At the end of class in week 7, Kyle introduced our final project for the semester and it was based about Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). These are 17 Global goals that are created to be used by all as an action plan for peace and prosperity for everyone. Our brief is to showcase the content of the sustainable development goals for either a child or for an undergraduate student. We have creative control on how we want to display them so for example it could be in the form of a website, app or ebook. Or we can also consider physical products like a toy or a leaflet, we can choose whatever we want. We are to pick 5 goals to designs and focus on for this project and with the brief being explained and laid out for us then and there, we all went straight into our research.
My research began with “What are Sustainable Development Goals?” I had never heard of them before and so the first thing I done was research what they are. With a quick google search I found that they are 17 objectives that were created by the United Nations, which are to be used as a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet”(1) for both the present and the future. They are the stepping stones we should follow to help create and peaceful and thriving environment that we all share, or at least try to make an effort in aiding these goals.
Target Audience
Now that I knew what I designing, I had to decide on who it was for. Like I had mentioned in the brief, we have two target audiences we could chose from, either 10 year old children or undergraduates (like myself). With our last couple of projects (including first year) I feel like I have fitted the target audience and have been designing for myself. Which is good and I’ve enjoyed it however, I do remember Kyle noting that this isn’t going to be the case for every project we do and we need to be able to design for everyone, not just us. So with this in mind I was going to focus on designing for children.
Idea Generation
Although I had my target audience chosen in my mind, I still mind mapped ideas for both audiences to see what I could come up with and to help me generate some ideas. There was some ideas like notebooks, tote bags and infographics that I would have really liked to design for undergraduates. But, I still stuck with my chosen audience being children and came up with two ideas for the project that stuck out to me the most, which were paper chains and games app.
I had this idea of paper chains as it was the lead up to Christmas and I aways remember when I was in school we use to make paper chains as a class activity and each year there was different theme. We would write down a fact related to the theme and decorate a paper chain (or more if we had more facts) and once everyone was finished we would glue them together and make a massive one which would hang up around the classroom. It was an activity that I really looked forward to doing each year in school and the memory of it has still stuck around all these years later and I feel like I could apply this project to that activity because it is an interactive way for children to learn about SDGs.
I was really happy about my paper chain idea for the project but felt like I should have a game or something to go alongside the paper chains, so found my myself then researching popular gaming apps for children. I was scrolling through the app stores and app review sites to see if there was a particular theme of games that was currently popular for children aged around 10, but I wasn’t getting any clear result. So I decided to instead seek out the opinions of my target audience. I’m fortunate enough to have cousins who are in the age range for my chosen audience and so I sat down with them and talked about some of their current favourite games and toys, to help generate some ideas for my own games app. Some games that where brought up where subway surfers, candy crush, geometry dash and others like these. Although these are great games, I was struggling to think of a way that I could tie SDGs into the, not to mention it would be very hard to recreate them. But when my cousins moved onto physical toys, one of them showed me a sticker book that they were really enjoying completing at the moment and this was exactly the type of game I was looking for. I was able to create the story around SDGs and it would also be doable to recreate digitally.
Finalising Idea
My final idea for this project was to create a sticker book app that took you to specific SDG based images and you would be given stickers associated with the SDG and you place them into the picture to complete the image. Once you have done a few of those you will be then given a prize, which will be paper chains which you can print out and make, each one with an SDG on it.
Paper Chains