BRIEF 06: EVALUATION

Overview

The DBA brief was to brand the ‘Northern Powerhouse’ and create awareness of it’s many and varied attributes to the rest of the world. There’s still a lot of uncertainty around the detail of how a ‘Northern Powerhouse’ will manifest itself, however for the moment let’s assume the four cities that head up the‘Powerhouse’ will be Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds and Hull which creates a nice neat line across ‘the North’. The idea requires a name and a brand, so that the world understands that this is a signficant single entity. 

This was a new and alternative brief and I liked the format of having industry professionals come in and crit our work, as the workshops throughout this year is something I have throughly enjoyed. However the brief itself was really hard and I found it difficult to fully engage and find passion in it, opposed to the other briefs I had on at the time. I think this brief was more beneficial to me working and interacting with a group and visiting professionals apposed to the development of my design work. 

The overall feedback for the design work was really positive and they liked to see how far our concept had changed from the initial crit. One thing the told us to consider was pushing the pattern further or keeping it more consistent with the brand. 

What skills have you developed through this brief and how effectively do you think you have applied them?

For this brief I think by working in a group I developed some knowledge in different styles of design through working with these creatives. Using an isometric grid is something I have never used before or considered so it was nice to be informed about it. My skills in presenting my work also has increased and with not working in a familiar group I felt that I remained confident and professional when sharing ideas.

Another skill is something I already knew about, but with the DBA crit  it allowed me to put at the forefront again, and it was to always focus on a concept. Without a concept there is no meaning to the design and I think this is imperative for it's success!

What approaches / methods of design production have you developed and how have they informed your design development process?

The approaches I took to design production was heavily influence by secondary primary research, I think I definitely could have used more primary research through visiting the cities I live in, to get a more well rounded idea of how the brief could have been executed.

A method of design as a group, we considered different mediums such as grids and moving image , I also think that considering how a design works in an environment was something I have always considered but not to such a broad scale which is something I will capitalise on in the future and not just think of the most generic outcomes.

I did consider using physical elements for this brief such as printed paraphernalia which I think would have been a really nice feature for the presentation, besides digital work. However due to time this was something that couldn't be done.

What strengths can you identify in your work and how have/will you capitalise on these?

I think my strengths within this group is to consider everyones ideas and not to get offended when someones doesn't like your work, and in this case none of my work for this brief was chosen, but I still helped with other tasks to ensure that the delivery of our work was strong effective, such as organising the presentation, creating notes and ensuring that everyone had something to say.

I also think a strength was going out of my comfort zone when doing the environment design, although this isn't one of my strengths I am glad I had a go at it and I now have some experience in this. I can capitalise on this in other projects by looking at tutorials or testing it out in my spare time to enhance these skills.

What weaknesses can you identify in your work and how will you address these in the future?

I think the weaknesses in this brief was time management, I feel that as an individual I could have done more to contribute to the group, however with working on the end or year show this took up a lot more of time than I expected and was a brief I was more engaged in. This then left me out of the loop for most of this project, although I would attended meetings and keep in communication with my group it did prove difficult to thrive in to two big group projects in a small amount of time.

Another weakness within this brief is that we didn't assign specific roles to people in the group. A lot of the time was spent on everyone doing the same task and I think if we had done some more specific roles, the work load would have been quicker and productive. Although I mentioned my strengths was trying something new, I feel that if I was able to work on my strengths a bit more my design production could have been utilised more as an individual.

Identify things that you will do differently next time and what do you expect to gain from doing these?

I think I would take on a more authoritative role in my next group work and assign roles to people to make the design work more productive.

I would say time organisation as an individual, but this was out of my hands due to the demands of the briefs I was working on at the time. However in spite of saying this I always kept my group informed of what was going on a maintaining good communication, which is something I will continue to do.

To spend more time on designing outcomes and refining them for group projects, a lot of my outcomes where rushes and my work was no where near it's usual potential!