Week 5 Ex-Change

We met up for exchange number 2 today. We discussed how our presentations went and what we have developed over the last couple of weeks. It was interesting to see how everyone's projects have progressed from just getting to know the brief to now where most of us have finalised ideas and presented. 

Callum shared his presentation and project with us and he did a video to show cooking conditions in Africa. It was a very nice video, although I couldn't wrap my head around what his project was about.

I showed the ex-change group my teams dossier and video that we had created for presentation and explained to them our 'How might we?' statement. There was little room for feedback as we had just had our presentation but they did say that they liked it and we had a good use of penguins to help make the message clear. 

 

Presentation Day

Today we had our presentation with stream B and C. The video worked perfectly, we did need to have the volume right up to here the quiet city sound effects and people were applauding too loud during the credits to hear our penguin noises that we put at the end. I thought we all spoke very well and got our point across. I felt pretty comfortable speaking in front of everyone as we had the script in front of us and had practiced enough times that it felt easy and flowing. I really enjoyed the other presentations too as I'm always interested to see what the other teams are up to and possible briefs that I/we could continue on with.

Finding LT100 was a little mission of it's own. I would describe the lecture theatre as cute and cosy but it was hot and stuffy with bad upholstery and not a patch on our state-of-the-art design block. Fortunately the lollies put me in a better mood ;)

The dossier presentation was very informative and I particularly liked Emily Campbell/Sarah-Louis Crawford and Afred's Child one. These are top contenders with our brief and I would like to look at these further. I think lots of people liked our dossier aesthetically (because of the penguins and the cut out on the front page) but I think people also were attracted to our 'how might we' statement. I am very happy with how our brief and dossier turned out and comparing it to the others we are leaning towards carrying on with our own.
    

Last Day Before Hand In

Today we spent the whole day together getting everything touched up, finished, printed, bound and submitted and rehearsed ready for tomorrow. We had a few issues with printing but got there in the end and cropped the dossier and bound it with double sided tape. With the dossier complete we did some finial editing to the video and recorded our voices for the moderating version of our presentation. After finishing the presentation we practiced for a bit then filled in the partner evaluation sheets and zipped everything up and submitted it all.

It was a long day with a few barriers but I feel very proud of our dossier and presentation and am excited to share it with everyone tomorrow. After putting sounds in the video with the penguins it has just giving the presentation that extra push in communicating our well-being statement and how might we question.

Final Critique

Before todays class I was talking to some students in the other streams and asked them how their work is going and their presentations seem to be focused on more empathy. Reflecting it with ours I thought that it might be good to adjust the script slightly so that we use less 'big word' and channel more empathy and personality into our presentation to make it more fun and exciting to listen to. I talked to Georgia and Hannah about this and they agreed. Simplifying the script also helped with the timing of the video and gave us more time for each section to read. Before showing Donald and Tristam for a practice presentation we did some final touches to the dossier and ran some print tests. We had a few issues with printing at first but got there in the end. The physical dossier looks good and we went through with a felt and highlighted all the little mistakes and adjustments that it needs before final print. Im glad that we print tested to see all the little nitty gritties and that we have plenty of time to fix them.

We did a practice presentation with Donald and Tristam separately. They both really enjoyed the penguins and script. There was one sentence that they pointed out as being quite bulky so we will fix that. There was a couple of other small critiques like Titles and credits and a backing track of some sort. Tristam mentioned maybe city sounds which we all thought was a great idea. These are things we will fix over the weekend. Todays final critique has been super helpful in picking out all the small things to fix and making our presentation and dossier the highest quality possible.  

Late Night Touches

Tonight our team met up to add touches to our video script and dossier ready final critique tomorrow. The Script was ready to go so we recorded ourselves reading the script and shortened it to fit the 2 minute time frame. Once that was done we edited the video to fit the script and practiced a few times. With that all sorted we worked on the layout of the dossier. It was a very productive night to get everything done and ready to show Donald and Tristam tomorrow. The script sounds good and I'm really happy with our brief and the dossier and the video is very entertaining. I feel well on track and await critique tomorrow.

Presentation Video development

Today we discussed what we would put into the script for the presentation. We took the best and most important bits from our dossier text and put it into a script for our video. The script is sounding good but still needs a bit of work but with the script roughed out I feel on track.

Week 4 Session 1

Presentation Style - Dossier and presentation

From our meet up yesterday we have developed our text for the dossier and have mocked up a dossier. We chose to keep our dossier black and white to keep with the penguin theme and also show the greyscale city and lack of fun in business life. Georgia has been looking at penguin videos and I have been looking for penguin photos with my illustrations. We have started to piece our dossier together as a draft to show today and the critique was good people responded well to the penguins. However Donald questioned if we need both photography video and illustration for our dossier. After much consideration from all the critiques we decided to take the illustrations out and focus on the photography and film. I feel that its the right direction to go as photography of penguin will feel more real and 'grown up' therefore interactive with our target audience.   

Team Meet up

Today we met up at uni to discuss the critique and start developing our brief further. During the last class we had an idea to use penguins as a replacement to business people. This idea came from our people watching trip a couple of weeks ago where we mentioned that when they are all walking in clusters dressed in black and white they look like penguins. So we thought we would play of this idea as a visual for our brief and presentation ideation. So while Georgia and Hannah did some research on the effects of laughter in stress I draw some penguin illustrations to represent our three profiles. I feel like the illustrations and use of penguins helped us gain empathy for these three profile and brought humour into it which is what we are heading towards in our how might we questions.

Week 3 Session 2 - Peer Presentation

Today was a peer presentation. We peered up with another group at our table and presented a draft dossier that we had used the night before which included the Audience Profile, Situation/Context, Need, Insight, HMW Provocation. Donald also looked at our draft. I found this critique super helpful as we were a little confused last night on what we were showing today. Both Donald and the other group's critique were good because we had a lot of 'how might we' questions that we generated the night before and were not sure how to cut them down. Also we weren't sure if we could have three profiles rather than one and Donald and Tristam said that we could as long as they all link to one how might we question. Overall this critique has been very good in seeing where we are at in the project compared with our peers and what direction to take it in.

Team Meeting Questions

'How might we?' Questions

Today we met up as a team after our elective class and stayed at uni late to put together some 'how might we' questions for tomorrows peer presentation. We were given a sheet in class on Tuesday that we used to help break down these 'how might we' questions for our three profiles which we now know as Wiremu, Craig and Evelyn. We whipped up a dossier and I did some illustrated people for our profiles and using the 'how might we' we narrowed it down to these main points and created a range of questions from there:

Increase The Good, Remove The Bad, Explore The Opposite, Question An Assumption, Go After The Adjective, Look For Unexpected Resources, Look For Similar Environments + Create An Analogy. 

I feel like with this 'how might we' idea we are starting to hone in all the information that we have gathered over the last couple of weeks and start to flesh out the key factors for our brief draft. We are ready for peer presentation tomorrow and to receive some critique.

Week 3 Session 1

Point-of-view Statements

In class today we got given point-of-view statement sheets. We were asked to give them a go individually first using our target audience and then reflecting back with the team. I struggled with this for a moment but once I got the hang of it, it proved to be very helpful. This exercise was useful in narrowing down our target audience and help develop our brief while also gathering empathy for the different profiles used. From journey mapping we only really talked about the different encounters and feelings that each journey went through but this point of view sheet has helped put it into more of a structure that can be developed into a brief. From todays exercise our team now has a definite target audience that we can start working on for a brief.

People Watching in CBD

Today we went on a field trip to the CBD to observe people in their natural environment, the city centre. We chose to go to Lambton quay at lunch time as we thought that this was filled with people that fell into our target audience. It was also the busiest place in Wellington where we thought we would witness the most stress and interesting activity. As I am from Upper Hutt I don't often walk around Wellington city so I really enjoyed this new busy environment. What I found most interesting about this people watching was how amongst the chaos there was an in the foot traffic where people were literally acting like cars in traffic (e.g. sticking to the left, overtaking, having a speed limit and even some form of indication before changing direction). This was quite amusing/entertaining to observe while sitting down but as soon as we starting walking we found ourselves subconsciously following these road rules. Another thing we noticed was that people showed no form of interaction with each other unless to share a joke or embarrassing moment to share in the joy. An example of this was when a man ducked for a pigeon and saw us watching we laughed it off together, which was the first form of interaction all day. So from these observations we started asking what if questions in an attempt break this stigma of head down don't interact and get to destination. My first test was to simple yell out a loud bird-like noise to see who was engaged in their real surrounding. When I yelled only one man looked up in a disgusted manor as if to say to me that I had intruded his anti social bubble he was in. We then tried making direct eye contact and smiling at people as we walked by. we got more responses from this experiment. A mixed range it seemed that the kids and senior citizens smiled back but the business people remained unresponsive (and one construction worker took my smile and eye contact as flirting :/ ). I found this to be a great insight in how serious and professional the business people thought that they needed to be. This was also seen in the balloon video that we recorded on our work blog. This field trip has been very helpful with our journey maps and gaining a greater understanding/empathy for our target audience.