Progress Crit and Developments of the Day.

...Creating angel and devil mini masks- designs for stickers in a "progress file" at the back of our book- for children to record whether they have got away with a lie, or have been caught out (above).

With progress boards ready, and everyone ~in the know~ as to what our project was about, and what our ambitions were, we started to plan scenarios for our book, and topics that could be featured- along with layout and design...

We went into our progress crit wishfully thinking that our efforts would communicate effectively. Undoubtedly, there were many criticisms in the brief- and we came to realise that our project had many flaws including:

-the consideration of our age range (5-9 years)- perhaps too broad- at 5, can children read this well? can they lie effectively? at 9, do they really want a child-like book such as this? perhaps we have the wrong target audience, could this be targeted to nostalgic adults instead?

-our problem- we set out to create a solution to "get to lie convincingly", as whilst a few of our "solutions" to scenarios may have done this, many were silly but ultimately child-friendly and playful- not seriously helpful.

After a discussion with tutors Jo and Amber, we felt it would be better to go for a more generalised audience, and to take a step back from focusing our design so much- although taking some of the elements to inspire a new path.

As prompted by Amber, we have decided to become ~the liars~ ourselves, creating phony and surreal circumstances to see how people respond to them. For example...creating a "missing spider" advertisement (like a "lost cat")- making it silly yet convincingly written- and with a huge reward- see how many respond. Altering signs in parks and the environment- making people consider the wording and think more carefully about the demands. Instead of "don't walk on the grass", we could have "don't walk on the grass...until you have taken your shoes off".

At the minute, we're not entirely sure which direction we're going to follow- though we know we want to make it a live brief- going out into the public and actually display these altered signs, though, for now, I think that's no bad thing- It'll be good to get a fresh view on the project and perhaps think more creatively than we were previously.