Tuesday 03rd of May - Sub-concious

 Research has been vital for this project, as I started with the question, 'What is Design?' this could just not be my own opinion. So from dictionaries, online and from peers, I concluded that design is about about creating/responding to a problem.


 From this initial research I moved onto research for 'Instructions' which when working on my original project, became my problem, my 'Design Problem'. 
  
For research for this project I have looked at various forms of instructions; 
-Sub-concious


 - Traffic lights, how certain things, colours or shapes for example, make you automatically react in a certain way. I have shown before my 'colour' research and what effect some colours have to us.


- Road signs, again, these are designed to instruct you clearly and quickly. 


- Signs, Advertisements, warnings, other quick ways of instructing us on the go, 'No Smoking', 'Pull', 'Push'. Maybe not even the words just the symbols, a figurine of a man putting rubbish in a bin is regularly seen on food packets or in parks. 

 Instructions can be used on the go and be effective, easy to use as well as potentially lucrative, most businesses use advertising to instruct you to buy there goods or 'come back' again. In shops for example I have looked at Points of Sale, for example how shops layout there goods according to your behaviour, for example promotions will be around till points where the highest foot fall of customers is. And any promotions within range are placed at eye-level, with the cheaper goods near the bottom. 


- Manuals- Have become my focus point. When starting this project I focused on 'What is Design' and the 'skills', projects, workshops I have benefitted from this Foundation year at Manchester. When looking back at how to use the 'silk screen printing workshop' for example, or how to knit or crochet; like i thought I would learn this year, It was was not obvious how to find instructions/follow. I also wanted to expand what I could do on programmes such as Photoshop and Illustrator, which like many I already found confusing. 


 So ended up trailing through endless sites, which were not relevant, un-clear, hard to print off/use or full of adverts. This became my first idea; 


 Would it not be good to be able to buy 'instruction cards' of just what you want to know? You can already do it for recipes, instead of buying a whole cookery book, you just select the recipes you want. Put the cards of your selected recipes together and have your own book! The other benefit is you can put these cards in a 'binder' instead of book and take away and add as many cards as you like. This binder can also stand up at an angle so the 'instruction card' is easy and practical to work from, you can literally follow whilst doing. 


 These cards are sustainable especially for the new customer trend of 'online shopping', an example of how my idea would work is, that when you 'add your product to basket' on any retail site you can opt for the option of instruction cards and in which language.  This therefore reduces packaging, weight and hassle for you!