Type: University Project
SCROLL DOWN
INTRODUCTION TO THE PROJECT
Futurism 2020 is an open showcase of the breadth and depth of creative work that the students of Murdoch University have produced over the course of 2020 in both semester one and semester two. The work presented in the showcase emerges from a number of majors within three broad disciplines at Murdoch UniversityL Creative Media, Communication and Arts. Some of the work is the result of a client-based project requiring a tailored strategy and implementation for a real-world situation. For others, they are independently created artworks that showcase the talent and imagination of our creative artists. Others, such as video game and film projects, are the result of skills together to produce the final work.
CONTENTS OF THIS PROJECT
Introduction to Service Design
Visualisation Exercises & Empathy Maps
Group Meeting for Presentation
Showing Each Other Our Own Work
Planning Deadlines For Publication
Bunnings Sausage Sizzle Fundraiser
Playing With The Idea Of Origami
Previous Years Designs and Hub Tour
Creating a Publication Style Guide
INTRODUCTION TO SERVICE DESIGN
“This class introduces the locally based industry event for which students will plan, design and install. Each each the College of Arts curates the Media Arts Showcase which is an exhibition to exhibit student work from the College of Arts. This unit will focus on the design of this event including planning, design and install of the exhibition areas. The event will require a large series of touchpoints including digital and printed outcomes. Service design projects like this one are often complicated and require many different disciplines with varying skills sets to work together to design the service system.
This class will act as a preliminary briefing session to examine the complexities of the event and establish strategies for commencing the real life project. This class also looks into efficient methods for coordinating and managing a team of people for a service design project. In addition it will be used to break down the skills and tasks required to effectively deliver a service design system such as the Media Showcase project.”
ESTABLISHING OUR STAKEHOLDERS
We did a lot of work the first few weeks looking at the concept of stakeholders and who they were for our showcase. Stakeholders are all the people that could possibly be involved in the event and/or affected by the event running. There were lots of mindmapping sessions where we got together as groups and tried to come up with as many possible stakeholder for this showcase as possible, which we realised was a lot! This ranged from ourselves, other students, faculty staff, higher ups of Murdoch University, TAFES, high schools, printers and many many more.
The purpose of these mindmaps was to think of ways that we might engage with each of these stakeholders as their interactions with the event will determine whether they return to the event in the coming years, spread word of mouth about the event to bring in more people in the future or discourage people from attending the event. We need to plan the event from beginning to finish with the stakeholders in mind, thinking about ways that would please them the whole way through. For example, wayfinding needs to be effective in order for a stakeholder to find their way around a hospital especially as there a lot of panicked people trying to find injured family members or friends who won’t be reading the signs properly so they can’t be confusing. All these experiences effect the stakeholders and the way that they will view our event if they experience it positively or negatively.
OUR PROJECT BRIEF
To start the project off we needed to construct a project brief that we could present to stakeholders, specifically the higher ups at Murdoch University and discipline heads, to get them on board with the idea of a showcase happening at the end of this year. In groups we were split up to focus on each section of the project brief, my group being the stakeholders of the event and how they would benefit from the showcase. As we had been doing a lot of mindmapping and talking about stakeholders previously in class, we found this quite easy to add a lot of stakeholders to our paragraph that would be included in the final project brief. We set up a word document that was posted in our Facebook group chat that we created after being placed in the group together so that we could all add to it different stakeholders that we thought of over the week. Once we had compiled as many as we could we turned our notes into a paragraph before posting it to Teams. The section we came up with is below:
Who will benefit?
Analysing the exhibit from all angles, numerous key stakeholders will positively benefit from the Murdoch Showcase. The key stakeholder of the event will be the entire Murdoch community; branching from heads of disciplines, alumni, staff members, security, small businesses situated in Murdoch and most importantly the library, with the possibility of extending the event long- term in the space. As the university is being represented, the event needs to reinforce and promote Murdoch; professionally showcasing the exceptional student work made from each discipline as well as how academics pass on industry knowledge to their students.
Students across each discipline who are asked to showcase their work; Games Art, Sound, Screen, Graphic Design, Creative Writing and Strategic Communications will significantly benefit from the professional display. The exhibit will give the students the opportunity to socialise, and collaborate with industry professionals in their specialised field, they will achieve a sense of accomplishment by presenting their work to various people who attend the exhibit. This event will not only benefit Murdoch, but local communities, governments and businesses, as we are actively supporting the community and providing more clientele for the evening.
The showcase is also a great chance to showcase Murdoch and its students to competing Universities and TAFES, not only in Western Australia but to international industry studios and businesses. Extending the experience to industries outside of Australia, cements a relationship to Murdoch, this offers exciting new opportunities for students around the world and gives various industry professionals an insight into what the next generation of employees in Australia are capable of achieving.
Key stakeholders also include high school graduates and students who will significantly benefit from the exhibit as they will have the chance to socialise with current students in their desired field of study. Furthermore, the exhibit will provide a visual insight and interaction into the professional level of work produced by students and what each discipline offers, enticing high school graduates to apply to Murdoch.
Lastly, family and friends will benefit from the exhibit, as they have supported each student throughout their degree, and this will give them the opportunity to see the end product in a professional showcase and see what the students are capable of producing.
CONDUCTING INTERVIEWS
The most daunting part of this unit for me was having to go out into the public and interview random people to get data for the showcase. The first people that I thought about were the discipline heads for my group, Games Art and Design, Brad Power and Daniel Wearing. Unfortunately I know Brad isn’t good at answering his emails a lot fo the time so I didn’t get a response back to him about setting up a meeting to interview him, but I did get one back from Daniel almost straight away.
I organised with Daniel a time to go onto campus during the first break of the semester to talk to him about the previous showcases and what he would look to see change this year for the upcoming one. Most of the group members from my discipline group came with me to attend the meeting and get information for their own interviews. We sat and went through all the interview questions that we had each constructed individually, getting answers to questions about equipment, work curation and more. We were able to get a good picture of what last year looked like for the Games section and that it was a success as Daniel very much enjoyed the set up and the showcase in general.
Haley was able to get a hold of Brad in one of her Games classes that she had with him to ask him the same questions that we asked Daniel. The feedback that he gave to us was that he wanted there to be more lighting over the area where the concept art would be as it quite dark the year before making it hard to actually see the concept art prints. He also drew up a basic plan of how he was wanting to arrange the Games section for this year based on how it was last year, which was really helpful in getting an idea for how it would work spatially for the event.
.png)
PLANNING FOR GAMES SECTION
In our Games Art and Design team, we brainstormed how we would plan for the Games section and what we would need to improve this section based on our interviews with Brad Power and Daniel Wearing. We looked at all areas of planning including equipment, entertainment, merchandise, promotional ideas, running of events, curatorial consultations and additional fun concepts. From the interviews we got a good idea of the equipment that would be needed to run the games section in a way that would work for all the different units within the games course. This included noting that we would need equipment for mobile apps, computer games, concept art, VR platforms and animation reels. These would require different equipment from each other which when we talked with Daniel he mentioned they would supply for us. Merchandise ideas we came up with were the selling of digital prints for the concept artists that have their work being displayed, gift bags and prizes for those who place top records on the games being shown and promo items such as stickers made from the characters in the students work. We were able to get a lot of information from this mindmap to get a good idea of how we would be needing to set up this area of the showcase in a way that would compliment the games discipline and their needs.
VISUALISATION EXERCISES AND EMPATHY MAPS
Based off of our interviews, as a group we collated all the information that we got from our interviewees and created an empathy map. Empathy maps are important in distinguishing what the emotions of our target audience are towards the project that we are creating or in this case, their thought and feelings towards the previous creative media showcases. We created this empathy map in our Games Art and Design discipline group and were able to establish some key points about how people think about their past experiences. From this we learnt that not a lot of people we interviewed had actually heard about the showcases happening at Murdoch whether that be students on campus or locals to the area, which was surprising thinking about it now if the previous years put up as much promotional posters as we did this year. Most that did attend last years show had feelings of enjoyment when they attended and were excited to come once again this year to check out the students work. This information was useful for us in trying to understand how we could change the showcase from last year to resonate with people more.
In this class we also did visualisation exercise as a fun little game to demonstrate how it is best to show clients visuals when presenting to them our ideas as simply talking to them about an idea can be visualised by them differently by how we explain it than we are actually planning to design. In this exercise we got given an image that we couldn’t let any other groups around us see. We were then instructed to write down key descriptive words of that image best we could to make it as easy as possible for the table we would swap with to be able to draw that image based off the words we gave them. Most missed the note that we were trying to make it easy for the opposite team, which resulted in some hilarious keywords trying to put the teams off of what the image was, the complete opposite of what we were trying to do, but made for a fun classroom exercise.
CADBURY CHOCOLATE FUNDRAISING
Due to COVID 19, from the beginning of the unit we were unsure whether we would actually be able to have a physical event on campus for the showcase. Although we were still able to plan out the event in hopes that we would eventually get the okay that it could go ahead, we had to start fundraising early on as we weren’t sure when that okay would come in and, if it did, if we would get funding from the university to put together the show that we wanted.
As a result, we started fundraising on our own with Cadbury Fundraising boxes that were ordered by Erica and Eko in bulk and given out to each student to sell. There were two different kinds of boxes but each box would raise $60 that would go towards our showcase funding. There were lots of students coming back for a second one very soon after they were given out, showing the amazing enthusiasm that our team had towards the showcase and getting it going.
I received two boxes to sell off, of which most were bought out by my family, friends and boyfriend. I didn’t really get a chance to go around with the box and try and sell them to the public as they were on them straight away when they found out that I was bringing some home with me. This worked out really well for me as with work and university I didn’t think that I would be able to find the time to walk around with the chocolates at local areas to try and sell them. Selling the chocolates was an enjoyable and rewarding experience especially as I got to steal some along the way (making sure I paid for them of course!)
GROUP MEETING FOR PRESENTATION
In class this week we looked at the idea of Futurism in both my discipline group of Games Art and Design as well as my new specialist group, Publication. We brought in printed examples that we had found online that we though best represented the theme of Futurism and looked at how we could possibly use them to design for the showcase. There was one particular style that was shown by group members and that was the neon theme of futurism that is more specifically shown in sci-fi futuristic movies, sporting a colour palette of purples, pinks and blues.
In our specialist teams, we used these images to make a brainstorm of what the publication could possibly look like based on what we thought of the images. Some of the words that came up were: chaotic, high contrast and 80’s retro. This started to get the designing cogs turning for us in how we might design for the publication and include in the presentation that was coming up.
CREATING A MOODBOARD
For the upcoming presentation, it was important that we had a moodboard created that we could show images to the discipline heads so they could have a clearer idea of the vision we had for the designs of not only the Futurism theme in general but also the publication as well. The members of the Publication team submitted to a folder on Teams images that we thought would apply to Futurism and our publication so that we could find out if we were on the same track with what we envisioned the theme to be. Here are some of the examples that we had on our moodboard that we printed out for the presentation.
PRESENTATION DAY
After all the preparation that we had done over the last week, putting together ideas for what we wanted to do for the publication this year, the day came to present to the stakeholders. Before the discipline heads arrived for the presentation, we had a quick group meeting to brush over what we had been talking about over Teams in the last week and details we had finalised the day before at the group meeting. This also gave us time to fold and put together the placards that Isaac had put together for each teams section of the tables when the presentations began as well as prepare our own material that we were prepared to hand out to the discipline heads whilst our team were presenting. We were all able to send in a bunch of visuals of futurism and publication ideas and inspirations to Teams, which Rachael printed out before the presentation to bring for our section of the presentation. This would help the discipline heads further understand what we were talking about as we had examples of similar works to the ones we were thinking about for the showcase publication.
Isaac, Marco and Jessica did a really good job at conveying all the points that we talked about on Teams and at the group meeting to the discipline heads. There was some repeating of information however within the presentation, which came back on our feedback for the presentation assessment, so if there was something I would improve on when working in another team in a similar context I would prepare a more structured script to make sure we didn’t veer off onto other topics or repeat the points we had already made. The presentation was very helpful in getting immediate feedback from the discipline heads and getting their opinions which was very important to us. This made us aware of details we may have overlooked or could have been too difficult to execute within our small team. The feedback we received, especially from Mark, allowed us to reassess some decisions we had made on the publication together as a group after the presentation feedback and adjust our plan.
SHOWING EACH OTHER OUR OWN WORK
For our next class, I thought that it would be helpful to our team to bring in examples of the work we had already done separately whether that was previous university assignments or independent work outside of schooling. I posted in Teams to the group to ask them if they also thought this would be a good idea and they all jumped on board. We were all pretty interested in what kind of work our other team members had done and what they could bring to the publication when we started to design it.
Not only did this give us a good moment to sticky beak at each others work and admire what each person had done, but this allowed us to figure out where each member’s design strengths laid and how we could utilise this best when we started designing in the next couple weeks. It was important to establish this as the showcase was fast approaching and we were still a little stuck on where to start and kept coming back to rewriting down our plan and not really getting anywhere with a concrete idea.
For myself, I enjoyed doing this with my group as sometimes I am not very confident in knowing that the work that I have done has been designed well. So seeing my team members admire my work and ask me lots of questions about how I designed different parts felt nice to receive some reassurance, especially as I was nervous to see if my work met the standards of everyone else.
LOOKING AT ICONOGRAPHY
The publication that was created for last year’s showcase had involved icons that represented each discipline and was used at the beginning of each section as well as for the online space and wayfinding. Nurin had brought in some examples of icons that she had done outside of class that we could potentially use for the publication sections and disciplines. We tried to narrow down the various icons she had drawn for each discipline by voting and putting a mark next to an icon that we liked best for each discipline. The wayfinding team also saw us doing this and showed us the icons they had created for their part of the showcase that we could steal some icons off of if we liked them. Although we didn’t use these icons and ended up using the ones created by the online team, this exercise was very fun and engaged the teams motivation.
PLANNING DEADLINES FOR PUBLICATION
This class was spent looking at deadlines that we had for the showcase as we had now been given a date for the show, November 27th, and a set up day for the library installation, November 12th. Now that we had dates we could start to plan out what we needed to do week by week and make a team schedule to keep us all on track with working on the publication. Our most important deadline that we needed to figure out was a date that we would give out to all the discipline heads in advanced to let them know when we needed all the content for the publication by as well as a send to print date. We decided with the help of Erica that we would need to send the publication to print by November 20th in order to give the printers a week to produce the amount of copies that we needed of the books. This then gave us the date of Friday 13th November as the date that we would need all of the content in by from the tutors, which we then emailed about the deadlines.
BUNNINGS SAUSAGE SIZZLE FUNDRAISER
As part of our fundraising for the event, we held a sausage sizzle at Bunnings O’Connor to try and raise some extra money. In class we created a roster, splitting into groups so that there would be people manning the barbecue throughout the day, sell any baked goods brought by students to sell and having someone there to collect money. A big thank you to Grace, a team member of our class and staff member at this Bunnings store, for using her contacts and helping Erica and Eko to set up this day and provide us with all the information we needed to make it as easy to organise as possible. I wasn’t able to attend the sausage sizzle personally as I had commitments with work that I couldn’t get out of but I did hear from people who went that it was an amazing day and that we raised around $1,000 from the day, which was super impressive.
Photo credit: Nurin Eddy and Alexis Tay
OUR FUNDRAISING RAFFLE
In out last fundraising endeavour, we held a raffle on Bush Court on the 22nd of October to try and raise more money on top of the funds we had received from the Cadbury Fundraising and Bunnings Sausage Sizzle. Georgia Earnshaw was amazing enough to put her hand up to organise this raffle for us and did a very good job at bringing everyone together to pitch in items for the raffle, designing promotional material for the raffle and volunteers for the day to hand out raffle tickets.
As I wasn’t able to make it to the Bunnings Sausage Sizzle, I donated some items to the raffle so that I would have contributed to the fundraising efforts as well. The items that I entered into the raffle were candles and face masks, of which were added to a pampering basket that Georgia had put together with the other items that she received from students. There were four baskets available to the winners of the raffle: Feeling Lux, Coffee & Chill, The Student and Pamper Me. Georgia and her volunteers handed out raffle tickets at Bush Court for two weeks, drawing in lots of people with their enthusiasm to buy a raffle ticket.
PLAYING WITH THE IDEA OF ORIGAMI
There was a spanner thrown in the works when we were told there could possibly be even less funding allocated towards the publication team and that a book may have to be reworked to something even more low cost that we could use for the publication. During this time of trying to figure out a new way for us to design a publication of sorts for the showcase, Jessica from our publication team came up with the idea of origami and using this as a way to create a compact material that could be expanded to show a full catalogue of works by the students. Jess brought in and uploaded to Teams a variety of examples that she had been playing with in her spare time as an inspiration for what we could possibly do.
Unfortunately we figured out fast that this wouldn’t cut expenses as we would need to pay for scoring which would be expensive and would be a time consuming effort to have to fold around 400 for the showcase by ourselves on top of designing the publication. However, we did want to include this somewhere throughout the show as it was an interesting concept of folding and building, much like we do to shape our own futures. This ended up being incorporated into our final publication with having origami pages in the back of the book that Jess had found online and designed with each discipline having an origami that represented them accurately.
Photo Credits: Jessica Quinn-Conroy
PREVIOUS YEARS DESIGNS AND THE HUB TOUR
Now that we were trying to find different ways to create a publication that weren't a full book due to costs, we started looking into previous years versions of publications to inspire us. Erica had mentioned to me that a previous year had done postcards for their publication as that year’s theme was Solar and the idea of travelling around the sun. The postcards incorporated this idea of travelling into the publication and in turn created a fun way to showcase the students works, each having their own postcard in the set that was produced. Amongst this material that Erica provided for us to look at for inspiration was a big pad filled with patterned paper. Looking at this sparked the idea of making a book that had glue binding as we thought this could possibly be a lower cost option that still allowed us to do a book style publication. As we looked further into the pad idea, we ended up with the final idea of making the glue pad book into a 2021 calendar where each month was a different discipline head or section.
On this day we also went for a quick look in The Hub to get a better idea of where all the spaces would be set up for the showcase night which was fast approaching. We toured both upstairs and downstairs, deciding which rooms and spaces would be most appropriate for each discipline that would be in the show.
LOOKING AT CALENDAR DESIGNS
Once we had decided that the format of the publication would be a calendar styled book, I started looking at calendar designs that might work with the minimal style that we had been talking about doing for the publication layout. It was hard to find calendar specific designs that included pages of purely content so when researching this I had to stick mainly to looking at the layouts of the pages that would be the headers of our publication with the dates being displayed.
These are some examples of calendars that appealed to me when I was looking through Pinterest for inspiration. What stuck out to me was the simplicity of the illustrations used for each month and the typography used. These really radiated minimalism with the spacing of the text and having lots of white space in the design.
STARTING PUBLICATION LAYOUTS
Before finalising our layouts for the publication, each of us did test runs of layouts that we liked and ways that we could display content within these layouts. At this time we were planning for a A4 landscape calendar with our publication so these initial layouts that we each came up with were to these dimensions. When I was designing my layouts for this I considered how in other publication focused units at university I had been advised to create layouts that had sections that stood out from the others to give the reader a break that excited and interested them by having a more out there design or completely different to the previous. From this I came up with the idea of having themes within the publication that were influenced by the respective discipline that the themed section applied to. For instance, with photography I looked at other publications that are usually used for photography and what I came up with was a photo book. Going with this idea I planned my layouts to reflect this, using polaroid frames around the content to build on this idea. Themes was definitely something that I wanted to apply to Creative Writing in particular as the students and discipline head for creative writing had mentioned they wanted to find a way to spruce up the section and designing the page more instead of just having only paragraphs of text on the page. Along with heading pages for each calendar month, I designed spreads around these ideas to present to the publication team. Whilst we were putting these designs together we posted them along the way on our group WhatsApp chat to get each others advice and then we formed a collection of different designs for layouts that we could then pick from later to finalise a layout that would be used for the final publication and its content.
CREATING A PUBLICATION STYLE GUIDE
Now that we had a final format for the publication and we knew the size and dimensions that the final book would be, we could start designing our final layouts. We had a meeting during the week where we discussed how we would keep these layouts consistent and what sections each person would be doing. Isaac helped this process along by creating the team a style guide based on the grids and layouts we had looked at together in the team meeting. In our initial layout designs we had designed a lot differently from each other so this style guide would ensure that we would be able to keep the sections consistent in text styles and layouts even though we were designing the sections separately.
FINALISING THE PUBLICATION CONTENT
We had finally reached the moment of the publication design process that our whole team had been anxiously awaiting: putting the publication content together. From the beginning of this project we knew that this would be the hardest part of being on the publication team as it was a rush for all the discipline heads to get their students' works marked after final submissions and into us so that we could place the content into the publication. The deadline for the tutors was Friday, November 20th of which most of the content was sent in amazingly so it was easy for us to wait the rest of the day for the content to all come in and be finalised and then get straight into putting our designated sections together the next day. The sections that I had to put together for the publication were Creative Writing and Photography. We were aiming as a team, with Erica, to get all of our sections together by Monday so that Erica could spend the week proofing the publication document and adding the sections that she was doing herself. To keep with this deadline so I could stay on top of it, I planned out that I would complete the Creative Writing section by the end of Saturday and the Photography section by the end of Sunday, all ready for the Monday deadline. This was tough as I had shifts at work during this weekend and there were moments where being tired would make me lose motivation a bit but I tried my hardest to push through and make it to each deadline I had set for myself. A big help for me to get motivated was a change of scene and getting out of my room to work somewhere else. This place for me was going back to my parents' house to work on the publication so that I had some company around me to talk to and watch movies with whilst I made progress with placing the content. In the photos below you can see that this process included lots of snacking and having special visits from my puppy (who was there mostly for the snacks). Although there was a lot of work to be done in this part of the publication process, I pushed through and managed to have my sections done on time and ready for Erica to proof.
SETTING UP FOR THE SHOWCASE
The last couple of weeks of semester were spent setting up for the showcase. As the publication team had finished up and sent the publication off to the printers, all the members got on board with helping the other teams that were currently putting their sections together for the show. This included helping score, cut and fold the invitations for the showcase so that we could start handing them out to our family, friends and anyone else we could find so that we could continue to spread the word about the show and draw more attendees in. We all worked together to create systems to get the jobs done faster and do them in bulk to get as many invitations done as possible, some working on cutting out the top parts that didn't need a scalpel and ruler and the rest cutting off the sides of the invites. I also came into Murdoch with team members when we would usually have class to help with other tasks that needed doing to help preparation for the show such as carrying up the panels from the loading dock so spatial design could have all the panels the work would be placed on up in the library ready to move over to The Hub.
The setting up continued through to the big day, all of us assisting each other to set everything up starting at 10am on the Friday of the Showcase. We only had access to the downstairs section of The Hub in the morning as the upstairs area was still needed for students still on campus wanting to utilise the space for any work or getting food. This still gave us the time to set up all the discipline areas that were going to be downstairs which were Sound, Creative Writing, Theatre and Photography. Having the downstairs, also gave us a place to bring stuff from library down to and prepare what we needed to there in advance so we could take it straight upstairs to set it up properly. The first part of the day was more relaxed with setting up and getting everything together but it definitely amped up at 3pm when we were allowed to get into the upstairs part of The Hub and start moving everything around. It was a all hands on deck situation, putting our muscles to use carrying all the tables behind a partition that was set up so we could make space for all the discipline areas. Having such a big group came in handy during these couple hours of upstairs set up, smashing it out and allowing for an hour extra to go home and get ready for the showcase night.
PICKING UP THE PRINTED PUBLICATION
As the publication team had already finished their specific tasks for their team with the publication, we spent most of the morning of the showcase helping the other teams set up their specific area. However, there was a gap in the day where we couldn't find anything to help out with as the teams were on the ball with what they need to do and how they wanted it to be done so they were getting their sections together fast. The girls of the publication team took this opportunity to offer to go and pick up the publications from Port Printing in O'Connor, all very excited to see the publication for the first time and how it had turned out after we had sent it off to Erica to edit and finalise. In the excitement we didn't quite realise that five of us in a car might pose some dilemmas in getting the books into the car, underestimating how many boxes there would be to pack into the car. This made for quite the hilarious trip home leaving the printers with five boxes in the boot, one on the floor in the front passengers seat and boxes on the floor in the backseats, leaving us feeling like we had driven back to the university in a clown car. Taking the publications back up to The Hub was an interesting one for myself as I had to learn how to drive an electric pallet jack for the first time, which was fun but slightly terrifying. I definitely passed it off as quick as I could to another team member when I got it back up to where they were waiting with the boxes.
FUTURISM SHOWCASE EVENT NIGHT
After many months of planning and designing this event the night finally came for the Murdoch Open Showcase! The event kicked into full swing pretty quickly as soon as the doors opened and within twenty minutes the Hub was full of people, buzzing about all the work that they were seeing. The event ended up selling out on Eventbrite, making our total official attendance of 500 people, although with people that only attended for part of the showcase there would've been more replacing their spot inside the venue. Everyone that attended looked like they were enjoying themselves and getting involved in all the interactive activities that had been set up by the promo and branding and social media teams. The games art and design area was one section that everyone was excited to visit, waiting to their turn to try out the Games students' amazing projects that they had been working so hard on, especially the VR games. For me, it was definitely a highlight seeing how well the attendees interacted with the publication that my team and myself created and how they were all so interested and amazed not only by the publication itself but the work that was placed inside. This made me feel a sense of accomplishment as we had done the students' works justice in the publication as everyone was admiring the content.
Group photo of most of our team after the showcase finished
THE FINAL PUBLICATION
Although I have done work with publications before at university, this process was very different to that of which I am used to. From what i have learnt in previous times, putting a publication together is very stressful and although this publication wasn’t short of that, having a team to back me up was a huge weight lifted off my shoulders as opposed to putting a whole book together by myself.
As we didn’t have a whole lot of funding from the university this year, we had to reduce and adapt the publication over this semester to make it cost effective for us. In the end this meant that the book was smaller in size so that the printers could fit more on a flat sheet, there was no laminate or specialty finishes and instead of ordering 500 copies we reduced it down to 400. This brought the total down to $6159.00 for the printing of the publication compared to the $7000 spent the previous year.
Even though we had to make a lot of adjustments and sacrifices due to the budget, I am very proud of this publication that we have put together and of all the hard work that my team has done this semester to produce this book. We were all very excited in the week that it was away being printed, desperate to see how it had come out after the crazy few weeks of designing the final layouts and putting all the content together. Judging by all of our expressions, and Erica, we couldn’t be happier with how it turned out and we were all eager to get them out to not only our other class members but to the attendees of the showcase, our friends and family.
REFLECTING ON THE PROJECT
When I enrolled in this unit I knew that it was full on but I didn’t really know what to expect from it at the beginning. It taught me that a lot goes into planning an event that i didn’t even think about and that it takes a lot of people to not only design it but put it together from the very minute that the event is planned to the end of the event. I didn’t realise how much I would enjoy a project of this scale and responsibility, especially to a team as I had only ever worked individually in the past on projects, but partaking in this unit had convinced me to further my studies with the Post-Graduate course as I want to continue working in teams and on big projects that I can get involved in as much as I have with this service design unit.
Not only was I able to create a publication that I am proud of but I felt like I was really involved in all areas of the event planning, getting to vote on branding options and logos for the event, communicating with discipline heads on deadlines and interviewing them on previous years efforts for showcasing their students work. These were all things that I usually feel out of my comfort zone doing but this semester I have really enjoyed being so involved with the team that we had built.
WHAT WOULD I IMPROVE?
A problem that we had when finalising the publication was the lack of bleed lines that we had when sending the work off to Erica. As a third year student, I was quite embarrassed to have forgotten such an important part of a design document set up. In the future, this taught me that even in a rush for a deadline I need to double, triple check all design documents to make sure they are set up correctly to ensure a easy transition for anyone editing my work, proofing or being sent off for printing.
Another thing I would like to improve on would be up-keeping my communication with the team. I feel like I worked really well at communicating with my specialist team but as the process started to focus more on that team and not on my discipline team we started to lose communicate with each other. For the last few weeks, there was barely any activity on Teams for the Games Art and Design discipline as we had already sorted out equipment requests and spatial design requirements with Brad Power and the other Games tutors in the first couple weeks of the unit starting when we did interviews. Most communication that we did have were on campus in class when we would discuss content coming in from Games to distribute to other teams so they could establish ways to use the content in their respective plans for the showcase. I would have liked to have been as in touch with my Games team as I was with the Publication team so next time I have a project that requires me to be a representative for more than one group I will remember to touch base with both teams when the conversations start to die down.
REFLECTING ON WORKING AS A TEAM
This unit and project was my first time working as a team and I enjoyed it way more than I expected to. When I learnt that this unit would involve splitting up into teams to work on sections of the showcase with, I did feel a little panicked as I can be quite shy especially with new people and having to share ideas with them. I found that I was a little shy towards the beginning of working with each group but as the weeks went on we had all become good friends.
At the beginning of working in the Games discipline team, we had trouble getting everyone’s notifications turned on for Teams and as a result I found it hard trying to get in contact with members of the team to get our tasks done for what we needed to do for that week. After a couple posts and still not having any luck with responses, I created a Facebook Messenger group chat with the members of the team to try and get their attention there. I was able to get their attention through this to let them know posts were being made to Teams and we all figured out how to ensure that every group member would receive the notifications from that point. After that I didn’t have any trouble with either of the groups I was in with getting team members to respond to posts on Teams.
There were times in the teams that I surprised myself and took on a form of leadership role in order to get things moving and going. When we all designed layouts for the publication separately, I was able to kick things off with the group suggesting ideas for how we could combine them together cohesively and who’s layouts we could use for what. This allowed us to assign sections to each member of the group to work on based off of what layouts they had shown us initially in this phase. It felt good to not sit back and let others make decisions like I usually would and I think that I was able to do this because I felt so comfortable with the group and team that we had for publication. I really enjoyed working with them this semester and getting to know them, we had no issues within the team with clashing personalities and this enabled a smooth designing process.
