Speaking from Experience

To start the brief we came up with several different starting points and ideas and then narrowed them down to just 2 ideas to take forward. Although I had 2 ideas to develop, I ended up getting caught up in just one of them but I think that it has worked out well as the other idea was fairly weak and could have turned out to be offensive to some people unless done really carefully.

The idea that I took forward was to help the first year graphic design students save money.

The first thing that came to mind was to work with some kind of piggy bank and redesign it to make it more effective or appealing to the first year students and convince them to save more money and hopefully not spend it until necessary.

I struggled at this point in the brief because I was set on working with the porcelain/ plaster piggy bank design which is already a set design with little room for developing or changing in any major way.

My first ideas were quite unrealistic and no scope for further development so would have turned out to be quite boring overall. I worked with ideas changing the design on the outside of the bank to show messages to convince the audience to not spend and also tried to work with redesigning the stopper in the bottom of piggy banks to have 3 layers which would make it slightly more difficult to get to the money. Aside from being quite uninteresting designs, they also would really answer my brief because they would not convince anyone to save and would not really change how someone would choose to just open the bank and take the money. 

After struggling for a while, I came up with the idea for a money bank that was used for emergencies. I thought I could use the existing emergency accessories that are visible basically everywhere and edit them to be used in a satirical way, exaggerating the importance of the saved spare change. 

I immediately pictured using the emergency fire alarm boxes ("In case of emergency, break glass" kind of thing) and thought about recreating the box to become a money box.

Other examples can be seen on Design Context blog

I also thought about the use of emergency instructional images like the ones used in planes and in some fire evacuation instructions where images are used primarily instead of type so that the instructions can be understood internationally.

Other examples can be seen on Design Context blog