This week we have been familiarised with Degree Show and what is expected from us. We got a chance to have a team meeting and here we started looking at already existing exhibitions as a team and sharing our first thoughts. Personally, I already knew I don’t want anything boring that would remind me of a classic exhibition, so I was looking for something more colourful than that.
We have been shown this website and as I was scrolling down I found this image where they had colourful elements that were vibrant and playful. The rest of the team enjoyed it as well. Here I was thinking since it is playful, maybe we could potentially do a degree show with the topic as a playground. The playground itself can showcase that we need to be playful within provided space as in graphic design projects and the way we place our elements depends on the space, so while there are some limits, it becomes our playground, especially when it comes to testing whether some elements work. It also works with the aspect when thinking off all possible concepts and when nothing is fully defined yet when it comes to projects which give some playfulness. The team also liked the idea of the playground, but we have been discussing different ideas when it comes to Covid and also the fact that we don’t know where our exhibition will take place as well and decided to see what else we could come up with.
Since I really liked the playground idea, I thought I might actually look at the imagery of it and see what else can be done here. So all of the playgrounds are based on different areas where different activities could take place. So I think the idea here could be the variety and actually having that freedom in the playground, which is graphic design. It can mean a variety of styles, a variety of people and they all come together here in the playground which is our creative space. It connects us all from different backgrounds in one place, which could potentially relate to the industry and course overall and we have the freedom to choose what we want to do within this playground.
Update:
This is the idea that I later presented to the team and they liked it. For my idea, I have been advised that having a playground could be a bit too childish, though I don’t necessarily think so as it can depend on how it is executed, later I have been told that this could be potentially an amusement park instead. I was also told to look into the maps of an amusement park. We also talked about how we could make this work in both physical and digital space considering the fact that it’s still unknown where our exhibition will go. So while in physical space is quite easy to replicate something like a playground, with the website I suggested that it could be an image that could be interacted with by clicking as each part would represent a different aspect of the playground. We discussed other ideas too, but there were some issues, for instance, Zoe’s idea could have a negative impact on certain people at least in my opinion, since it is about Covid and bacteria, so in that case, it could be quite risky and could offend someone within the audience even if it wasn’t the intention, then we have tried to think whether we could do something more realistic for her concept. Later we all agreed we want to make something fun and colourful, since with all of the stress we have been lacking this aspect, so we have all decided to look more into our concepts individually to then see which potentially we could choose while waiting for tutors answer so we could present all our ideas for feedback and see whether there are some concerns regarding them.
