An Effective Life/Work Balance
Project 3: Designing Systems
Many people continually make formal or informal resolutions to improve aspects of their lives. Although the goals may be set by an individual relative to his or her specific situation, many of the intentions actually apply to a larger body of people. Working with the topic of creating and maintaining an effective life/work balance, my and my partners’ goal is to design a system of three pieces that inform and engage the audience, thus moving them to action.
The System:
Physical:
Spatial:
Digital:
03.29.2016 | Beginning Thoughts
For the projects that we have done so far in Communication Design Studio, we have explored designing for people who are not ourselves at all (The HES Project) and designing for anyone to enjoy (Visual Visionaries). This time, however, it is a bit different.
Prior to the semester beginning, our teacher, Stacie, asked us for both design and personal goals. For this project, she divided us into groups where we are designing for topics that relate to the personal goals that we set for ourselves. I have been paired with Lucy and Lily, and we will be focusing on designing a system that creates and maintains effective life and work balance. What is interesting to me about this project is that through being given a topic that I, myself, struggle with, I am designing for myself. However, there are many people, especially at Carnegie Mellon, that deal with this problem. Therefore, I am designing for other people, but for a problem that I can deeply empathize toward.
At Carnegie Mellon, I am reminded everyday of the privilege I have of being here. I’m constantly inspired by the talented classmates I get to learn with and the educational opportunities available. What I find personally stressful at CMU is the feeling that I’m not living up to the potential I have as a student here or to the standards set by those around me. I have continued to struggle with an unhealthy Life/Work balance because though I love being around people, having fun experiences, and being spontaneous, the need to meet the high standard I have set for myself causes me to work for unnatural and terribly unhealthy periods of time. To emphasize my point, I have gone almost 48 hours without sleep just because I wanted to make a deadline. No deadline is worth that risk of health.
This year has been better than last. I’ve experienced growth by learning not to overwork projects, taking breaks, taking yoga classes, and spending more time with my peers. As a result, I have actually felt the quality of my work improve by making life more of a priority. Though I haven’t found the right balance yet, I feel happier and more optimistic that I will get there one day.
With recent occurrences — two on-campus suicides reported in one day — I realize how imperative improving the stress culture of CMU truly is. There needs to be ways for people to take a second to realize when their mental health has become unhealthy and to learn how to improve the way that they are feeling. Instead of seeing only educational and career opportunities prominent around campus, I’d like to see my school promoting events and spaces that can improve the health of their students. For that reason, I could not be happier to be beginning this project with my group, and hopefully finding a way to design some sort of solution to this pressing issue.
03.30.2016 | Beginning Research
Stacie has asked us to begin looking into our target audience, how our system will live on campus, context for communication (what’s already on campus), and grounds and walls that may be available.
My teammates and I have begun to look at articles and have documented some research here.
Things found and/or discussed:
- Tips for how one person can balance work and life (examples being showering, meditation, etc.)
- Things that already exist on campus — yoga, mindfulness room, paws to relax, CaPS (a therapy service)
- Thrive@CMU is something that exists, but I’m not sure how well it has been received by students
- Project Smile
- Lily has previously done semester-long research on CaPS, and does not feel that we should tackle the problem through CaPS. This belief was reinforced by articles published in our campus newspaper, The Tartan.
- CaPS can’t schedule enough appointments. Students have to wait weeks to speak with a therapist.
- Help is only easily accessible when it is “emergency.” There should be resources that provide immediate help
- Maybe creating something like what MIT has: http://together.mit.edu/
- Making the stress culture more accepting of failure
- “the happy mask”/ “the crazy mask” — terminology used about the campus’ stress culture-> “encouraging people to be honest when they’re not doing well — like encouraging friends to talk to each other more when they’re struggling to get rid of the ‘happy mask’”
- how to change people’s habits?
- emergency poles on campus?
- online 24/7 messaging service and support?
- anonymity?
- “How do we create a space that people can feel safe to be vulnerable?”
- how to inform people of resources that exist?
- the difference between mental health and social health
Thinking about Concept
- We know we don’t want to focus just on CaPS
- we could do things with spaces- Mindfulness room, etc.
- walls on campus — in residential halls/near classrooms
- target audience: CMU students, especially those silently struggling within the stress culture, or those that don’t know where to go other than CaPS
- context for communication? — ways to change habits?
- perhaps something inspired by what MIT has initiated
03.01.2016 | Post-Class Reflection
With the unfortunate recent consequences of the school’s stress culture on our minds, we met during studio with Stacie and our classmates. After Lily mentioned our thoughts to Stacie though, she reminded us to keep the project light-toned and feasible. From that my group, has decided to focus more on habit-changing since work/life balance is formed habitually. We feel this is the best way to affect the culture and community, and hope that positivity would be able to spread as a result.
I found today’s class activity SUPER helpful. We created questions and then through a “speed-dating” activity, alternated with different groups.
Some of our most interesting findings:
- student-run > school-run (there seems to be a lot of mistrust of the school during this difficult time)
- strategies for balance
- the unfortunate case of happiness being defined as meeting goals, and being high-achieving (how do we change this stigma?)
- classmate’s current state of balance
03.03.2016 | Affinity Clustering & Group Meeting
Today, my group met as a team. We organized all of our research, findings, and ideas into an affinity cluster. I think we found the speed-dating really helpful as a means of getting started.
We organized the information into categories such as “Communication Methods,” “Problem,” “Stress Culture,” “Resources,” etc. This really helped us in determining what our assumptions, constraints, audience, and context are. We even started brainstorming communication methods.
Though this was a very productive meeting, we plan to continue to place post-its up as we generate ideas before Tuesday.
05.05.2016 | Post-Class Reflection
At the beginning of class, we further defined audience, what we are communicating, and what the physical context is. Here are the answers my group gave:
- Audience = CMU students, who are stressed and don’t know it or don’t know how to seek help
- What to Communicate = having a balance can improve work, and it can also make you happier.
- Physical Context = unknown.
From there, I met with my group. An element that my group thought was important at the time was addressing CMU’s stress culture. In hindsight, our want of including that in our topic probably stems from the recent tragic events that have been fresh on all of our minds later.
However, later in class, Stacie had us do a mark making activity where we independently wrote down adjectives that we felt fit the tone of our scope and project.
Mine were:
- fun
- playful
- feel-good
- empowering
However, upon meeting with my group, I found that though they had chosen similar words —
Lily’s words:
- fun/playful
- inspiring
-balanced
-sincere/trustworthy
-down-to-earth
-relatable
-lightLucy’s words:
-motivated
-peaceful
-connected
-safe
-encouraged
— We all visualized different tones.
How could this happen? On consulting with Stacie, she noted that our scope was the widest of all the other groups. It was strange to us since we hadn’t thought that our scope was that large before. But tackling an entire stress culture is a lot.
So, we met as a group and discussed scope and tone.
We found a new assumption that we are making, which is that CMU students work too hard… and we want to shift that balance. We want our project to be fun and promote happiness. We considered the incorporation of student profiles of people who do a good job of balancing work and life.
We played around with the idea of “My heart is in the ___” or “My heart is more than work” and felt that this summarized what we wanted to do, which is basically shift CMU student’s priorities from just work. To take on this and CMU’s stress culture would be out of scope for this project. So we narrowed it down to just fixing small habits.
We left the meeting feeling better about scope and tone, but arranged to meet later to discuss it further…
05.05.2016 | Group Meeting
We began where we left off, talking about “My heart is in the ____” and “My heart is more than work.” We have crossed off mental problems or stress cultures from our scope. Habits are small enough in scope that we could actually get people to take action, which is a large part of the prompt. As Lucy mentioned during the meeting, it is a nice balance between macro and micro.
We discussed possible forms our communication could take. One we have been pretty set on since the beginning is small notes, that say little reminders like “Take a shower” or “Call your mom” — things that affect people’s well being and contribute to a healthy lifestyle and happiness, yet are often neglected with the intention of having more time for work. We feel that the little notes could contribute to habit-changing. We also thought about timers in working environments like the library that could alert people when to take breaks. Other contexts could be an app like “Streaks” that helps people form habits. We also looked into Nicolas Felton’s Quantified Self Infographics. Lily suggested some kind of way to “stumble upon” good habits.
Ways that we define healthiness (staying active), social life, and healthy thoughts/positive affirming thoughts. We noted that there is a strong correlation between healthy habits and happiness.
Catch: We thought that the phrase needs to be short and catchy, like a hashtag. At first we threw around the original “My heart is in (more than) the work,” but it was very wordy. Lily mentioned “Work hard — Live hard.”
Finally we agreed on “Habits of Happy” or #HabitsOfHappy.
We still need to consider whether a word or two might be changed from the different pieces in the system.
Action: We want people to take a break from work and be healthy, to develop healthy habits, and to have physical and emotional health. We have not yet put this into a phrase or question format.
Validation: We want to do research on being happy, such as looking into positive psychology. We will look into testimonials which we can curate into a blog, and potentially spread awareness of through Facebook. Another resource that exists is JStor, where we can research our topic further. We have agreed to hopefully do this before we meet again as a team. We have also decided to maybe frame our habits in terms of productivity, as a way to make people feel more accountable for the habits.
We will be meeting again tomorrow to clean up our thoughts before Thursday’s studio.
04.07.2016 | Establishing Catch, Action, and Validation
We began our group meeting by making new marks that fit a compiled list of adjectives that we created as a group:
- Playful
- Inspirational
- Trustworthy
- Encouraging
- Inviting
- Positive
- Uplifting
The mark-making was also inspired to be possible patterns for our little notes, which might make up the physical part of our system.
We established our Catch, Actions, and Validations further from yesterday to be clearer and easier to understand:
Catch: Habit of Happy
Action: Take a break - Find your Balance.
Validation: Positive psychology, benefits of balance from spiritual practices, statistics about overworking or being sedentary
04.07.16 | Post-Class Reflection
Meeting with Stacie made me feel like our group is on track. She suggested though thinking of using participation as more of a component. Also, how can we phrase our catch to incite more participation? Questions could help to get people to feel like it relates more to them. I think this applies most to our physical artifacts. She also wants us to really consider how the visual elements will transcend to the different mediums.
We started discussing colors, in order to further our establishment of a visual language/vocabulary:
We circled the ones that we thought we should play with further.
At this point we thought we had what we want to do pretty figured out:
- Physical: notes
- Digital: blog
- Spatial: chalkboard, inspired by Candy Chang
But we started to rethink our concept.
We worried that the blog would lead to too much comparing. We thought about building up #habitsofhappy as a social media campaign but were worried of having only Instagram as a deliverable.
Talking with Robyn helped us to realize that we could use our Instagram to promote people to contribute through challenges. We really liked the idea of creating handwritten, bright, and colorful challenges.
I’m really excited about the Instagram happy challenges! We talked about making them gifs that we would create in After Effects.
Here’s some inspiration that we found:
We’re still lost on spatial though. When we met with Andrew, he gave us a lot of suggestions on ways to maybe move past the chalkboard. The chalkboard achieves what we’re trying to make people realize, which are different ways to be happy, but isn’t that just reiterating our card idea? Also, chalkboards seem to be a little overdone. We plan to work more on this.
04.08.16 | Independent Explorations
I played around with the colors that we wanted to explore further. I found that the coral against the pastel colors was too aggressive, especially when used for type.
I’m a big fan of the yellow, blue, orange/red combination, but am not yet sure how to use it correctly.
I know that my use of type is not yet working so I am looking forward to seeing what my teammates suggest.
04.09.16 | Group Meeting
We talked as a group today about restructuring our catch to be more inclusive and grabbing. To do this, we will make them more conversational. We’re still thinking about incorporating the question format.
We then decided to focus on the visual language. We have established our colors to probably be the yellow, orange/coral/red, and aqua scheme. Patterns are still in the works. Here’s the process we made on that…
Looking back at old patterns from the wall:
Creating Ideas for the Notes:
I love how fun they are, but I really think that we should explore patterns further. I feel that this style of patterns was just what our gut went for, so maybe we should try out some other types before settling.
Considering the Spatial Part of the System:
Since we were still struggling with the spatial piece, we spent some time on this today. We like the way that during Exam-week, the school transforms “The Cut” to house activity like zip-lining and bouncy houses and puppies! Likewise, we would like to occasionally have a pop-up playground in the cut.
What brought about this idea is that we like the way that a seesaw can visualize the way that Work and Life need to be balanced. The balance is never the same. Sometimes work is more of a priority than life, and vice versa. We will probably for our deliverable photoshop a painted seesaw that shows Work and Life being balanced.
As part of this spatial piece, Lily, Lucy, and I would be standing near the seesaw handing out our physical artifact of the notes that give suggestions/reminders of ways to keep the balance by remembering that life matters just as much as work.
In case this idea isn’t received well, our backup plans for spatial are the chalkboard and a digital touchscreen game that simulates the balance.
04.11.2016 | Working Further on Visual Language
Color Palette:
We began by deciding that in the quick mockups that we had created, the blue, yellow, and red combination was working the best.
I also noticed the fact that these are primary colors. Primary colors are associated with children. Our concept revolves around the idea of “play” and currently even features a playground. Therefore, I feel like this is an ok association for our colors to have.
Patterns:
We decided to hand-make geometric patterns, since when only using the computer, we weren’t having as much freedom to explore. We had one aesthetic that we had made in the beginning, but felt that we may be settling to quickly. We used watercolors to create squares of patterns:
04.12.2016–04.17.2016 | In-Class and Carnival Process
Critique:
- try something like Museo for the type?
- Danae and Stacie didn’t like the playground idea. Maybe going with small activities vs. one big one?
- “Is your audience girls?” We need to refine the color palette and patterns to fit a gender-neutral CMU audience. Speak to men. This is hard since we are an all-girl group.
- Could the cards be ads for the spatial events? Maybe people are notified of the events through the Instagram? (How the system works together)
- Stacie: think about multiplicity. Is the pattern on all pieces? Consider theme and variation.
- Make sure the type isn’t yelling at people to play. Speak with them.
- Can some be monochrome? Or do you want to keep combining colors?
- The textural edit (see below in “Pattern Edits” Section) works for some people but not others.
- Robyn suggested checking out bedding for pattern ideas.
- Consider logistics of how often you will post on social media, how often events will take place, how to get followers, where exactly things will be placed, etc.
Pattern Edits:
The Citrus-y ones:
Hexagonal:
Ovals:
Triangles:
New Patterns:
We focused on creating more gender-neutral patterns through both color and shape.
Personal Reflection:
Quite honestly, I worry that my patterns that I’m making are still too girly, so I want to work on making ones that better fit the audience.
System:
Everything can work individually, however the digital, spatial, and physical work together as a system. We realized that the cards lead people to the Instagram, which notifies people of events. At the events, we would also be giving out the cards.
I think we’re in a good place, but need to prep for our presentation on Tuesday. We talked as a group about having 2 cards to prototype, a start on the Insta, and perhaps our small events planned out.
04.17.2016 | Planning & Independent Exploring
To do before Tuesday:
- *Presentation*
- Tabloid sheet of Visual Language
- 2 Cards
- Start the Instagram
- Plan the Events
Pattern Edits:
I played around with colors and textures, keeping in mind the process we made during class on Tuesday.
I really like that the tactic my group is taking in making decisions is in learning by making. Our concepts have grown through communication and then applying the ideas to test them.
04.17.2016 | Group Meeting
Our goal was to try using our patterns in a way that wasn’t girly, to finalize our visual language.
I loved this combination:
But it was way too pastel-y, and thus it was perceived as too girly.
Here were some other combinations:
Backtracking, we played around with colors a bit.
This helped us to realize that we should go with a multi-colored visual language, as opposed to one that was more monochrome or pastel.
Eventually we decided on this one:
We felt the high-key colors help it to be a great way to create the playful tone we want and to reach both guys and girls.
We also worked on our presentation for Tuesday. We will finish it up when we meet again tomorrow.
04.18.2016 | Group Presentation of System
We created a keynote to show to the class the way that our system we are designing works:
04.19.2016 | Reflection on Studio
Today in class, we presented our project concepts as groups to the class. We collected all of the feedback into an Excel Spreadsheet noting who said what. I liked how the activity allowed for easy access to the feedback provided by others. I think that being able to type in the spreadsheet allowed people to contribute lots of thoughts during the short time that they had.
Here’s the feedback that stood out the most:
- Habits of Happy sounds very good on the tongue.
- What do you define as working “too hard”? How do you define “healthy?” how much of “life and play” vs work makes a balanced lifestyle? how would people know?
- The audience may be a little vague.
- Habits also take at least 6 weeks to form, how would you get people to continue to do the stuff you guys wrote on the cards?
- I like how your catch asks people what activities they like
- How will people see the cards and know to take them? Push the cards to try to think about how they are not disposable. How will people know these are collectibles as opposed to just informational postcards placed throughout campus?
- I’m interested to see how the cards translate to a change in behavior.
- What are some examples of the events and who would organize/pay for them? How would they be identified as ‘habits of happy’? What will make people go to these organized events?
- There are already many social events on campus of this nature, how will you distinguish yours from the rest and provoke participation? I feel like events and similar initiatives exist so what about yours convinces people to take the time out of their day to do the activities?
- How can you make it not so generic that it might apply to all universities if you want to specifically target the issues at CMU and our student body’s mental health awareness?For events, maybe going to places related to campus like the Carnegie Art Museum or Phipps? I think that’s a healthy habit a lot of us forget about. What activities are you doing indoors aside from the cards? (Outside only works with certain weather.)
- I feel like there is little incentive for people to go to these events — organization of events might be difficult?
- How will your events stand out from existing ones like those sponsored by the wellness room? How are they more effective?
- What would motivate people to join these events outside from the casual interest we see when the school holds events. I think defining that part of the system more could be helpful
- The stickers may be used effectively small and large scale in a variety of environments. This works well.
- Pluto is quite similar to Museo, but Museo has some stronger terminals — so switch to Museo.
- I’m curious about your validation. What are you thinking?
- Habits of Happy is so cute. Great use of colors without being “Martha Stewart”-ish.
- I really love the style you guys are going for, although the colors seem a little darker than I thought for something that is “happy”.
- People like the use of social media. Instagram sounds like a good match for this project because it is light-hearted and meant to be fun.
I’m so happy that this activity allowed us to gain so much insight into the strengths and weaknesses of our project. For example, a lot of people find the digital to be strong, but had comments about the spatial and physical that we hadn’t noticed or thought about before. Tomorrow, we will discuss the feedback that we received. We will be meeting as a group to hopefully find solutions to the problems, grow the pros, and move forward into prototyping.
We could also begin discussing the logistics of how the 3 pieces of the system work.
04.20.2016 | Group Meeting Progress
Discussion Points
We want to bring back “find your balance” somehow. And make it clear that there’s not just one correct balance.
We define “working too hard” as:
- when mental health starts to deteriorate
- missing out on important things
- finding a loss of meaning in the things that you do
Since our audience was considered to be “too narrow,” we have further established our audience.
- People who are feeling burnt out but realize importance of a good balance
Someone says it takes 6 weeks to form a habit. We’re not sure if it’s exactly 6 weeks, but we discussed how to actually cause people habits to change. We’re thinking that on the back of the cards, there could be some way of tracking progress, through maybe a visualization.
For the catch, we have decided to include the question of “What’s your habit of happy?” somehow.
Our way of not making the cards seem disposable is through quality. We’re thinking of using High Quality paper. We have already talked to Dylan about ways to emboss the cards with gold leaf.
We want the cards to be more lifestyle based. (Meditation, or going on a walk for example.) Since they are things that someone is doing by and for his or her self.
For fonts, we tried both Museo and Pluto, and decided that Museo worked much better. We really appreciates the stronger terminals that Stacie pointed out to us.
To validate, we have been accumulating research to complement our catches. We also determined that to improve the legitimacy of the project, having a logo and figuring out funding will help.
Progress on Events
For events, we have established that they will be on-campus. This will help make them specific to CMU. Also, since they won’t be off-campus, this better allows for stress-free and casual participation. As the events would be small-scale and cheap, they could easily be funded by the Student Activities Fee or some other way through the school.
Here are some examples of events:
- finger painting
- kickball
- freeze tag
- giant collaborative tarp mural
- four square
- frisbee
- pet puppies
- yoga
- thai chi
- free lemonade
- ice cream bar
- jump rope
- giant jenga
- friendship bracelet making
- karaoke
- bubbles
- water balloons
- tug of war
- tie dye
- hula hoops
- bubble wrap popping
- s’mores in Donner Ditch
- chalk drawing
- “playfair” for upperclassmen
Progress on Cards
For more of an accurate mockup of our vision, we used gold foil to assist in mocking up our idea.
These iterations keep the white background.
We tried changing the white square to be smaller. The teal we felt wasn’t working though. It didn’t feel happy enough.
We tried to lighten the mood with a lighter colored square.
We’re not sure if we’re there yet with colors.
We printed out the cards to test the sizing.
And printed out:
We like the idea of the cards being wallet-sized and portable. That way they could be more permanent.
It was based off of the size of the CMU ID / the size of a credit card. These show slight variations though from that size:
04.21.2016 | Post-Class Reflection
Two things we discussed that our crucial to understand when designing for this project are:
- How the pieces fit together as a system
- Theme and Variation within the parts
This is something that we have been paying attention to all semester, but I feel that with this project, I really want to show that I can fully grasp these concepts.
We showed Stacie our prints from yesterday and she thinks that the square and rectangle feel too mechanical. The type is also competing with the image, so were going to work on that as a group.
She also warned us against doing too much on the card. We need to consider what the role of the person is in the interaction with the card.
We thought about creating a pouch that can go on the back of someone’s phone to keep their card with them. Since people always have their phones on them, we thought this would be a good way to reinforce the formation of habits.
Here’s a mockup, although the hole would be larger and the white would be clear instead.
For spatial, Stacie suggested to consider the affordances of spaces on campus, so that we can carry the visual languages into this part of the system.
At first I thought about having a poster, but we need to think further outside the box to created graphic pieces that fit into the environment. We’re still iterating on this.
04.23.2016 | Group Meeting with Lucy
Lucy and I talked primarily about our spatial element.
Talking about Form:
We tried to think further about ways to incorporate visual language and form into the event. We decided to go with some kind pop-up event. We thought about using the shapes from our patterns as placemats that would go on the table, alerting of a Habits of Happiness event.
Talking about Scale:
A problem we were facing is that the events spanned lots of different categories, and happened both inside and outside. It was getting too large in scope.
We used diagramming as a method to narrow in our scope.
Diagramming the categories allowed us to see that too many were active.
We then took the activities diagramming them between Indoor and Outdoor. Lucy and I wondered whether the active ones would actually be most effective. A lot of people feel uncomfortable joining a game that has already begun. We felt the indoor circle would be small enough in scale to be accomplished. Food and little activities are universal, can be joined casually, and cause little happy moments.
Another nice thing about Indoor Events: The people that we are targeting are the people working too hard, maybe not passing by the Cut outside as others. This is strong rationalization because our audience would have a better chance of finding the events that happen inside. The events can also still move around.
We decided that we will be focusing on Indoor events for the project.
04.24.2016 | Group Meeting with Lily
Lily and I met to talk about visual language and do some planning for prototyping tomorrow.
Branding/Visual Language of #HoH:
Eureka! Why not just use one pattern? We’ve decided to stick with the hexagon pattern. Hexagons are the most balanced shape found in nature. This fits our project so well since we are focusing on balance, but also on being healthy, which is how the fact that hexagons are natural relates.
It’s crazy how deciding to pursue hexagons has really helped with our visual language:
- We can use the hexagons for the spatial element for the mats.
- We can play around with colors, with the hexagons being a way of uniting the system.
- Hexagons stack together, promoting the idea of collecting habits, which is what we want people to do with the cards.
I’m really happy we decided to go with hexagons.
Spatial:
Physical:
A big decision Lily and I had to consider is when to go monochrome with the patterns, and when to keep all the colors.
We’re still working on figuring this out completely.
But we played around with color pairings, having a colored background and monochrome patterns:
We really want the cards to change colors so they feel collectible. We think we’ll go with maybe a little bit bigger than ID card sized.
The phone ID-sleeve will be part of the physical component.
Instagram:
After meeting, I did some work on the Instagram. Most of the work revolved on finding a way to get our colors to look good consistently. I thought that this would be important to do because we need the colors to look good for all of the components of the system.
At first I used blend modes and kept the original as-drawn format of the hexagons, thinking that they looked like confetti. But having white on the outside competed too much with the white text.
First Colors:
Lily suggested trying changing the colors in photoshop instead. To do this, I first made the pattern black and white and then changed the hues and saturation levels. However, as you can see below, the tone values will all wrong. Some were way too dark, creating gross colors, and some were way too light.
Second Colors:
To fix the problem with tone, I played with curves to make the colors cleaner. I also adjusted the colors to fit our palette.
Event Colors:
For event days on the Instagram, the colors combine.
This still looks a little rough though. For example, there needs to be a bit more navy. But it helps get the idea across.
The Instagram Aesthetic:
I put the patterns into a grid format to check if they will work, while also adding in the hexagons. I didn’t include type and image yet though. The blank squares will have user-generated images that were submitted as responses to the challenges.
We made a lot of process today. Looking forward to finishing prototyping the different elements tomorrow.
04.25.2016 | Group Meeting
Today we tried to mock up our idea as much as possible for tomorrow’s critique.
Visual Design:
I spent a lot of time touching up the image of all the colors. Since we were printing it, it had to be clean.
I also played around with the idea of having the hexagons on the background color, yet I’m not sure if we are pursuing that.
Instagram:
I’m really happy we chose to do an Instagram. It’s simple to prototype and I think carries are visual language really well. It ties well into both the cards and the events.
Spatial:
We are creating hexagon placemats to display cards, sleeves, and the event activity. The phrasing we will use is “take a sleeve, take a card, take a break.”
The hexagon shape allow us to fit the affordance provided by the tables around campus: rectangular and circular. They additionally simulate the idea of connectedness that we are trying to creating in creating a happy community with our design.
We’re thinking of placing bowls over top the hexagons to display our stuff. We wonder what shape the bowls could take. Would a hexagon shape be too much? We’ll ask tomorrow.
We also took a stab at printing to make sure our scale of 15 x 15 was good. We also wanted to have a better proof of concept so that we could get feedback on whether the placemat and cards were working.
Cards and Sleeve:
Stickers:
Lucy iterated on stickers and logos. Within that, she played with color, type, and scale.
We also found that we could use something like this as a logo on the Instagram.
04.26.2016 | Post-Class Reflection
Today was a checkpoint so that we could receive a lot of feedback on where we are now. We first met with Stacie and then got critiqued by other groups.
We noticed that feedback from Stacie dealt more with the visual language, while feedback from our peers was more focused on the system and how it works.
Feedback From Stacie:
- Something that really stood out to me was that when Stacie looked at the cards, she noticed that our visual language also has a lot to do with angles, and not just hexagons. I like that because it makes me feel like our language is a bit more unique than just a shape.
- Pay attention to values, and use them in similar ways. If we’re going to have a dark background, then maybe that should be consistent with all the cards. We need to also pay attention to the intensity on the color wheel. For example the blue and red pairing is really intense, while the blue and orange are both muted. She said to, “bring logic into the use of colors”
- The hexagons feel really digital. We’ve lost the human aspects, and need to bring it back. We need to work on making it feel less computer generated since we did actually paint them. Should we bring back the textured palette?
- Stacie said that we have made big strides in legibility and composition.
- We should play with the frame of the sleeve and integrate it better with the pattern. We talked about having a hexagon cutout, but are not sure that is right for the project.
- For the Instagram, we need to make the hexagons more organic. We should scatter the hexagons like we did with the Instagram.
- For the spatial, Stacie noted that the placemats do kind of look like soccer balls. We talked about making the hexagons instead have the scattered look. Instead of having place cards, we’re going to try to incorporate the text into the placemat or maybe into the bowl.
Steps to take as advised by Stacie:
- Add handmade quality to patterns
- Let this ^ inform the system.
Feedback from Peers:
Good:
- “Color and system look good.”
- “I see the Instagram really working”
- “Placemats fun and usable”
- “Cards are appropriate, and the actions are good — all things that I need’
- “Visual design is A++”
- “Color palette works and is consistent”
- “I like the way the Instagram is multifunctional”
- “Good consistency”
- “Very consistent color palette”
- “Cute Instagram”
Bad/Things to Work On:
- Spacing on the stickers.
- Make the break activities more appealing. Some people not interested by bubbles, for example.
- Someone suggested have examples or suggestions on the back of cards. For example, “Read a Book” could have listings of book recommendations.
- The justification feels too scientific. For example, they didn’t know why they should care about justification. We should make it less esoteric and even more conversational.
- The Instagram needs to feel more specific to CMU. We can do this through event and time and taking our own photos.
- People were confused about the sleeve. We think that maybe having a sticker or packaging on the sleeve could help them realize they should put it on their phone. Steven talked to me later about the sequencing of “Take a Card” needing to be before “Take a Sleeve.” He also doesn’t like the wording of “sleeve,” finding it not evocative in the way that we want.
- The plates (even though they’re not what we will be using) confused people, making it feel like a buffet. Perhaps not having place cards will help get rid of this unintended meaning, as well.
- Someone noted that the hexagons feel scientific or like floor tiles. We’ll fix the floor tile thing by having more scattered little hexagons. But is the scientific thing bad?
- Make it clearer how to get to the Instagram. Maybe have “follow us on Instagram” somewhere on the cards?
- We need to convey that the location of the events is always changing. We can do this through tagging locations on the Event photos on the Instagram.
04.26.2016 | Planning Next Steps
We sketched out a few ideas, but will work on executing them today and tomorrow to fit the feedback given by our professors and peers.
To Do Today:
- lily: the pattern
- faith: bowl shape
- lucy: backs of cards
To Do Tomorrow:
- revise visual elements with new style of pattern
- add on back to cards
- create new sleeve
- prototype the bowl
04.26.2016 | Independent Working (As a Team)
Lily’s Pattern Process:
Lily repainted our hexagons to better fit our visual language and the color that we had established. We needed to keep the texture more than in our past edits. The shape is also similar to what we imagine the new shapes of the placemats will be.
We scanned them at a MUCH higher resolution since we had issues with pixelation in our last iteration.
We’re really happy with how they came out.
My Bowl Process:
I consulted with our classmate Chris Perry, who is really good at origami, for suggestions. He showed me designs that incorporate hexagons. In the end, I felt that a 6 sided bowl would be the cleanest design and look the best with our visual language.
I did two different mockups. One is taller with the jagged top and the other is shorter with a smooth top.
We felt that the smooth-edged one is more approachable to people, which would encourage people to take things out of the bowls. Additionally, it would look better when we revise the mats to be more scattered in their design.
Lucy’s Card Process:
Getting to it tomorrow.
04.27.2016 | Group Meeting
Physical:
The Fronts of Cards:
The Backs of Cards:
Not all the colors are correct on the backs of the cards, so we still need to work on that.
Seen together:
Spatial:
We tried having the type of “Take a break on both the bowl and on the placemat.
However, when printed, we felt that the type on the placemat felt hidden and faded back. However, we felt that maybe having the type on the bowl would be a better option. To do this though, the bowl would have to be a lot bigger.
Instagram:
For the Instagram, we tried to make it feel more human. To do this, we used the multi-colored hexagons and then played with colored squares.
Here is how it normally appears:
Lucy brought up a good question of what happens when it’s not perfectly arranged? Like when it’s one-off for example. We experimented with moving it one over and found that the compositions still made sense.
04.28.2016 | Post-Class Reflection / Planning
Critique:
- colored bowl? maybe add a white tablecloth?
- colored squares not working on the Instagram. “It feels cheap” :( NEED to fix this
- add organic feel/hexagons to squares on the Instagram
- hexagon also pulling it away. Take out the plain white hexagon from the Instagram.
- images don’t integrate on the Instagram
- Cards look better with the white background.
- integrate multi-colored hexagons into everything else — makes everything feel more organic.
- Colored cards not as fun — maybe add multicolored clusters?
- graphic element has richness and multiple colors. make sure this feels the same way throughout the system.
Rethinking Concept:
We kept hearing that the placemats and bowls didn’t feel integrated. We have found a way to integrate them together:
Therefore, the bowl essentially becomes the placemat. They can be arranged in compositions like we had imagined for the tables.
We also played with having multicolored clusters on the cards and liked how it looked, but need to work further on it.
Planning for Weekend:
Thursday:
- art store stuff
Friday:
- Instagram, Cards (separately play)
- buy bubbles, kit kats, mini play dough? (gift bag stuff), stress balls, yoyos, bubble wrap, tops
Saturday:
- 11–7 keep free
- assemble bowls (figure it out)
- fix up cards, insta, stickers, sleeve
Sunday:
- 12–3 (maybe earlier)
- last touches to dif parts of system
Monday:
- assembling sleeves / system diagram / visual vocab
- after 7 (tentative)
04.29.2016 | Picking up Event Materials
Lucy and I went to Target to get fun things for the events.
- Crayons as a creative event (with clear hair bands so we can divide them into packs of four or something)
- silly putty as a stress-relieving event
- kit kats as an event with sweets (their catchphrase is also “take a break,” which we found fitting)
- bubbles as a playful event
04.30.2016 | Group Meeting
Spatial:
Figuring out how to build the hexagon placemats was really hard.
We began by sketching and calculating math.
We also cut up our old model for help visualizing. We flipped it over and has the inside of our new shape.
We found that we needed to build the piece out of chipboard (so sturdy enough to hold the even stuff) and then a thinner paper on the outside.
Figuring out the inner hexagon bowl was harder than the outer hexagon bowl shape.
After building and re-building, we kept struggling with finding the correct angles and lengths of the trapezoid shapes.
It was a battle to find the right length and angle.
We tried using math, but got stuck:
Finally, we cut out the angle of one of our close iterations. And folded to where the length should be.
And surprisingly, this estimation worked PERFECTLY. We created 3 high-quality versions and then painted the inside chipboard with white gesso.
Cards:
Lucy worked on adding the white backgrounds, multicolored clusters, and adjusting the color and hierarchy of type.
We focused a lot on having consistent tones for our background since that is a problem we’ve been continuously facing. We printed in black and white to check and the tones seemed pretty similar.
Stickers:
The stickers will now be used to brand the event giveaway items. They should be white with multicolored type for correct contrast.
Lily figured out the sizes:
Lucy started mocking up the stickers:
05.01.2016 | Independent Working on Instagram
Yesterday, I left a little early to finish my final for another class. So today, I worked a bit on the Instagram before our group meeting later.
Here are the iterations:
This is the one that we liked:
We thought adding the filter to the crowd-sourced images was too much and that it felt more balanced without it.
We are still thinking about animating a few of the challenges or event days.
05.01.2016 Group Meeting
Planning:
To Do Before Tomorrow:
- Cut out stickers/assemble
- Cut out cards
- Make sleeves
- Visual vocab
- System poster
- Instagram captions
- Context shots / photo studio 8:30
- finish bowls
Lucy:
- visual vocabulary
- cut out stickers and cards
Lily:
- bowls
- sleeves
Faith:
- Sleeve cards
All:
- System Poster
- Photos
05.01.2016–05.02.2016 | Final Weekend Process
We spent some time printing in Reese. After test prints, we realized we needed to scale down the prints a bit.
We printed out stickers as well.
We began to assemble the different components of the system.
We cut out instructions to put inside the sleeves so that using them and attaching to the phone would be more intuitive to the user.
Lucy created coloring pages to accompany the crayons.
We documented our pieces.
Then, we walked to Hunt to get some context shots.
Lucy knew some people studying in the library so we asked them to be our models.
Lily and I spent time planning out compositions for the systems poster. We wanted to include hands to make it seem more playful.
This was the final system poster:
05.03.2016 | The Final Show
We put our stuff up on display with our peers in the Communication Design Studio. It was really fun to see the Systems projects we had all worked on next to all of our other projects.
Here was our final system:
05.03.2016 | Final Pieces
We completed the systems project and met our deadline!
Physical:
Digital:
Spatial:
The System:
05.03.2016 | Final Reflection
One of my biggest goals as a designer is to expose myself to different styles instead of settling for just one. I really enjoy how in a group project, I have the opportunity to learn from the different styles that my group members bring to the table. In this project, I stepped outside my comfort zone in terms of color to go toward a more multicolored palette. I learned about how using a palette like this takes a lot of consideration into tonal contrast. Additionally, I learned that white was a great way to make type or shapes contrast with a very colored pattern.
Through doing this project I learned about how aspects of a system push and pull on each other in theme and variation. My group’s visual language changed constantly. Once my group decided to use hexagon clusters as part of our visual language, we had to figure out how they would be used on each of the pieces. We had to figure out how human and how digital to make the hexagons look, as well.
During our final critique, Stacie mentioned that our colors looked a little too much like “Skittles,” particularly when looking at the bowls. If I were to have the chance to work with my group again in order to improve our project, I think we would really look into lowering the values of our 3 darker colors. I’m also curious about how it would look to re-integrate our old texture pattern somehow. I’m also curious about ways to make Habits of Happy look more official when in it’s spatial context. Like maybe some way of making the name more noticeable.
I had a lot of fun working with my group. We encouraged each other to stay positive during stressful times on the project and take breaks. I learned a lot with them about design, but also learned better strategies for improving my own work/life balance. Despite working on this project during Finals, our group’s positivity and encouragement was consistent. I had a really good time working with Lily and Lucy and getting to know them better.
