At the start of this project, I thought more objectively. Was there something I could teach people, or give people that would make them change? But most of the solutions I thought of involved a middle-man and actually using more resources [whether they were eco-friendly or not]. I decided that anything that focused on objects was out of the question because it went against the creative brief: reduce impact! So I found myself a bit lost.
So I began my research by laying some foundations. I looked up and e-mailed some organizations and services. I mainly wanted their insight on how they motivated people to change, and what they found to be the most difficult in motivating change. I found a research article about motivating change through one of the organizations. Every hypothesis I had about changing behaviour was confirmed in the article. People have to have a reason to change. That reason has to be somewhat personal. And sometimes, change can be introduced for a person via an outside source.
Initially, I thought of a few objective campaigns. For instance, promoting bamboo products. Bamboo is a natural resource with a vast numbers of uses, all of which prove bamboo to be a more viable and useful option than resources we use now. But the current status of bamboo as a resource would mean promoting it not to the public, but to companies. I was confused and frustrated, because everything I could think of was objective, and thus far, objective campaigns have not produced any strong tangible change.
I’ve started keeping small notebooks with me at all times. So as a part of my research and mapping, I wrote down ideas and thoughts as they came to me, wherever they came to me. I first considered doing a motivational campaign about voting after discussing politics with a friend. She told me about a study where people were asked if they supported a policy and they said yes. When they were asked if the supported a conservative policy [the exact same policy], they said no. It occurred to me, people just don’t think.
We make so many choices without really thinking. By the time I got to writing ideas down, the idea had transformed from promoting thinking before voting to thinking about everything. There was never any doubt in my mind about the creative direction. There were very few thumbnails and sketches as a result. The visual language of the campaign came together after a tutorial. I had already created one in the first creative sample, and I just needed to expound on it.
The direction I was intended to represent the process of thought and cognition. In doing so, it allows a person to see and comprehend a train of thought as exactly that… a train of thought. So without telling someone the importance of an original thought, action or deed I can show them. My goal was to place the gravity of the subject upon an audience without directly telling them so that the choice to think would be their own and not a command they could mindlessly follow.
While I am proud of the campaign I designed, there are some things I would like to change. First, I am not very good at research or mapping. Much of my work in any case comes from a deep sense of intuition. I don’t like to test design or content. I believe that myself as well as my fellow designers are crowd enough to test on. Sometimes, we forget that we are an audience too. However, I realize that this could be a highly fatal flaw in commercial designing. Even when the answer is clear in any profession, clients like to see proof and reason. So while I could grow in execution of design and layout, I think my area of most needed growth is clear mapping of my research and design process.
