Everyday Wellbeing Design Challenge – Refining The Brief

 

The pace is ramping up over at the Everyday Wellbeing paper we’re working on with Massey University’s School of Design!

We’re almost at the stage where the students’ research is being refined down in groups into a brief which will be presented to all of their peers from across the School. After 4 weeks of understanding wellbeing, bringing lived experience into the mix, exploring areas to focus on, and defining a way to visually represent information – the Visual Brief will be delivered for everyone to see.

The Visual Communication Design department who we’re working with closely had a collaborative ‘peer review’ session this week – something like a speed dating for project feedback. Every group brought their 8 page A3 drafts to the table, and let their peers loose with the red marker – helping them to tighten up not just the imagery of how it was being presented, but of the content itself.

Check out the two hour workshop in a minute in this time lapse:

 

We’ve been delighted to work so closely with the VCD department because their design process has been a credit to collaborative practice; they’ve woven in opportunities for idea sharing, peer feedback, cross-discipline meet ups, physical activity and group work. And that’s all been to generate around 60 rather innovative, edgy visual briefs. We’re also starting to look at opportunities to bridge this design challenge into the Wellington and wider Lifehack community through evening and weekend events, summer programmes and more! If you have any ideas – give us a shout here.

When these are presented next week, students will get the chance to see all the other presentations and choose whether to:

a) carry on with the area they’ve been researching

b) pick up a brief that someone else has written

c) start with a combination of several if something new sparks having seen the variety of other angles people have come from

 

 

This is pretty exciting as an approach as it starts to break down the traditional design and innovation processes where ego starts to creep in, and people follow their original course or idea blindly, not allowing for other perspectives and approaches. It’s also preparing students for the way the design space is moving – a switch away from design being seen as a skill, and toward design being seen as a practice.

In Week 5, we’re back to run a workshop with VCD about ‘Working In Groups & Understanding Design Research’ ~ we’re pretty excited, and just released a blog about Design Research in honour!

We’re also fizzing on ways that we can layer these learnings into our work to create and share a design practice for youth wellbeing. If you’re interested in hearing more about this, sign up for more information here.