How To... Feel at Home in a New City

Our group (group 3) started the project by sitting down and creating a list of ideas for starting points of this project. We made sure that everyone got a chance to say their ideas and we tried to focus specifically on just the starting points of ideas. By not trying to develop them at all in the early stages, we could make sure that we came up with as many ideas as possible. This was useful in later stages as there were lots of ideas which we could pick the best parts from and create one idea that incorporated them all.



After we had enough starting points, we looked through everything that we had and decided on the best ideas or parts of ideas which led us to the one which we developed into a resolution.
The main idea that we chose to develop was the idea of bringing home to the city itself.
We decided that a good way of doing this was incorporating parts of home into a photo of the city, and so we experimented with this idea. A photo was taken at the Millennium Square and then some of us experimented with putting imagery into the photo, mixing home and the city together.



Meanwhile, we had also decided on the idea of creating a product for students who were new to the city. We focussed on students because we are students and can relate more to them as an audience. We also thought that this would make it much better to distribute our resolution, as the student audience have very obvious and specific destinations of travel.
The product would be a product of support for students who were new to the city, so it would have to be some kind of product that made the student feel like they were at home.
This is when we came up with the idea of a 'Smell in a box'. So the product would be a free 'smell in a box', available from student unions and accommodation or available to order online. Quite simply, it is a product for students who are new to the city and are feeling homesick. When the box is opened, the smell comes out and produces the same smell as the students real home (wherever they lived before they moved to university), thus making it feel like they were at home and helping with the feeling of homesick.

We chose to split the resolution into 3 parts; A poster advertising the 'home to the city' idea, a poster advertising the product itself and a prototype of the product packaging.
Now that we had the tasks set out, we decided to split the group into 3 teams of 2, with each team working on a task. This was split into illustration, type and creating the prototype box. I was on the illustration pair, and we created drawings of homely images to put over the photo taken at Millennium Square. These drawings included a sofa, a lampshade and a washing line. We thought that each of these images really expressed a homely atmosphere and worked well in what we were trying to convey.



The type pair worked on the style, size and positioning of the type as well as the content of what would be written. It is important to note that although these pairs worked independantly of the group, we did make sure that everyone knew what was happening all the time and the final decisions and changes to the resolution were made as a whole group. We tried to choose a style that was easy to understand and read but still interesting, and I think this worked really well. As well as deciding the conent and the style of the type, this pair also focussed on creating a logo along with the box prototype pair.

The box prototype pair worked on creating a box for the product 'smell in a box'. We wanted the product packaging to have a homely feel just like the product itself, and after some idea generation we settled on having a brown paper parcel packaging. This is because it gives the product a feeling of being sent from home, again adding on to the homely feel and opposing the feel of homesickness. Going with the parcel feel, the packaging is tied with a piece of string and has a brown card address tag. The address tag simply has the product logo to make sure that people understand that it is the right product. I think that this effect for the packaging worked really well, and gave the exact style of box that we were looking for.



The final ideas that we came up with were based on the posters and the logo. We decided that a border around the image would help break the poster up between the words and the image to make it more obvious about what was being advertised. We went with an idea of using ripped brown paper like that on the box as a rough border which could be layered wit the text about what the product is and where to get it. This was a great choice, as the words stood out on the brown paper and it helped with the anti-homesick vibe. We also decided on the actual name of the product, which is called "Home in a box". We went with 'home' instead of 'smell' because the latter word doesnt always hold the positive connotations that home does. The logo, too, was based around this name. It simply shows the word 'Home' in a simple and elegant typeface with a single line following over the top in the shape of a roof. This shows 'Home in a box' in an obvious way that is quite easy to understand.



Overall, the project worked really well and our group worked very well together.