Students design a creative solution for university clients as part of five week module

Students from the Digital Design programme have completed a five week-module which involved working on a live brief with various university stakeholders.

The Design For Change module asks students to work together with a university client on a live brief, which focuses on coming up with a creative solution to address a challenge that the client is facing.

Students were given the opportunity to work with stakeholders such as the Careers Service, GCU Students’ Association, Sir Alex Ferguson Library and the Strategy & Planning team.

Ruaraidh Roberts, Ellie Janes and Megan Ryce were assigned to work with Strategy & Planning where they had the task of re-branding the Student Experience Survey.

The Student Experience Survey is an annual survey aimed at Undergraduate students to give them the chance to provide feedback on their course experience.

Using their creative expertise, the students were challenged to find a way to make the survey stand out and increase overall participation.

The module began on the first day of Trimester A, meaning that students had little time to settle into life at university. Ellie explained: “It’s all pretty fast-paced to be honest, which I think was the whole point of the assignment. It’s designed to give you a taste of what industry is probably like.

Pretty much from the get-go, it was like “Right, here's your brief, here's your client. You're meeting them in an hour.” With that, we had all the information we needed to get started after that first meeting.”

Once the main points of the brief were discovered, the students knew they didn’t have time to wait before getting started.

“We essentially just highlighted the key points of the brief, what was expected of us, and then it was up to us to arrange the meeting via email.” Megan explained.

“It helps as well that you've got teammates there to bounce off of. You feel like can't let your team member down, so it gave us that momentum to realise that we had to rely on each other to get the work done.”

Understanding the challenge of the brief, the team realised that the branding would need to be as engaging as possible.

Megan said: “At first we all thought that the topic of the Student Experience Survey wasn’t particularly inspiring or fun. It did give us time to think “How can we make this fun?” which became our main goal. I think it was also quite clear from the start that the problem was that there wasn't enough participation in the survey, so it was quite clear what the issue was.

From there, we knew the problem was how to solve that in an engaging way. We also talked about the fact that it was difficult for us to remember when we did the survey, because there's so many surveys. We had to work out what could set this survey apart from everything else.”

Despite the challenging brief, the students enjoyed getting to work alongside their assigned client. Ruaridh said: “

“They were really pleasant. I think it was a nice combination of quite formal, and I would say it felt pretty accurate to what an initial client meeting feels like. It felt very normal, which was really nice. I think they also felt the same way as us, because when we went in, they were like “Oh, we're not fully set up yet, we're only just back.”

“It was very much fast-paced, even for them, they weren't quite sure on the timeline of everything but I think it all worked out really well.”

For the team, it was clear that the correct approach would involve clear communication and strong collaborative working. Ellie explained: “I was pretty proud of what we managed to pull out of the bag in four weeks, it was pretty cool. A fully-fledged concept that had meaning behind it, and it was simple but it was also quite thought-provoking.

What worked with our team was that we were all really honest with each other, it was all very brutally honest but in a constructive way. There was a lot of good communication between the three of us, and it worked out pretty solid.”

Ruaridh added: “We definitely went away and made stuff but we didn't separate out the deliverables that much, to be honest. The way that we decided the plan of attack was, we came up with an overall concept together and then we went away and produced different posters. A few days later, we brought them all back together and I think we decided to start by making posters to come up with some content that we could then shift out across the other channels. It felt quite blended, as opposed to regimented.”

To make the collaboration easier, the group used a platform called Figma which allowed them to easily share and edit files. Ellie explained: “We also used Figma as a shared place to make all the project files and sketches, because it's a really good platform for just being able to comment and edit the file together. Being able to have that live collaborative space just meant that we could work together more easily, because obviously we all have lives that are separate. We were really committed to it; it was a good team effort.”

On the final week of the module, each student group got the chance to present their final work to their client, other stakeholders and fellow classmates. Ellie, Megan and Ruaridh were the first group to present. Megan explained: “Looking back, I would say that we should have tried to practice the presentation! We're just so passionate about what we're talking about and we just ended up going over time but I think that's the only kind of criticism I would have with it.

Other than that, we were great communicators. I think that's always key to every group project, is just having clear and concise communication, which we weren't afraid of.”

Ruaridh added: “Yeah, we loved it. It was so simple, but there was something unique about it that we were proud of. You’re not going in with the intention that it might get used or it might not, but they said that they really liked it and would be interested to see if it helped them build retention.”

By Rachael McAlonan

Got a SCEBE or GSBS story? Email me at Rachael.McAlonan@gcu.ac.uk or connect with me on social media here