Early Challenges

When presented with this brief, everyone had an opportunity to think on it for a week before team assignments were given. My initial thought was that the brief asked a lot of us within a short time period. That time period is further shortened by scheduling conflicts, team members' holiday plans, as well the issue of actually agreeing on our project "thing."

After feeling that two weeks have slipped by with very little movement from the blue team, three of the members met last week and came up with some solutions that challenged the brief and would also challenge our team members.

The team has never been able to meet in full, and our closest to that was on 21 March.

Today, four members of the team met to discuss last week's meeting with two others who were unable to attend. There were no formal decisions made, however my suggestion was that if we are to run this like a business, we need to start taking on business hours. Our infrequent and frankly quite short meetings are not assisting us in completing our mission.

Tomorrow, Valentina will be writing about the project ideas up until further meetings. Those meetings are planned for Wednesday and Thursday, at which point, by Friday we should be taking action on something. Anything. The "thing" must be done...

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FAST FOOD NATION

"On any day in the United States about one quarter of the adult population visits a fast food restaurant"
"A fast food kitchen is merely the final stage in a vast and highly complex system of mass production. Foods that may look familiar have in fact been completely reformulated. What we eat has changed more in the last forty years than in the previous forty thousand".
"The US average adult consumption of fast food is 3 hamburguers and 4 french fries dishes a week".
"In 1970 Americans spend about 6 million on fast food. In 2001, they spent more than 110 million"
"Every day in the US roughly 200,000 people are sickened by a foodborne disease, 900 are hospitalized and fourteen die. According to the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than a quarter of the American population suffers a bout of food poisoning each year. Most of these cases are never reported to the authorities or properly diagnosed...there is a strong evidence not only the that the incidence of food-related illness has risen in the past few decades but also that the lasting health consequences of such illnesses are far more serious than was previously believed."

FAST FOOD NATION - What the All-American Meal is doing to the world (Eric Schlosser)

Project 6 Brief

Introduction

This project invites you to engage directly with the marketplace, bypassing or seducing its gatekeepers, to achieve a profitable intervention in the creative economy.

Brief

Despite the smell of fear induced by recession and fears of recession, we live in a culture with an appetite for novelty. This project invites your team to conceive, create, promote and sell a completely new product or service. There are no restrictions on the nature of the offer itself, beyond the need to adhere to the law of the land (nothing, for example, dangerous, fraudulent, or copyright infringing). Your product may be something tangible, it may be a service or event, or a virtual product. But whatever your product is, it must represent both innovation and application skills that allow it to connect with a commercial framework.

*As well as naming and branding your own group’s product or service, you should collectively decide on a name for this project, and use that name to brand the exhibition in which your outcomes are shown.

Presentation

All teams will be required to develop their products into physical or virtual artefacts. Your journey to the market place will be captured and criticized in a reflective journal (to be produced by each member of the team). The resulting artefacts, profit and loss balance sheet and supporting research will be presented at an exhibition to be held in the MADS studio during the week of 20 April. Feedback from tutors and peers will be delivered on the afternoon of Monday 20 April and the evening of Wednesday 22 April. The private view will take place on the evening of Monday 20 April.

This project will require a sophisticated team management strategy. Your tasks will, at the very least, include market research, pitching, negotiating, PR, print and web design, accounting, catering, building and breakdown of the exhibition.

Any profits generated by the teams during this project will become part of the funds available for the MADS Degree Show in December 2009.

Criteria

The project will be assessed against the following criteria:

* Your ability to identify a specific opportunity and to develop an original product to fill this gap in the market

* Your ability to manage, delegate, share, take responsibility, plan and deliver the product to the marketplace

* The level of risk taking you display

* Your ability to move beyond the predictable

* Your ability to manage the gatekeepers

* Your ability to work constructively as a group

* The quality and originality of your solution, and the degree to which you give it dimension as an iterated artefact

* Your ability to sell yourselves and the radical potential of your concept to others in the supply chain and retail sector who are potentially less attracted to risk

* The communicative qualities of your artefact and your exhibition

* Your ability to generate revenue while still taking imaginative risks