CONTINUING
CONCEPTS
CONTENTS Design Process
6
Manifesto
10
Ted Talk Magazine Spread
12
Ad Campaign
20
Site-Specific Installation
30
Remarks
40
DESIGN PROCESS When faced with the challenge of thinking about my own design process and how I work best, I seemed to come up with a simple ever repeating cycle. I always start out brainstorming, trying to think of as many great ideas and compiling word lists before I even start sketching. Typically, I then blank and end up stalling until I get the best ideas when I am least expecting it. Then comes the task of getting all of my ideas down on paper. I end up repeating those first four steps multiple times, creative block is a real thing. Ultimately, I find that my best ideas are the ones that come in the middle of my brainstorm and sketching.
6 │ Design Process
clear paper with process sketch
Manifesto What is design and what does it mean to me? For this project I was faced with the prompt of conveying just what I think design is or what it should be about. There is an underlying meaning to design, and that is that design is underrated, powerful and a form of art. So often designers, especially up and coming designers, are underrated and under appreciated. What designers create is powerful and controlling and most do not even realize it. Not just anyone could pick up and be a successful designer. Design is a trade, an art form just like painting or playing an instrument. It takes time, commitment and talent to design anything successful.
10 │ Manifesto
TED TALK MAGAZINE SPREAD This project was based off of creating a magazine spread for a Ted Talk of my choice. I chose a Ted Talk named, “The Happy Secret to Better Work.” It was all about positive psychology and learning to the best of our ability instead of teaching everyone to meet at the middle. Here is how I started working towards my final product.
12 │ Ted Talk Magazine Spread
Process Normally for projects, I start my planning and brainstorming out by creating a set of rules that I know I want my design to portray using a technique referred to as OIICs. For this project, I had not yet learned about this technique, so making up goals in my head was what I had to work with.
oiic OIIC stands for Objective, Insight, Issue, Challenge. This is a method I have been using to clearly see my goals for my current project at hand.
Sketches For the magazine project, I was faced with one rule: a hand must be included in the final design. These are a few snippets of sketches that went towards the final composition of my Ted Talk magazine spread.
sketches Sketches are something I do to help get ideas on the page and see what ideas might work together. 14 │ Ted Talk Magazine Spread
Revised Sketches These revised sketches are just the top three ideas from my small sketches. My revised sketches include more detail for me to see what kind of tone I want my final product to have.
16 │ Ted Talk Magazine Spread
Mock-Up Once the revised sketches are complete, I brought them to life in a quick digital way to get an even better understanding of what will work and what will not work. I was able to take direction from this step to see what route is the strongest and what will work best for the final.
Final The final product ended up at an 11x17 inch spread for a “Time” magazine. The goal of the project was to make this spread fit into the brand guidelines of a specific magazine, down to the font and the numbers on the page.
spread A spread is two or more pages that are placed next to each other in a magazine or a book of some kind.
18 │ Ted Talk Magazine Spread
PSYCHOLOGY
The
Happy Secret to Better Work
companies in the midst of an economic downturn. And I found that most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: If I work harder, I’ll be more successful. And if I’m more successful, then I’ll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting and managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior. And the problem is it’s scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. Every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better one, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we’re going to change it. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. We’ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, as a society. And that’s because we think we have to be successful, then we’ll be happier. But our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise somebody’s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, we’ve found that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You’re 37% better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we’re able to work harder, faster and more intelligently. We need to be able to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you’re positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way. We’ve found there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully. We’ve done these things in research now in every company that I’ve worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they’re grateful for for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world not for the negative, but for the positive first. Journaling about one positive experience you’ve had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it. Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters. We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we’ve been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand. And finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. We get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their support network. And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we’ve found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but a real revolution.
We believe we should work hard in order to be happy, but could we be thinking about things backwards? In this fast-moving and very funny talk, psychologist Shawn Achor argues that, actually, happiness inspires us to be more productive.
By Shawn Achor “Why do you waste your time studying happiness at Harvard? What does a Harvard student possibly have to be unhappy about?” Embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness. Because what that question assumes is that our external world is predictive of our happiness levels, when in reality, if I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10% of your long-term happiness. 90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world. And if we change it, if we change our formula for happiness and success, we can change the way that we can then affect reality. What we found is that only 25% of job successes are predicted by IQ , 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat. I talked to a New England boarding school, probably the most prestigious one, and they said, “We already know that. So every year, instead of just teaching our students, we have a wellness week. And we’re so excited. Monday night we have the world’s leading expert will speak about adolescent depression. Tuesday night it’s school violence and bullying. Wednesday night is eating disorders. Thursday night is illicit drug use. And Friday night we’re trying to decide between risky sex or happiness.” I said, “That’s most people’s Friday nights.” Which I’m glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. Silence on the phone. And into the silence, I said, “I’d be happy to speak at your school, but that’s not a wellness week, that’s a sickness week. You’ve outlined all the negative things that can happen, but not talked about the positive.” The absence of disease is not health. Here’s how we get to health: We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success. In the last three years, I’ve traveled to 45 countries, working with schools and
TIME, SEPTEMBER 9, 2018
2
AD CAMPAIGN The ad campaign project started off based around making people love West Virginia. I ended up taking a twist on that and trying to show people what a big problem littering is in West Virginia. I wanted to convince people that we need to all take part in taking care of the beautiful land and ultimately, making them fall in love again.
20 │ Ad Campaign
Process OIIC Objective: Show how pollution is hurting West Virginia’s environment.
Issue: Many people are not aware of the ef-
fects on air quality as well as water quality in West Virginia. Many are not educated on littering and the wildlife of West Virginia. Also, just the overall quality of the state of West Virginia is depleted by littering and polluting. Insight: Many West Virginians care about the environment, but don’t see how their actions are affecting the state.
Challenge: Help people see how they are impacting the environment.
Sketches For my ad campaign sketches, I was playing around with making trash and litter into things like buildings and cars. I also experimented with social media and making West Virginia beautiful without a filter and also using a filter to clean up the debris. Using real statistics as a guide was a main goal to ensure credibility.
22 │ Ad Campaign
clear for sketches
Inspiration I was envisioning my ad campaign to have a similar tone that this campaign used. A simple background allows the main idea to stand out. It lets the audience put together what the composition is all about.
Inspiration Inspiration is a great tool in design to get ideas and to see what has already been done 24 │ Ad Campaign
Mock Up I took the best ideas from my original sketches to create my mock-ups. Using a filter effect and litter or debris to portray another thing were two of my stronger areas for an idea.
Research For research, I sent my four mock-up designs to eight of my friends who are not in design or in any design classes that would know what is going on. I asked them to rank the designs in order of which they understood or like the best, to they understood or liked the least. My results came back that design four, the soda can in the puddle, was the best received design and led to my jumping off point.
research
26 │ Ad Campaign
research is used to make sure that your audience can understand what the design is trying to say
Final My final compositions evolved to being the most littered items in West Virginia as commonly used transportation devices. Aluminum cans being the most littered things in waterways, fast food wrappers and cigarettes.
SITE-SPECIFIC INSTALLATION For the final project of the semester, it was all based around something that bothered or “bugged” me. Ultimately, I decided wanted something that other people relate to, and something that some may not understand. Trying to bring awareness to how people walk was where the project really began.
30 │ Site-Specific
Process OIIC Objective: Get walkers (specifically to class) to walk on the right side of the sidewalk (like a road) if there are people coming the other way. Issue: Walkers tend to be thinking only of themselves and/or the conversation they are having when walking to class and they do not file into a single line should someone else be walking on the opposite side of the sidewalk.
Insight: It is frustrating to have to step off the sidewalk into the road or stop walking completely because other walkers are not paying attention to what is going on around him/her.
Challenge: Getting walkers attention to direct them to the right side of the sidewalk like you would drive a car on the road.
Sketches The sketches for this project were really all over the place. I had one specific idea in mind and I could not get it out of my head. This came with some crazy sketches just to get an idea of what all I could actually do to show someone how to walk. One of my main goals with this topic was controlling how the viewer walked and that is what I went for.
32 │ Site-Specific
clear
Inspiration These two site-specific installations used the same idea I was trying to convey, controlling where people walked, or at least where they wanted to walk. Giving viewers a sense that there was a specific place to walk was what helped to spark my vision for it all.
36 │ Site-Specific
Mock Up The final step before creating the life-size installation was making sure the concept would work in a real setting. Using my small prototype, I was able to see what needed to happen in order to make the vision come to life. I saw here that I would only need five people and that the black and white sign did not quite hold its weight next to the colorful people.
Final Finally, the site-specific project was set up on a sidewalk so that when people walk, they had to walk around the human cutouts. I had a lot of great responses come from this installation and I realized that people do not actually understand their surroundings.
38 │ Site-Specific
Remarks Overall, this semester has been concepts in the making. I have learned a lot in regards to design and pushing through the difficult places and projects. My process has grown and evolved just within the past four months and I am looking forward to the coming years of continuing my process.
40 │ Remarks
Raegan Ricer│Fall 2018