The magic of hindsight...

Our new brief "Speaking from experience" targets the new first years, due to start in September. It is our mission to pass on the knowledge we have learnt this year, identifying any problems we had, empathising with their position, help them out, entertain them or - if we're feeling particularly cruel - scare them. 

After a fair few hours spent reflecting on the year we've had so far, discussing low and high points we each settled on 5 problems. My 5 problems/pieces of advice were;

NEVER choose Gender Studies as an elective

How to cope without sleep/Guide to staying awake

The art of Multi-tasking

When looking for Blu Tack go low

Short cut to short cuts

Discussing this in groups of 5 I decided to go for the "Blu Tack" issue. Mainly because it's pretty specific and a genuine problem. The majority of the briefs I have handled so far this year have been extremely broad (due to my own fault) and I think I've caused myself more problems than necessary. By choosing something like this I can challenge myself and try and work in a different way than I have all year. So anyway my statement of intent goes a little like this;

What Problem?

When pinning up work Blu Tack is hard to come by.

What to do about it:

Make the new students aware of this problem, suggest a solution for it.

How?

Still haven't really decided on this. But possible ideas so far include:

Providing some sort of place where Blu Tack can be kept

Inform students where people usually hide their Blu Tack, through the method of mapping, or stickers on location

Produce something which helps explain why Blu Tack becomes dispersed, possibly using animation, storyboarding, film or photography

I'm still not too sure what I actually want to achieve with this brief, as to whether I want to entertain, inform, persuade the new first years, or whether to try and resolve the problem for them. 

I think once I have decided on this I can really start to think about how to solve this problem, at the moment there are too many possible ways of looking at the problem.