Design Production, Brief 1 - Initial Ideas & Study Task 1 - OUGD504

BRIEF - To produce a folded leaflet entitled "My Design Process". This will need to show my understanding of the design process itself, as well as how I apply it to my own work. 

I have begun this brief by completing a study task in our first studio session. In pairs we needed to think about the certain stages of the average design process. In my pair we discussed how we both work through briefs and the main stages we go through:

After the initial brainstorm, we then needed to write down our personal design process. In this I wanted to try and show more of the personal side to my process and include things such as 'getting a coffee'. This was to narrow down what makes my design process more individual and unique to me. I wanted to focus more on my personal side to try and come up with more appropriate concepts that represented me more:

After looking back at my design process, I tried to narrow down things in my process that were personal to me. I thought I could use these as concepts for my leaflet development. 

Initial Concepts:

I initially thought of how I constantly worry and have self doubt throughout my process as I am not overly confident with my work. This is something that has come to my attention through brainstorming and showed me this is something I need to work on in the up-coming year. Although this is a big part of how I work, as it pushes me to achieve better, I thought this concept would be slightly mundane and focusing more on the negative side of my process. This is definitely not something I would like to focus on as I do not see myself as a negative person. 

Another concept I had was how I like to question everything in my process, questions such as 'Do I understand the brief?' 'Is this working?' 'Can I do more?'. Yes these may be generic questions everyone asks themselves but I personally try to question myself at every stage to try and achieve my best possible outcome. I thought this idea could possibly work better for content rather than a concept. I feel I could write my content as questions or focus on this when describing my individual process. 

I then thought about how much I like to organise myself throughout my work. I find if I do not use time management, to-do lists, timetables etc, I would not be able to work as efficiently as I do. This helps my process dramatically and I find this would not only show an element of my process but me as a person as well. Expanding on this concept I had the thought of 'structured chaos', this to me sums up my process entirely but thought this may be a slightly obvious route to go down.

I have now begun sketching initial ideas around the concepts I have. I have played around with ideas such as the symbols of a flow chart and perhaps making these into cards of some sort. Another idea I have been playing around with is making my leaflet close in on itself. This is to expand on the idea of how I conceal my work from presentations, building on the idea on confidence growth - in doing this brief I now know confidence is something I need to work on and feel as a concept this could be quite interesting. 

I also had the idea of a sort of map diagram. This would follow on from my organisation concept. I had the idea of 'Organisation is Key', I then would produce a sort of flow chart/map that is read by a key. I have again played around with a possible envelope leaflet, focusing on the idea of concealing itself away. I am unsure at this stage which direction to go in and so am going to conduct an informal crit with my peers to discuss which route to go down. 

Informal Peer Critique

In my critique I asked my peers which they thought was a strong enough outcome to use. I discussed my concepts and the type of folds I was initially thinking about. The feedback I received was they thought the envelope/concealing idea could be effective but perhaps I could look into more interesting origami folds rather than a standard envelope. I am going to look into this to whether there is a more effective way I could fold my leaflet and develop my ideas from there.