Assignment 1: Design strategy
Assignment overview
Assignment 1: Design strategy consists of a process journal and a presentation. In this assignment you will focus on developing a communication design strategy for this year's Swinburne Mental Health Week campaign.
Your journal will house your task work from Weeks 1–5 and demonstrate your work process on the assignment including all method, research, exploration and the iterative development of your presentation. Your participation in the discussion boards and Miro factors into the assessment of this assignment.
Your presentation will require you to present your design strategy for Swinburne’s Mental Health Week (SMHW) campaign. Your weekly tasks will comprise the building blocks of this presentation and will answer what is the goal of the campaign, why it is important, who it is for and how it will be implemented. These four components make up the design strategy.
This assignment supports unit learning outcomes 2, 3, 4 and 5.
View the Rubric to learn about this assignment's marking criteria.
Assignment details
Task
The following details are relevant for both parts of Assignment 1. Please read carefully.
This Swinburne Mental Health Week campaign needs to promote awareness around the importance of good mental health. It should promote awareness of Swinburne’s services and support around mental health as research has shown that this needs to be improved, particularly in the current climate when many are both working and studying remotely. The campaign needs to engage the audience and encourage participation in the event. For example, you might consider how to get time-poor students to engage in this event and how digital and social media can be used to encourage engagement and participation in the event.
The problem
Develop a design strategy for the Swinburne Mental Health Week campaign. Consider what problem you are trying to solve. This will help you develop a call to action and inform. the evaluation process. As you develop your campaign, keep the point of the campaign in mind. In addition, the campaign must communicate the theme of the event week.
The audience
The good news is YOU are a part of the target audience for this campaign. Remember not every student will think just like you. You will research information about existing students both on campus and online, who are currently studying online or in a blended learning environment. Next you will develop personas to target appropriate messaging and branding for the campaign. See the resource below for additional support around developing personas.
Note: Developing a strategy that appeals to your identified audience (online students) is key to this brief.
The sponsor
Swinburne University.
The goal
The Swinburne Mental Health Week campaign needs to:
promote awareness around the importance of good mental health
resonate with the intended audience and address their specific mental health concerns
drive users to the event day media touchpoints, e.g. digital/social media and support resources and services through the Swinburne Health and wellbeing
(https://www.swinburne.edu.au/life-at-swinburne/student-support-services/health-wellbeing/)
website
develop a theme for the event week.
Key questions
Key questions that you should consider when developing this strategy include:
Why is this event important?
How will you tell people about it and get them involved?
What sort of incentives could be employed to do this?
How can we engage with the audience in interesting, unexpected ways?
Assignment 1: Process Journal
Assignment 1A is your process journal. This is a multi-page document that tells a comprehensive story of your work for Assignment 1. It includes your tasks from Weeks 1–5 as well as a clear and articulate presentation and annotation of research and design options that have contributed to the development of your strategy presentation.
Please ensure the document is legible. It needs to have clear headings and subheadings that explain the work within as well as clear annotation of sketches and images. The visual design of the process journal should be considered, with a clear hierarchy of information and use of typography applying a consistent grid and layout.
Your process journal will be submitted as an onscreen quality PDF.
As you are posting your work on Miro, this document is merely a repository to bring all this work together. It is recommended to set up a multi-page document in InDesign or similar program to keep track of your work as you go each week. Taking screenshots and photos of your process as you go along is recommended, as then it is easily collated.
This submission will include at a minimum the following four tasks:
Task 1: Ideas for Swinburne Mental Health Week—initial research into Swinburne Mental Health Week and audience (10%).
Task 2: Persona development (audience)—audience research and two developed personas for your target audience (10%).
Task 3: Benchmarking and positioning—benchmarking and the positioning matrix, with revisions based on feedback (10%).
Task 4: Concepts—mind maps, mood boards and three different design concept sketches including a minimum of two different media touchpoint applications (10%).
Assignment 1B: Presentation
The second component is your design strategy presentation. This is a formal, professional, design strategy pitch presentation that is presented to your client. The presentation documents will be an onscreen PDF that covers the what, why, who and how of your design strategy for the Swinburne Mental Health Week (SMHW) campaign. It will feature key facts and insights about the brief, the client and the audience as well as personas, positioning maps and at least three rough concepts for the campaign.
You will also develop a presentation in the form. of a video, which will run for about seven to nine minutes. (You can record this in Collaborate, download it, and upload to a video site like YouTube.)
The content of the video should be guided by the following steps:
1. Introduction (15 seconds)—introduce yourself and your background.
2. What: Campaign issue and sponsor (90 seconds)—provide a profile of the sponsor and SMHW. What are your audience’s concerns and needs around mental health?
Outcome—at least three key research facts/insights of the issue, a profile of the sponsor and review of existing SMHW campaigns.
3. Who: Audience research and personas (90 seconds)—using data from the Swinburne Annual report, develop a series of at least two personas that represent your audience of online students.
Outcome—infographic of audience research and personas.
4. Why: Benchmarking (90 seconds)—review the existing SMHW campaigns for strengths and weaknesses. Look at other university mental health campaigns as well as other mental health campaigns that have young people as an audience. How will your proposed campaign differentiate or be positioned in relation to what already exists?
Outcome—best practice review, positioning map.
5. How: Message, concepts and media (180 seconds)—brainstorm words and visuals that may relate to your campaign.
Message outcome—mind maps and wording ideas for the campaign theme.
Concepts and media outcome—sketches, image board and media sketches.
(Refer to assignment examples for scope of work required.)
Note: your presentation must be submitted as a video. Follow these instructions to upload your video to YouTube and submit your video link:
1. See 'Uploading a video to YouTube' in the YouTube section of the Assignment tools
(https://studenthub.swinburneonline.edu.au/understand-assignments) page in the Student Hub.
2. Then refer to 'Submitting YouTube video URL' in the YouTube section of the Assignment tools
(https://studenthub.swinburneonline.edu.au/understand-assignments) page in the Student
Hub for instructions on how to provide your OLA with the correct link to your presentation.