Experiential Information Design

Due to COVID-19, this week I relocated to Christchurch for the lockdown period. We went onto mid-semester break immediately. This time was really stressful and chaotic initially, so I didn't get a whole lot done. However when I got back to doing work from home, I began crafting the front cover to the box. My aim with this was not only to make it appealing, but easily readible. Finding the appropriate design which was both engaging but systematic was actually a lot harder than I anticipated. At this point, I decided to gain some further user testing on the design from Flynn It was then evident from his feedback that I needed to explore the front cover further:  Finally settling on the bottom design.

This week I opted to change the sizing of my box to make it something which would be more effective and allow me to break up the text to ensure it wasn't having the same information overload effect of the old packaging. I then reconsulted my medical packaging research to see if there were additional tweaks that could be made before adding in my refined languaging to my new design.  When adding in the new languaging, I also made a few minor tweaks, such as altering the sub-headings to be a serif font, again creating bit of variance between the text for the design. At this point I feel it is looking a lot more successful. I think the next steps will be addressing the cover to make it more appealing to festival-goers and relanguaging that to make it more understandable. 

This week we created initial prototypes and user tested these to see their effectiveness. There were still a lot of areas to improve on, but I felt that this gave me a good starting point. It was recommended that I look into adjusting the languaging used within the packaging to appeal more to a younger demographic. It's meant to be a fun thing, but the packagings languaging makes it sound so serious. It was suggested I explore the languaging that festivals use in order to determine how I should reword it. I looked into both this and how drug testing stations work too.  And after a lot of refinement this was what I altered it too: At each of the lanuaging development stages I conducted user testing. I tried both a serious and fun approach to see which one resonated with my user more. I have attached their interviews below

I watched this video which explained the necessity of  not using a hardline approach to the war on drugs as it won't work. Drugs are going to be consumed, but in situations where education was used as an approach it was a lot more successful at reducing drug consumption.  Drugs. 1971 - Nixon started a war on drugs mass incarceration, violence,   fuelled powerful cartels no drugs = no problems eradicating drug supply   if you reduce the supply without reducing demand, the cost will go up. Drugs will be consumed no matter the cost the effect is to encourage more production which in turn creates more supply made meth production more professional and more potent.   the us government has a 1% effectiveness in stopping drugs from entering

This week we began class by pinning up all of the examples that we had collected and mapping them on the data visualisation spectrum. It was really interesting to see the discussions that arose over where examples should be placed and why. We then got into groups, in which we chose one persons medical packaging to divide and classify which information we deemed to be the most important and necessary and which information it was possible to omit. This was an interesting process as we had to be really critical thinkers and understand who any particular set of info might be applicable to.  We were then encouraged to go home and try this on our own medical packaging. I personally found this extremely useful as a lot of the text that was on my initial packaging was extremely irrelevant and unnecessary. Following this,  it was time to create an initial prototype, which could be user tested in class next week. 

I kept all of my visual inspiration as boards on pinterest: Medical Packaging Research :  https://pin.it/6x3LzNp Infographics/Data Visualisation Research:  https://pin.it/36eeRnJ