Entering third year: REAL WORLD!!!!!!

Third year has begun, with many expectations of an outrageous workload and a lot of stress. Although I was preparing for the start of third year, I was very excited and keen to get back into things and get creative with projects. The first day comprised of a briefing for the next few weeks, in which we will be working on a real live project called “Healthy University”, and working in groups to begin the project. We were assigned groups for different categories that make up the Healthy University Strategy (environment; health and wellbeing; equality and diversity; and Welsh culture), and the focus of my group is Welsh culture, particularly Welsh language. Each group is given a client and a mentor to guide us through the project. During this first day our group worked together to begin brainstorming Welsh culture and our target market (students).

The rest of the day we came up with a solution for raising awareness of the Welsh language through some sort of everyday student routine. We analysed the process of getting a coffee   and thought about what we could do with this process to prompt students to learn/use the Welsh language. After brainstorming and changing from one idea to another we settled with using stickers on coffee cup lids with humorous or entertaining phrases written in Welsh. The idea would be that you could peel off the sticker to reveal the English translation.

The whole group seemed to be very happy with the idea and we presented it to our client using role-play. The client seemed pleased with the idea and elaborated for us what his main goal for the Healthy University Strategy was. The idea is to focus on encouraging the use of the Welsh language and also to make anyone around the university or local community feel comfortable with using it or it being used around them.

During this first week of the Real World project I felt a bit confused as to where we were meant to be going with it and that the briefing wasn’t completely clear. However, as we’ve continued throughout the week I have started to feel more comfortable with it and aware of what is expected of me and my group. With my group being assigned Welsh Culture as our topic to focus on within the Healthy University strategy, I wasn’t too interested as I am not from Wales and have never been particularly intrigued by Welsh culture or the language. Although, as we go deeper into the project and research I am finding myself getting more and more absorbed in it. I now feel very determined to make our campaign a success to get more students speaking Welsh and to help Welsh speaking students feel comfortable with using their language.

A lot of people come to study in Cardiff because of its great reputation for education and student life but I think that there are many students within Cardiff Met who just aren’t particularly aware that the Welsh language is still used and its our job to make them aware. I have always felt like a very sociable and accepting person and I enjoy being able to understand other people’s feelings and learning about where they come from and their aspirations. I want to be able to spark emotion and create motivation or just the smallest amount of interest through this design’s purpose by putting myself in another person’s shoes and seeing things from a different perspective in order to gain insight.

Later in the week we were required to come into uni to brainstorm more and start writing up our creative brief. We thought mainly about the kind of lifestyle students live and their day to day activites and what would entice them into our campaign.

After this brainstorm we all agreed that we liked the idea of using interactivity and play through games to gain attention from students. We began by looking at existing games and game styles and thought about how we could modify these games to include an essence of Welsh culture and language. Students like to drink and they also like to play drinking games so this was our starting point which led us to look at other particular card games such as ‘Top Trumps’ as well as ‘Jenga’. We also looked at particular language that students might use. Here are some phrases that are commonly used by young people/students with their Welsh translations.

As the main focus of this campaign is to encourage the Welsh language within the student community we began to develop our game concepts but first we had to meet our mentor to get feedback and following this, the client to make sure they were happy for us to continue developing with the idea.

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