100 people could've been happier, 28 couldn't. Our primary research shows that it would be beneficial if we were to make people happier/smile. Our original general question was, 'Are you Happy?', this was problematic as it was giving us an answer that we weren't looking for. Most people said that they were happy, but what we really wanted to know was whether, we, could make them happier. Therefore, we changed our question to, 'Could you be happier?'
Our primary research was gathered through the use of a questionaire on a sandwich board. Our method seems to cover both qualitive and quantative, we were able to gather figures/percentages but also research that covered the qualitive description. This was researching into what actually made people happy. We asked the general public if they could be happier, the majority said 'yes'. We also managed to gather research on what made people happy, some of the results included:
- nice weather
- food
- friends/family
- weekends
- a good film
I found this research useful, it's qualitative primary quality made it authentic and also meaningful. The popular answer being, 'yes', although seemed obvious that everyone could be happier, surprised me at the same time. A lot of people that seemed quite happy, when it came to asking them what made them happier, said things that you wouldn't expect. It made our problem seem more of a problem, and we felt making someone smile would be an effective solution.
We also did some research into the effect of smiling/laughing. It is scientifically proven that even if you smile and you don't mean it, research shows it makes you feel better. Our aim was at least, just to make someone smile.
We originally were going to base our problem with Leeds overall, but after considering time and effectiveness, we thought it would be better to target a smaller audience, we focused solving our problem for people within the College of Art.
Reviewing our research, the majority of our results suggested that food makes people happy. Although, this was only the majority, our problem was trying to make everyone happy. We decided this was impossible, unless we focused our audience more (college of Art). For our first presentation/crit, we handed out bags of Haribo, this appeared to make everyone happy, it seemed the idea of receiving a free bag of sweets was appealing.
We then looked at sending out a small, cheery message to make people smile. There were ideas that looked at how people could get two cards and then pass one of them along, as in, spreading each others happiness. The cards could also be given out along with a little bag of Haribo. We aimed to make people smile/happier, photographic evidence shows that our cards and sweets did this.
Our problem, once recognised properly, was actually quite simple to solve. A free bag of Haribo appeared to cheer people up, and feedback like "I really liked your little cards" and "They did actually make me smile", shows that the cards that came with the sweets were also effective. However, if we were to broaden our research and it's solutions, we could perhaps branch out to other methods of making me smile/happy. Haribo was a good solution as it was quite general, but maybe next time we could focus it further to more specific groups, maybe groups/people outside of college. It's a campaign that could be addressed a number of people, but the key seems to be researching into more depth as to what makes certain people smile.
5 things I learnt about the design process:
- You can start anywhere as long as you narrow it down effectively
- The more you research, the more ideas you actually think of
- Your first initial design thought is probably one of your best solutions
- It's always good to get feedback from other people as you go along, to make sure it is communicating/working effectively
- Normally, the simplest ideas are the best ones, as long as they work
5 things I would do differently next time:
- Maybe try and think of a problem and act on it sooner
- Develop research a lot further, I think because our problem was changed, we didn't have much time to research
- I would have wanted to use the video camera at some point, I think it would have been a nice way to document the evidence
- Focus our problem down to a smaller audience?
- PLAN PRESENTATION (save powerpoint as correct format)
