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PHASE
1:PREPEARTION / RESEARH |
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PHASE 1: PREPARATION & RESEARCH |
1. Choosing a Brief For our 1st team meetings we studied the available briefs, and weighed up what we considered to be the overall pros and cons of the 2 favourites. Either Elite Cars or Film Festival We discussed this further, and decided to take on the Elite brief, firstly because it would be more representative of the types of briefs we’d be working on in the industry, and also because attempting to do something new and different would provide an interesting challenge. We also felt much of the emphasis of the film festival brief would be around the technical specifications to make it work, whereas the Elite brief would give a more equally balanced level of involvement and engagement for all team members in their different roles, Creative, Technical, Financial and Managerial. 2. Team aims and objectives We used the fishbone exercise to try to identify our team aims and
objective for the project. We each made our own, and then decided as
a team which elements we wanted to include as our ‘shared vision’
group fishbone. This exercise proved to be very difficult for us; our team was undecided between aims for the project; as a leaning experience, aims as a company; as a business endeavour and aesthetic aims; as a creative project. A problematic aspect for us was that of the 2 briefs we were aiming to fulfil which meant there were essentially 2 projects running simultaneously, the scoping and pitching of a commercial project (and production of leave-behind book), and the ongoing learning about the business of multimedia, which involved logging and including extra detail in our leave-behind book for assessment purposes.
We chose to use the same method most of us have been using in previous tasks with a main role assigned to each member, who then also acts in a secondary/supporting role to one of their colleagues with a different task. The difficulty here, was making the distinction between roles which were necessary for the project itself, and roles necessary for the producing the pitch and document, and how we could divide these tasks to give an equal amount of work / responsibility to each member. Name: Leading role|| Supporting role Leslie: Project manager|| Design director We each defined our tasks, and reported back to the rest of the team on what we felt was expected of us in our respective roles. Here is my role description: DESIGN MANAGEMENT: -Core Concept – this was to be the task of the whole group, but
as it became apparent that in this case at least, it was very much linked
to ‘look and feel’ I undertook this task. The Project Manager Leslie undertook the last 2 tasks. This was due to some unfortunate personal problems I had during the project, which put me behind schedule, so Leslie acted very responsibly as Project Manager, and took on the extra work herself. An additional task I identified for my role was to put together the group presentation website, which each team member contributed their content to and I input into a template site I created. 4. Scoping the Brief, Identifying Clients aims and Objectives -Consumer website- direct to end consumer Concept requirements:
In order to come up with a concept/design I needed more information
from the client, I made a list of questions for the client. The Project
Manager combined these with other team questions and emailed the client. Q: What exactly do you sell (which brands, parts, etc)? Q: How do you currently sell it (in store, by mail order, telephone
order)? We met with the client and discussed remaining issues, transcript on
group blog at: 6. Scoping of Project Project Scope Outline (opens in new window) 7. Resource Assessment We assessed our resources – what kind of company are we? I discussed this with Project + Content managers (so I’d know what hardware/software/human resources available to make design decisions, and who we’d need to hire externally to make the concept happen). As we would be presenting ourselves as a company to the client, when we are actually a group of 5 students working on a project, we had to decide on how honest to be about ourselves. We decided to include our existing multimedia skills within the company resources, and say that we are a new company, but each with experience within the industry, to strike a balance between our current situation, and a realistic situation we may be in, in the future as recent graduates who may choose to set up our own company. 8. Initial Research: Clients, Competitors and Target Audience. For design inspiration / competitor research I looked at other car
company websites. I looked mainly at those of luxury car manufacturers,
as these were more sophisticated and expensive than those of car sellers,
and would better convey the type of visual message Elite would be seeking: An early idea I had was to include a ‘personality user interface’
on the site, as a means for the customers to interact with the site,
as the brief states they are low skill set web users, and also wealthy
business people (which means they would be used to having PA’s).
I wasn’t sure if such a thing really existed as a product we could
use, as I had only read about them in ‘Futurecasting Digital Media’
by Bob Cotton and ‘The Age of Spiritual Machines’ by Ray
Kurzweil. However, in the Futurecasting book, there’s a web address
for the A.L.I.C.E bot site, which was a starting point to learn about
lots of companies that use the A.L.I.C.E and A.I.M.L code to make their
own virtual agents: I also looked into statistics of women drivers, as although Elite state
90% of their customers are men, I felt that as women are 50% of the
population, and increasing customers of more traditionally ‘male’
consumer products such as PC’s, stereo systems, etc, they may
be an increasing market for luxury cars, so may be a factor for Elite
to take into consideration (potentially providing increased R.O.I):
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