Concepts. OUGD504

Concept

• a plan or intention
• an idea or invention to help sell or publicise a commodity
• Is received or conceived.

As a group we were asked to pick out 3 words from one vase, and one from another, and from these we came up with a concept to do with these words. Our group got given a bar to create a concept for, and the three words we were given were curtain, clock and court.
We had to think about many different aspects whilst coming up with our concept such as:

• Who is the audience?
• What is the purpose?
• Potential customers?
• Current customers?
• How can we push the concept as far as it can go?

For the word clock, we had many ideas that included time, time travel, and having a bar that looked back into different eras and decades that were interesting. We also looked into Salvador Dalis' melting clock paintings and thought about a bar that was quite abstract and post modern.

For the word court we thought about the regal court, and also a sports court and having a sports bar. But mainly we focused on the court of law and how we could bring those ideas into a bar. We also thought about the justice system and hit upon an interesting idea of the prison, and mainly focusing on the venue of the bar.

For the word curtain we thought a lot about the idea of theatre and performance and how the curtain is used in different performance situations. We thought about the idea of opening and closing curtains in performance, and also how curtains are used in tents such as circus tents.

After a lot of discussions over many different ideas, we landed upon the idea of a prison themed bar, but in a quite subtle way. The venue of the bar would be in a converted prison over three floors. We struggled a bit with the target audience of our bar, as it had to be located in Leeds we were unsure whether to target it at students, which are in abundance in leeds and so the market would be huge, however there is a lot of competition within leeds. For this reason we decided to target our concept at young professionals who have more money than students and are more likely to travel a little further out of the centre. 
From here we came up with the entire concept for the bar. We wanted the bar to be fairly classy and attract young professionals and so it needed to be slightly more high end than the cheaper student bars that you generally find in leeds city centre. The location of the bar was the most important factor, in an old converted prison, and so from here we thought about what the interior would look like, the kind of events/music/drinks would be here and what else we could do to push the concept.

 The main cell block of the prison was our focus, with a ground floor and two balconies above.
The ground floor would have the main large bar running down the middle and bar stools around the bar. This is also where the stance would be so that bands and live music can be performed at special events.
The first floor balcony would house the booths and main socialising  area for the customers. The booths would be in the cells around the first floor balcony.
The third floor balcony would be the vip area with booths that are able to be hired out for special events.

We were mainly inspired by a hotel in The Netherlands that is a converted prison. It has kept a lot of its main features and history, but had been teken into the modern era by the addition of lighting and furniture. This is what we wanted to achieve with our interior, and so we decided to keep the colour scheme quite neutral and modern with black and white, but also keeping some of the prisons original features such as exposed red brick walls and the metal of the bars and balconies.