Week 7
03/11/08
Digital Futures
Attended the Digital Futures evening this week in the Art College where guest speakers Jane Fielder and Nicolas Roope gave a talk on some of the work they do and where they saw design going.
Jane showed us some of the work her company, Red Bee, have been involved with. Red Bee works with companies all over the world. Instead of boring you with who, check out their website and have a look for yourself if you weren't at the talk. She showed us various videos of the type of work Red Bee do. A lot of the work for television companies was visually stunning. Red Bee was responsible for the current re-birth of digital channel UKTV G2 in the form of 'DAVE'. This showed us all how a re-brand should be done. I was able to go home after it and tell my mates I had met the woman responsible for Dave. OK, I'm sure there was a massive team involved but you know what I mean.
Nicolas gave a slightly different approach. He kicked off with the urinal with a fly in it so you aim at the fly sub-consciously and not all over your shoes. It symbolised how simple design should be. The simplest of ideas can be the most effective. He is creative director of POKE London and Hulger . We were shown some of both companies exploits which I will list below. Nicolas was a really quirky guy and can see from listening to him were his ideas come from.
Some of POKE work:
(Work for mobile giant Orange)
(More Orange work. This page never ends.....try it.)
(Global Rich List)
Plumen Concept
Also check out Hulger's latest work in the form of 'Plumen', their low energy light concept. Why didn't I think of that!
Process
This weeks lecture was about the process involved during the design process for a job. On placement I have sampled some of the various stages in completing a job for a client. These range from initial meetings with clients to the final handover of the product to working on tenders.
I feel that the course doesn't prepare us enough for things such as working on this process. It teaches us the skills needed to do the work but not the practical side of the business such as drawing up tenders or meeting clients. So I was relieved to find out from Chris that we will be having a lecture on solely based on billing and invoices.
Happy days. More lectures like this please.
Innovation and Concept
The name of this module is innovation and concept but I am continually feeling like I'm not as far as I should be. It's already way into the semester and I still haven't got a strong idea for my major project down on paper yet. I have tried and tried to think of something original but no joy. I feel I'm spending too much time trying to do research for the blog when I should be concentrating on my major project idea and trying to research it instead. Bad times!