OUGD405 Studio Brief 04 First Thoughts and Idea Generation

Brief

You are to identify a problem from your individual research and provide an answer to it. You must the resolve this problem in an engaging and interesting way to a specific target audience.

Background / Considerations

Who needs to know?

What/ why do they need to know?

How will you tell them?
You must identify whether you are trying to EXPLAIN, INFORM, INSTRUCT or EDUCATE the audience?

What will the audience respond to, where will they look? How will they need to interact with it? How will you know it is working?

Will it be a; collection of, a presentation of or instructions to.

What is the tone of voice? It must be appropriate to your subject, audience and method of delivery.

Instantly the problem that my research clearly identifies is the wide spread phobia of insects. So prompted by the brief out line I started to think about who is most effected by this. My statistics suggested that women in general would be a good audience because half of all women have a fear of insects. However, I found it difficult to see how I might really target such a large yet specific target audience in a week. So I went back to look at some of the websites I visited in the very early stages of my research in studio brief 02 and found that there was a larger proportion of insect phobias in urban environment so I could look into trying to reduce the insect phobia of the people of leeds.

This got me thinking about how to remove this fear or at least attempt to reduce it and I came up with three areas that would contribute to doing this: belittling the fear, familiarise people with the object of the fear and praise the object of fear changing the emotion from fear to awe. It is speculated that the reason so many people from urban areas have insect phobias is because they don't come into contact with them often enough for them to be the norm.

Another possibility for a target audience was children. This is because in my research I found that many children pick up the fears of their parents in amplified forms, so designing something that might change a child's attitude to insects could make a lot of difference.

These possible target audiences gave me my two main ideas for this brief. The first is a segmented flip book, similar to the ones that used to have three sections to combine the outfits of certain professions,  but with sections of insects bodies on each part of the page. This would mean that a child could combine the body parts in any way to make and kind of insect. Not only will this educate in the sense that it shows how advanced and specialised insects can be, fostering this sense of awe or praise in place of fear, but also it will be done in such a way as to create a beautiful impression of insects.

 The other idea I had was to address the urban target audience. Something that really jumped put at me as special to urban environments was fly posting. So I started to think about how I could combat the phobia of insects by using fly posters and it occurred to me that treating it in a comical way could belittle the fear and hep people to think about and analyse why they might fear insects and in turn reduce their fear.