Studio Brief 4 - Initial concepts

Concepts

Booklet based around shopping smartly 

Topics / tips included would be:
- meal planning 
- Meat deals - bulk meat buying then separating it into portions to be frozen
- End of day reduced prices in shops 
- Making homemade lunches to reduce cost  
- Buy big packs of pasta, rice etc
- Use by vs Best before
- Essentials to stock the cupboards with
- Frozen veg better than fresh - fresher than fresh vegetables   
- Buying own brands
- Using dried not fresh e.g noodles, herbs etc 
- Closest food places
- Closets shops 
- Simple meals

Creative prompts booklet

The booklet would take inspiration from Wreck this Journal and provide people with ways of tackling creative tasks set within the year. During this year, it was found that people found it difficult to adapt to lateral idea generation. For some this was made even more difficult because they had come straight from A - Level so had not experienced the open way of working that others will have had in a Foundation year. The booklet could include tasks for people to try as a way of 'loosening up' their way of thinking. Different techniques for easy generation of initial ideas could be useful and restrictions could be suggested. Pages could be left blank so that the user could stick down their responses to the tasks, similarly to Wreck this Journal.

Initial crit on concepts 

The group thought that the creative prompts booklet was the more interesting out of the two ideas. It was suggested that Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies would be a useful reference, as these suggest things that wouldn't be done normally. Taking inspiration from this, could mean that the prompts use a card format instead. It was also said that the book could become a 'Foundation course' in a book. Surveying people within the class on their experiences of Foundation and the activities they took part in could help generate ideas for the book. It was said that the 'Foundation Book' could be dated like the year with the different tasks coinciding with when they are actually done on the course. A suggestion was to physically do tasks with the first years as an activity in a workshop format. Someone also said that an activity pack could be created providing all the tools needed to do the activities. Also the tasks within the book format should provide simple techniques that generate good results, almost acting as cheats and ways of easily tackling briefs.