New Direction + Workshop
Wednesday, April 4: A Breakthrough
04.03 MEETING —
After studio on Monday, we set up a meeting for Tuesday to begin to align where our project would be going and how we would be continuing our work towards the end of the semester.
We synthesized some of the point we thought were important with advice from Kristin. Our main concern now was to define a clear voice and identity while creating a strong call-to-action. Indeed, the pledge itself was not a very good incentive to act. We needed a way for our campaign to run in the long-term, for people to want to participate and continue to care or be mindful.
What happens after they accept the zine? They get the zine, they post the selfie…what’s next?
In fact, we found the need to change what we were trying to get our audience to do. Sure, the kit is meant for people to post their true self, but how would one define trueness? What if someone posts makeup photos, but that’s just how they express themselves? We realized that we need to redefine the campaign and discuss what the final deliverable looks like.
We discussed some possibility on where we could take our campaign. Perhaps it could take on a more personal voice, or a more provocative voice. Maybe it could be several small zines that describe the stories of different personas/characters and their relationship with Instagram. Or it could take the voice of a teenage girl. One thing for sure was that we needed to reshape the campaign so that the call-to-action could sustain a longterm involvement and also bring the community of participants who are interested in the mission (and maybe even nonparticipants) together.
In addition, we needed a stronger visual identity to help aid our voice and message. How could we leave a strong impression on our audience without being too vulgar or extreme? We were intrigued to experiment with visual language, as inspired by Colors magazine Kristin shared with us.
Until the next meeting, we decided each member should do some individual research into existing campaign/call-to-action and generate ideas for what our campaign could potentially look like.
04.04 MEETING —
For Wednesday’s class, we had laid out a set of goals and objectives for everyone to work on. Our plan had been for each of us to pitch our ideas so that everyone was heard and had worked on campaign ideas to move our project forward.
When we reviewed what everyone had brought to the table, we saw some commonalities emerge and we decided to move forward in a direction that was about starting a conversation, making Instagram more for yourself, and allowing people to define their own relationship with Instagram. These ideas stemmed from our group’s thoughts. Some of these were about personas and how people identify with different concepts based on how they see themselves in a project. Other concepts were more about mental health and how it was counterintuitive for us to ask people to go back to Instagram to promote our campaign. We want people to bring back the mission of the original Instagram and share moments of their lives and want them to do that in a healthy way.
Our consideration and challenge for this idea was to switch the order of zine to people’s responses. Before, our project revolved around the zine being the input for people to act upon. The output, or final deliverable, would be people’s responses to the campaign. As a team, we were pretty set on the idea that the project would take the form of a zine. Now, people’s responses would be used to generate content for the final zine. To get to that point, we needed content, or input. After evaluating where we stood, in time and concept, we decided to move forward by creating a workshop that would generate content and get people to think about their relationship to Instagram.
Workshop Materials
After our hearts were set on the workshop, we went straight to crafting questions. We were now interested to know people’s personal relationship with Instagram as opposed to us defining how they should or are using it. Thus, the questions reflected more on the stories of Instagram’s positive and negative influences on people’s lives. By getting these stories, we will define what the final deliverable’s message would be.
We imagined about 20–30 people to be at the workshop, and created a google survey for recruiting participants. We hope to get a mix of design and outside design majors with different experiences on Instagram. The workshop would consist of part 1, where participants have to write their stories on question cards according to each topic, and part 2, a open group discussion reflecting some of the questions from part 1.
We also created a team task chart to keep track of our progress and what we need to get done. In addition, it helped us organize who has what assigned.
Making Printing Paying Crafting
Since the workshop would be a decent amount of time, we thought the participants should have a takeaway as well as a nice toolkit to interact with during the workshop. We repurposed the pouches during silent crit to become our workshop kits. In it, there would be a muji pen, a set of question cards, and Instagram stickers for each participant.
The question cards were printed on quality card stock with different colors for each section. This way, it would be easy for them to identify which card we want them to write on. These would be returned to us for content to put in the zine. However, there would be a Instagram post-shaped sticker at the end of the cards, where each participant would write their first step to making the change they want in the way they interact with Instagram. This is an artifact that the participants could take home to keep, which would also help remind them of our campaign and make them think.
In addition, at the end of the project, we hope to distribute the final zine to the workshop participants.
