Final Project- Group Rationale

Group Rationale:

When our group got together for the first time to plan out our final project, we started by brainstorming a list of ideas for our visual. On this list were things like “3D brain”, board games, and 3D mind maps. Ultimately we wanted to do something creative as well as interactive. Our initial idea was to create a replica of a brain and have the different topics we discussed this semester sticking out of the brain. This would show that visual communication has a lot to do with our minds and how we perceive things. Unfortunately, as cool as this idea was, we wanted to make our project interactive so that our audience would have to physically do something in order to learn about visual communication. We thought that making the visual interactive would be a great way to keep our audience focused and interested in the subject matter since they would be working towards an end goal.

Our next idea was to make a board game. We thought this would be the winning idea for sure. We came up with the list of topics from the semester and started sketching out what we wanted the game to look like. We took inspiration from popular board games that we grew up playing and tried to come up with rules for the game. This idea got messy pretty quickly. The game ended up being too complicated, to the point where we weren’t even sure how to play it and as a result, we went back to the drawing board.

Our next idea was to create a little town dedicated to visual communication. We decided to have various buildings and each building would have a designated topic from the semester assigned to it. As we were thinking of buildings, we thought it more appropriate to dedicate a college campus to visual communication instead, and thus we came up with O’Connell’s University of Visual Communication. Making a college campus made it more relatable to our audience, which would be other college students.  As we got to making the actual visual and deciding what we wanted to include, we thought we could make the design festive and fun. Since the holidays are coming up, we decided to make the university Christmas themed, equipped with red and green buildings, as well as fake snow!

Each building on campus was assigned a different topic from this past semester. We printed out examples of each type of visual from our blogs and wrote about what each one was. We placed the visuals under pieces of paper so that whoever was viewing our project would have to interact with it to learn something about visual communication. We also added important “buzz” words such as line, Gestalt, and size, where appropriate to further demonstrate examples from class. As we were making our visual, we thought of a way to make our project into somewhat of a board game that would not be too complicated. We bought little toy cars that would act as player’s pieces, and in order to win the game, you must be the first to stop at each building on campus and learn about visual communication. Our goal for this project was to make a fun, interactive and informative visual and we feel as though we succeeded in doing so.

Personal Reflection:

 REFLECTION: What were you trying to achieve? We were trying to achieve a complex visual that would do the best job to explain to a student a full semesters of work if they have never taken the class before. This was harder than we thought because there were so many different topics covered so we decided to hone in on the assignments as our main focus. We decided to have a main focus because if not everything else would get cluttered if you added too much information and it would disrupt the cognitive load. Doing so, we ended up adding the assignment that best connected to the specific university building, and added the purpose of the assignment, the audience, the context, and how to create it. This felt very organized to us and having it in a university setting helped our audience of students to connect and be able to navigate easier. Finally, having this university setting helped because it allowed students to have to hit each stop before making it out of the university.

REFLECTION: What problems did you encounter and how did you solve them? At first, we encountered many problems. We had so many cool ideas on how to create the best complex visual that we really had to think through each of the ideas and figure out why it wouldn’t be the best one to offer. We had one really good idea where we would create a board game and the first few rolls would be going through branches of a mind map, then it lead to a flow chart that they had to make specific decisions, and kept incorporating each blog assignment as we went on. This was great at first but not all blog assignments reflected this flow of material so we decided to make it easier and also less confusing by using the university idea. One other problem we had when we finally were set on the university idea was figuring out how we were going to add all of our ideas again in one overall design. We were considering buying army men, doing a Santa Land, calling it Professor O’Connell’s global village. These were great ideas but again, there were just too many things going on. So we decided we could take the festive Christmas theme to the university and that worked out best.

REFLECTION: What was your AHA! moment? Our AHA! Moment was when we found out that we could combine two of our ideas into one great idea. We also liked that this was 3d because it made it more fun to look at. We really loved the Christmas theme because this is the last project setting us away from Christmas break with our families so we all got together for a few hours each day, blasted cheerful Holiday music, and got it done very efficiently and smoothly. I am so happy with out groups overall teamwork and togetherness.

 REFLECTION: What connections did you make to what you have learned in the readings and in class? The biggest connection was when we learned about the best organization practices for qualitative and quantitative data. There was so much data here if we didn’t plan and make a lot of drafts and iterations than it probably wouldn’t come out as organized as we would like it to and that is clearly a problem when tying to convey information to a viewer who has not seen something ever before. We also showed specific examples of theorist teachings such as Occam’s Razor, and Shriver’s model in our assignments along the way. Finally, we even connected little things like size, and proportion by making the snowman a little larger to use a different technique.

REFLECTION: What would you do differently had you more time or resources? If we had more time and resources we would probably add to the poster board different theorists for each of the assignments that we had examples of. We just wanted to give them a more generalized idea though because it would be terrible to overwhelm someone with so much information that it would deter them from actually learning and getting anything out of it.

Draft 1

First Iteration

Final Product