Final Design Project

Over the last term in First Year Design, we have been very busy doing our final project.

It takes up the whole last term, and in a sense is our exam as there is no written exam in design, just course work, so this in effect takes its place.

The Brief:

The project brief was set, in groups of 5 people, we were to look at a business or a service in Lancashire and come up with a design proposal that would increase the health and wellbeing of Lancashire residents.

It was a fairly open brief, allowing us to use all of the design skills we had learned over the year into one project and show what we could do.

The project had to consist of a 5000 word group report and a 15 minute presentation, with questions being asked at the end, meaning this was going to be a very in depth project which had to be clearly thought out in all stages, showing well done research and a design proposal that clearly showed how it would benefit Lancashire residents and their wellbeing.

Our Project Ideas:

For our project I joined with 4 other girls who I had come to know over the year. We sat down and began to discuss our options and what we each felt would be interesting to work on. There were sections of project ideas to give us a little bit of guidance that the whole workshop group had created together.

Initially we thought about the topic of transportation and cycling, and felt it was a good idea to link with health and wellbeing as there are physical health advantages to doing more exercise. We were thinking up design ideas such as the Boris Bike scheme in London. But upon reflection, we realised we were going about the project the wrong way.

The brief stated we must link it with a business or service.  We thought about bike shops and such, but nobody had a clear idea of what we would be setting out to do.

The other error we had made was coming up with the idea we wanted to propose without doing any research to back it up. We had narrowed our ideas to early on. Something we had learned not to do in the first few weeks of design.

Luckily we realised our mistakes and decided cycling was not what we wanted to do.

This lead to a mass brainstorm from all our team members. I thought this is more like what design should be about, everyone became more animated and interested in the project as a whole.

This lead to the agreement that we would look into animal therapy and animal shelters in Lancashire.

This time we did not narrow our ideas, everyone sat around the table doing secondary research into things such as the benefits animals have on people in the areas such as mental wellbeing. I also called up animal shelters around Lancaster and set up visits, this meant we could conduct some primary research to help us build up our design idea. Also by visiting the shelter before contacting services and business such as schools and care homes it would allow us to see if the project was feasible. Then we could work to link it with specific areas of the Lancashire residents.

To help give our selves some guidance when talking to the animal shelter staff, we thought up some initial ideas of what we thought may work. However, unlike the cycling idea we did not limit our selves to just one. We wanted to uses these basic ideas as a talking point with the staff. With the aim of hearing their views on them, which would therefore allow us to adapt and change these ideas into ones that would work.

I think this clearly  shows the importance of idea generation when doing a large project like this. As if we had not really sat down and thought about what our ideas were and how we would execute them, we could have ended up with a project that was not completed to our full capability and having a piece of work that did not correctly fit the brief.