OUGD406: Design Practice 1 - Communication Is A Virus: 5-A-DAY (POST CRIT)

For the first brief we were asked to attend as part of the 'Communication is a Virus' brief we were asked to pitch our initial concept which defined the context and method of delivery of our final outcome.

Our concept of trying to encourage Facebook users to decrease their use of the social media website by 5 times a day received positive feedback from both of our tutors, however our the main issue we has was with the method of delivery.

Our initial thoughts for the method of delivery was to create an app which would interact with the audience and make the process of decreasing your Facebook use more 'fun', the crit however made us realise that being unable to actually make the app and only a mock up of what it would look like meant there would be no source to find out whether our concept was working and had gone 'viral'.

Therefore, following the crit we developed more ideas as a group on other possible methods to distribute our message.

What is the concept?

We will create an online campaign which aims to encourage our target audience of students and teenagers to post more meaningful and perhaps inspirational tweets on the social media site Twitter. We will achieve this by asking our followers to limit their daily tweets to just five, which will therefore encourage them to think about what it is they are posting and whether it is worth it. To make the page more inter-actice we plan to re-tweet and rate the original tweet of the participating user.

What is the context?

In reference to a person's daily diet each day the term '5 - A - DAY' means to increase your intake of fruit and veg each day to create a healthier lifestyle.

This idea can to relate our concept which aims to reduce the amount of time a student uses Social Media websites - an average of 23 times a day - as constantly staring at a computer screen could be thought of as an unhealthy lifestyle.

What is the method of delivery?

The main tool in our online campaign will be the social media website twitter, on which we will create our own twitter page where users can tweet there 'inspirational tweets'. Our twitter page will also be the main source of feedback for the project as the response we get will show us whether the project has gone viral. 

To promote our Twitter page we wanted to do something that would intrigue our audience and make them want to visit the page. We will therefore design and create stickers to be placed around the city - perhaps in the most common places that people tweet? And where there is a lot of waiting around? Train stations etc. - and post a video of this process on other social media websites such as Youtube to increase interest across the internet.

The sticker campaign will also be supported by a range of promotional material such as posters and flyers, as these methods are effective in getting a message across quickly.

Using this information we were then able to write the brief in which our final deliverables will be marked against. We were asked to bring this brief to our second crit to discuss with Amber our development from the last crit and our new concept.