deakin also brought leading creative industry experts such as Andy Huntington from Berg, Joel Gethin-Lewis from Helicar & Lewis, Daniel Charney from Fixperts and Nat Hunter (RSA) to support us. The first week was mainly talks about their work, but the second week, we had professional crits every day about our project with them over Fuze. At the end of the second week we presented our project together at a launch event in The MMU Shed to students, academics, industry and investors through Fuze. Presenting a project through online communication (video) definitely made it a lot more challenging, but rewarding at the same time. The whole point of using online methods without physically being there was that Fred wanted for us to get used to the future of modern collaboration. He said to us that it is very common for creative agencies these days to meet international clients or other designers over Skype, or Fuze, so it is a very useful skill to have.
I learned so much in the Collabology workshop about working collaboratively with people from other disciplines in two weeks, than I have ever done at university before. It was amazing to see our group idea evolve so quickly, from the #WhatIsNormal campaign where victims could seek support and describe how they feel to a more positive and light hearted approach (#ThinkBeforeYouSpeak campaign). The critical feedback from creative directors and the support we received from Fred and his staff every day was vital for our success. What I enjoyed the most was that the staff never spoke down to you when they gave you constructive feedback. They really knew how to motivate you but also give you the autonomy to make your own decisions.
I was in a group of three (another graphic design student from Salford, and a first year from MMU Fine Art), and meeting up was definitely a challenge, especially when one of our groups members wasn’t that reliable. The main thing I took from this workshop was the surprising amount of work you can actually do in a week if you really work hard and put your mind to it. If you have a good concept and you have a good group of people with a variety of skills, then you can definitely produce quick mockups.
Our first idea for our project was to create a website and an app where you could seek support if you had been racially abused, or discriminated against, and also anonymously post how you feel on the website similar to the Whisper concept. We also thought of projecting those live posts on billboards in local bus stops, so the public could see and empathise with how other people in their community felt about certain issues (like an art installation).
After our first crit from some of the creative directors at Mother London, we were told it was a good start, but that such a heavy topic needed a light hearted and positive approach, otherwise our target audience (18-30 year olds) would not engage with it. Based on the feedback we received, we asked other members of Collabology to draw celebrities and famous people based on stereotypes, and then to draw them based on descriptions about their merits (not physical attributes) instead. We then used the outcomes of the exercise as a case study of how you perceive others around you.
That led us on to make a video were people read out mean things that someone had said to them in their life, similar to the famous “Read Mean Tweets” YouTube videos from Jimmy Kimmel. At this point, I had a lightbulb moment, and I remembered the Buzzfeed videos I’m constantly watching. Buzzfeed are very good at making viral videos aimed at the young generation about a diverse range of topics (awkward to fun) so I thought we could apply their same interview style approach to our videos, we could make them go viral. So we interviewed our friends about important and uncomfortable issues nobody ever wants to talk about and recorded it on camera.
Questions like “What is a lesbian haircut?”, “What do you know about gender, and how do you feel when you meet someone from a different gender (not just woman, and man)?”. To extend the “Think Before You Speak” campaign, we made posters with slogans such as “What’s a lesbian haircut?” and “Why can’t a man wear pink?”. We also designed an app, and a website where you could learn more about these controversial topics through light hearted videos and a set of questions that would hopefully challenge the way you thought about an issue such as gender.
Our social media campaign was for people to send us their own short videos through Instagram and Twitter, explaining how they would like to be addressed or treated. We would then also share these videos through our website and app.
If I had more time to develop my NMP, I would work much more quickly, I would also make t-shirts with our slogans, create a radical empathy toolkit (like a welcome pack) which young people could have access to if they wanted to promote behaviour change in their community and create a real organisation called “Radical Empathy”. I would host meetings with young people to educate them about these controversial issues in schools and maybe even start an annual behaviour/social change festival about this.
This is a project I am very passionate about. My plan is to develop this further once I finish my degree and make into a real organisation. What my graphic design degree has taught me, is that I want to use my creative skills to make a difference in the world, even if it’s just a small one. After speaking to my tutors, I feel this is a powerful project which could actually be very beneficial for the young generation in Britain. The main aim of the campaign is for people to empathise with others, and I feel I could keep on incorporating other controversial topics like feminism, homelessness to this. It’s a campaign / idea that can keep on developing much further, and I’m looking forward to making it into a real thing.
