Findings and Insights

What We Expected

Within each category, we wanted to look for patterns among the students' submissions. Since each student selected their items depending on the categories we provide, we anticipated finding similarities. For instance, we expected that students will select their laptops for the "most expensive" category.

However, because everyone has their own personal interests and traits, there will be differences between most of the items as well. This will further help us to get a sense of students' personalities, which might be reflected in the items they carry in their bags. In addition, we look forward to discovering more diverse and new perspectives of students by looking at controversial or different styles of objects in the same category.

Design Decision

The design process was the longest and most difficult phase of this project. Our discussions were mostly about deciding on a format, how to lay out the images in the publication, and what our visual approach was going to be. In the end, we aimed to create an easy-looking publication, focusing on the images we took, as well as creating a more fun and dynamic layout with the colours and image placement. To make the publication interesting, we made each spread different from each other, but still contained similarities to create continuity throughout the publication.

Challenges

The simplicity of our project didn’t stop us from encountering issues. As group mates, we functioned well together. However, we had to do each task one at a time to be able to start on another one. This caused us to have to wait for each other to finish our respective parts. This was especially noticed during our photographing process where we spent almost two weeks finishing it. Time management was our main issue, so we solved this problem by asking one another for help if one of us had spare time. We made sure to focus on this project together!

Feedback

We received several feedback and shared opinions from various lecturers and peers. The most interesting feedback we got was different perspectives on what a “good-looking” layout looks like. Therefore, our group tried to satisfy each person’s opinion comprehensively. At the same time, we continued to modify and develop our layouts through discussions within our group. In the end, all the feedback was taken into consideration when we adjusted the layouts. Not only the layouts but also the choice of paper, format, fonts, and visual appearance.

Achievement

This project made us learn that each individual has a very different way of thinking about what object is considered fitting for each category, which can be seen in chapter three. We were able to see a lot of new perspectives as certain objects were chosen for a category, as well as its opposite one, e.g. same object for the “most dangerous” and the “least harmful”. As time went on, we also learned how to manage the workload as we communicated with each other to complete the tasks within a specific timeframe.