Firstly we needed to come up with a concept for our piece and so we each went away and did research on the statement independently.
The 10,000 steps a day challenge is a challenge said to improve your health on a daily basis and is supposedly easy to fit into your daily routine. On the NHS website it says that the average person walks between 3,000 and 4,000 steps per day, and 1,000 steps is the equivalent of around 10 minutes of brisk walking. I found that walking every day can dramatically improve your health, but some of the tips for walking a bit extra each day weren't very inventive or even realistic that people would be bothered to do them. On the NHS website it suggests little additions to your day like getting off the bus a stop earlier than usual or walking the dog, but if you don't have a dog this is highly unrealistic and only people that are really enthusiastic about walking more or losing weight would bother to get off the bus early. I realised that there aren't really any incentives to make people want to walk more in their day unless you actively seek it out for yourself. Also the average person only walks up to around 4000 steps a day so to walk 10,000 is a lot more than usual and getting people to do over double their average walk is probably much harder than just telling them to get off the bus a stop earlier.
There is also a 10,000 steps challenge website based in Australia where members can join up for free and get a pedometer to count how many steps they do during each day.
Although there are more benefits to this scheme like being able to see how you're progressing and take part in challenges and talk to others doing the same challenge as you, there are still no incentives to get new people involved that don't actively seek it out.
After regrouping with all of our individual research we found that we all discovered that if a person doesn't know about the 10,000 steps challenge or doesn't actively seek it out, there is no real incentive to do it, and people will go about their days clueless to how doing extra walking each day will improve your health. For this reasons we decided to focus on raising awareness of how walking a little extra each day is beneficial to your health and can improve it dramatically if done over a long period of time.
Initially we came up with some ideas on how to get more people involved in exercise and telling them how doing a little each day can improve your health.
We decided to initially go with creating packaging and promotional material for a gadget or tool that people could buy or collect to track how well they are sticking to the 10,000 steps challenge and also connect them to either a social networking website or our own website, where people throughout the country can connect with each other and compete in challenges or meet friends to walk with. We thought that this would be a good idea to create more promotional material about walking more to improve health and get the message out to a wider audience. However, after our first crit with tutors we realised that it would impossible to create a product such as a wristband or electronic pedometer that would link information to the internet, and so we looked back at our first ideas and decided to focus this project more on the specific audience of students within our university.
From our own experience we found that students tend to be a little lazy, especially graphic design students that would rather wait for the lift to go up one floor than take the stairs.
We wrote up our brief so that our aim is to promote the idea of doing a little extra walking each day to improve health, while keeping it humorous and light-hearted to communicate the message to students. We decided to focus our project within our university so that we can easily see that it is working and see what kind o things we need to focus on specifically, for example the use of the lift to go up only one floor.
At the point we came up with an action plan of what we want to achieve over the rest of the project. To begin with we wanted to stir attention and get people talking about our project, and so decided on some hard hitting posters with little information on them so that people will see them and talk to their friends and colleagues about what they have seen.
Secondly we wanted to create something that had a lot more information on it that students can read and interact with an learn more about how changing your lifestyle a small amount each day can really benefit your health. Also there will be a smaller leaflet that contains some of the images from the posters with more to the point facts and shocking facts that will have a bit impact on the way students think about their health. Also, as well as having the shocking posters deterring people from using the lifts, there will be stickers on the stairs with encouraging phrases on them to make students feel better about themselves for using the stairs and keeping it positive.
Finally we will have a website and social media attached to the posters and handouts that contain all of the information about the 10,000 steps project and where people can post their own tips and tricks about easy ways to stay healthy as a student.
Before we split up into smaller groups to work on things separately, we needed to decide on a few things such as the colour scheme we would use. We were limited to two colours plus stock and so we decided to keep it fairly simple with white stock, and the colours black and an accent of a mustard yellow.
We also decided as a group what we think all of the different elements should be like and what they should include so that we know in advance what we're working towards.
We then split up the tasks within the group. The three boys took on the tasks of creating the logo and the posters, and Melissa and I look into creating a dynamic and interactive handout with the majority of the information within it.
I started looking for different ways of displaying information in the form of a booklet or handout.
Probably the easiest way to display a lot of information whilst also keeping it easy to understand is the use of information graphics.
But as well as this we needed to find a way to put a lot of information in a handout small enough for people to pick up and carry around with them.
This final one I found particularly interesting and thought that the format would work well for displaying a lot of information, while also only using one folded sheet of paper for the main body of the handout.
I then created this for myself to see how easy or difficult it would be, and it turned out that once I had figured it all out and got the measurements correct it was fairly easy to fold and unfold, which led me to the idea that the main piece of paper could be created as a poster that students could put on their walls as a motivational piece or just a reminder about how doing a few extra steps each day is beneficial to their health.
After this we all got back together to discuss what we had done over the past few days. The rest of the group liked my idea and we decided to go ahead with it as the handout we would create. I would concentrate on the main piece of paper that folds out into the poster, and Melissa would concentrate on the four inserts that go into the folded piece of paper.
We also decided on a logo to use throughout the project so that it would be recognisable as part of our project. The title "the hidden c" (in fact) was what we decided on.
The main problem we had at this point was the initial poster designs that the boys had created. I found them to be a little graphic and sometimes verging on offensive rather than shocking.
As well as being slightly offensive, the posters didn't really have anything to do with being healthy or promoting more steps, and they focused more on the difference between being fat or thin.
From here we had to decide what we really wanted to say in out posters and throughout the whole of the project. we talked for a while about this and finally came up with focusing on food and a student diet, and shocking people with actually how many steps it would take to walk off all of the calories you intake from say a mcdonalds burger.
From here i went on to design the poster and the main body of the handout. Melissa did some research into a standard big mac meal at mcdonalds and found that it contains almost 1000 calories, and would take 24,750 steps to walk it off. These huge numbers are astounding and extremely shocking so i decided to keep the poster simple with purely type so that the statement would stand out and be easy to understand.
The finished booklet contains a lot of information in a very visual way which makes it easier to read and understand.
The final posters that were made were much less offensive and were shocking enough to get peoples attention. They focused more on the idea of diet and how we need to walk more to work off the calories of a student diet.
As well as these posters to discourage people from using the lift and being lazy, we wanted to put some encouraging statements on the stairs so that when people choose to use the stairs they get congratulated a bit and feel better about themselves for making a good choice.
To link all of our print together they all include the website that Alex designed that contains all of the information we gathered plus posts from us that we update regularly to encourage students to keep making small changes to their day to improve their health. There is also a Facebook page and a twitter page linked to this website so that it can be shared between friends and colleagues and encourage more people to get involved.
Overall I think that this project has gone well. We got some good feedback from students that had made the choice to use stairs rather than the lift and I think that some of the information displayed in the booklet really shocked and surprised people that just taking a few extra steps each day can really improve your health dramatically.
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