Wednesday 6 November 2013

NEWSPAPER// Design Sprint Day 2: Rapid Idea Generation

So day 2 of the design sprint was all about turning our investigation from day 1 into a huge number of ideas and concepts, to really explore this project to its full potential. These ideas would be quick-fire, encouraging some unusual though processes and many unusable concepts. However from the underbelly of the rapidly generated ideas we also generated a good few concepts that we would have otherwise ignored or never conceived of.
We organised the second day in a similar way to the first, with short 5 and 10 minute 'design sprints'. Today we had these topics on rotation:
1) Names.
2) Title Illustration/ Taglines.
3) Concepts.
4) Funding.

1)
The most important task in generating a concept for the paper is to create a suitable identity, this will primarily come form its title. The concept of the design sprint allowed us to come up with some names, then develop them further at a later time, this was hugely beneficial in the generation of a solid concept. Following are a list of the slightly better names that we thought of with a total of three rotations, with the first two being our preferable titles:
-Die Übergine
-NNN.News.Paper
-The Little Biddleford Express
-The Antidote
-The Writies
-Newsbook
-The Daily Crumbs
-Duck Echo
-Elected Moral Papers
-Democratic Newspaper of Justice, Liberty and Hope.
-Dead Wrong
-The Bib
-The Wig
-Era Valgaris

Our favourite names are either 'Übergine' (which will include the Umlaut) and the NNN.News.Paper. Both of these have a lot more depth in there concepts that I will cover later on section 3. 

2)
To complement the Titles of our papers and to also expand the concept we tasked ourselves to the creation of some taglines for each name. The taglines would add depth to the realism of the paper as well as its level of satirical depth and tone of voice.
Many of these are found on our design sheets.

3)
We developed many different ideas to conceptualise, but two really stood out as a good examples of satire. The first is ÜBERGINE, taken from the world Aubergine, as in the vegetable.The name was really inspired from the nonsensical names of other satirical news sites, like The Onion. What inspired us to further develop the names was its perceived randomness; it does not really stand for anything, it appears both serious, as an authority, stupid and satirical when seen but looks great on paper. The name Ubergine can have its own meanings associated to it and with this flexibility it works great for satire.

The second concept we developed further is NNN.News.Paper. This is satire on the concept of taking information off the internet and presenting it in printed form. We decided that NNN could stand for New Nepotist Network; Nepotist being the favouritism shown amongst the elite to their friends and relatives, a strong undertone in the world of printed news. The .News.Paper element being the address and domain of the physical newspaper in our invented offline network. The idea of the offline network can be carried forward into other aspects of our paper, which is really a continuation of an idea we had yesterday, regarding the web page. This is outlined in my previous post.

4)
The final task of the day was more about decision making than creative thinking. We had to work out what form this newspaper would take in terms of content and funding. Understanding more of our concept than yesterday we set about refining what we want and need from the project, more importantly where we could source a large amount of content from in a short amount of time. We deepened our 4 options from yesturday and came up with a plan::

Option 1.
Source amateur content from forums and online.
+We can sell the paper.
+High level of ownership
+Creative Control
+Shows Initiative
+DIY Aethetic
+Curate the paper
-Ask Permission from many sources.
-Content may suffer from amateur content.
-Design will suffer from time spent curating content.

Option 2.
Propose Idea to large satire news sources in return for acknowledgement and free promotion.
+Exposure
+Loads of HQ content
+Sustainability
+Sellable
+Prospect of growth
+Time Saving
+Design will prosper as content will be quick to source
+Large Scale paper will be the result.
-Have to ask permission
-Legal issues
-Loose some ownership
-Loose control on tone of voice
-Sources may constrict our choices

Option 3.
Carry out option 2 without permission from sources. This will result in a proposed paper only.
+All same positives from option 2.
-EXEPT- Cant sell product.
-Will never go live.
+No legal issues

Option 4.
Write it ourselves with contributions from friends and relatives.
+Total ownership
+Cohesive tone of voice
+Shows initiative and skill
+Sellable
-Time Limited
-Smaller production
-Content quality could suffer
-We are not experts
-Design could suffer from time spend writing.

Having reviewed our options we have come to a conclusion on how to move forward.
The plan is to aim to achieve Option 2 with aspects of Option 4. We wish to generate our own content and be open to contributions but to also flesh out the publication with stories from respected sources. To achieve this we aim to email a potential source, for example News Thump, on Friday with our request to use their work and the concept of the paper illustrated for them. Based on their response we can either proceed with Option 2 or Option 3. By the end of the following week we can send a second email for clarification and the go ahead to use their work in a live environment.

That concludes day 2. Day 3 will involve development of the publication. This will involve fleshing out one of our two solid ideas (Ubergine or NNN.News.Paper. We will also sleep on the developments of today and decided weather we should go ahead down a completely new avenue or stick to our guns.







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