Even so, I don't necessarily see the point in wasting time back tracking over the development of the idea to find more research as it won't necessarily make a difference to what I end up with so I figured I may as well spend my time researching things that will be more beneficial in terms of moving my idea and this brief along.
The development of the idea was as follows (from the little notes and what not I worked on in my sketchbook, and the research I did whilst writing stuff down):
Just a quick image to show the development in my sketchbook:
Considering the product ideas I have to work with, and the ones I narrowed them down to to then decide which I think would be the best to take forward, my thinking was a long the lines of
- I want to produce a product that isn't temporary, that someone would just throw away without a second thought.
- I want it to be collectable, if the person consuming it wishes to collect them
- Not just something that may only be seen once or twice then never again.
- The water idea is great because dirty water is a massive problem within developing countries, although because it is a massive problem, ideas really close to this one has been done. The one I can think of on the top of my head is from when I was at Leeds Fest, and they claimed that for every bottle of the water that was being sold there, something like 50p was donated to a water charity. A great idea I must say.
- Also, to do buy a bottle of water and give clean water would work, but a bottle of water wouldn't necessarily fulfil the top few points I have made.
- Art materials is good in order to push the kids to be more creative, but I don't really think this would be solving a problem as such.
- Food seeds, again this has been done a lot, although I do think it would work. But the majority of people in the UK don't buy seeds to grow themselves. Some do, but I think the target audience for this would be rather restricted to maybe the extents of a target audience this type of idea could reach out to.
- That leaves clothes. I could narrow this down to just one type of clothes - t shirts, pants, socks, shorts, hats, etc.
- Everyone needs clothes no matter where in the world you are for a number of reasons, so I think this could be an interesting route to go down, as I could appeal to a wide range of target audience with this.
Concentrate on the buy one give one scheme
- Clothes are always being donated to developing countries
I did a bit of research in relation to this to see what sort of sets ups exist that already try to tackle the clothes problem.
<research of clothes donation things here>
- could 'team up' with a charity that does this, then set it up so that when you donate your old clothes you then receive a free t shirt - I'm not sure this will work as charities are solely about having people give to them, without really getting anything in return so it would most probably just have their noses turned up at the thought.
- buy a t shirt, give a t shirt to a child in need - this would not only give the person being involved with the buy one, give one scheme a lot of the points I raised above, but it would also give the children new clothes, not just old ones that people who decide to donate don't want anymore.
- just go along the lines of donating old clothes to a charity that passes it on - sort of like, set up a movement where people donate their old clothes and get a free t shirt in return, and then this movement goes on to donate the clothes either itself, or passes them on to an existing charity that does so.
- if I do donating - the last 2 points, I could design the packaging for the t shirt that would be received
After debating about this for quite a while, deciding wether to go down the donating route, or stick to giving new clothes for new clothes bought, I put together a good and bad spider diagram for each to try and help me decide:
Whilst I was coming up with points for the mind maps, I had a little idea spark where I could maybe combine two of the 'giving' products. Like, say you buy a t shirt, and then you give a developing country something they need, such as a mosquito net or what ever.
I think this idea could work a lot better than having to compromise either doing something that would benefit the country but wouldn't be a strong enough product for the consumer to buy (in my opinion), or to compromise actually giving something useful for a stronger product.
I do think that the clothes idea is a good one because as I said earlier, everyone anywhere in the world needs clothes. Even so, I still feel a little iffy about the whole thing as though it's not necessarily as strong of a movement as it could be.
Then I came up with the idea to maybe
- buy 1 t shirt, give a mosquito net
- buy 5 t shirts, give... (something useful that's a little more expensive)
- buy 10 t shirts, give...
I think this idea works a lot stronger than the previous to give them new t shirts as it will provide them with something a lot more useful that could possibly help a whole family, rather than one individual child, so it will have a bigger impact to the developing country as a whole.
I started thinking back to the whole water problem that there is in developing countries, and decided to do some more research into this
<research into water problems>
While I was doing my research, I was talking to a friend of mine and I mentioned what I was doing, and it turned out that studying this sort of thing was something that he covered while he was at college last year, and provided with me to a link to 'Water Purification Tablets', where if you put one tablet into a litre of water and leave it for 30 minutes, then it purifies the water and makes it safer to drink. He said, and I quote,
"dirty water is one of the biggest killers and one of the easiest to sort out." - Matthew Parker.
By him just saying that made the decision to do the product that will be received by the developing country family would be clean water.
Buy a t shirt, give XX litres of clean water to a family in a developing country.
For now, when I explain my idea I will say 50 litres, but I will research more into this another time.
Again, I think this is a stronger idea to do instead of buying a bottle of water to then give the family clean water as by doing t shirts, it provides a longer lasting product that can be worn when ever the consumer chooses, and they can wear it with pride, knowing that by purchasing that one this will have made such a difference somewhere else in the world. It can be collected, and can be seen by many others around the person wearing it.
Matthew also provided me with this diagram,
He explained how it's the formula of the chemical that they use to disinfect water, the Cl bits are chlorine, they sorta break off and bleach the water. I will remember this diagram whilst progressing through this brief.
Also, when XX total of t shirts are sold, then a clean water pump will be installed into a community that needs it the most.
I thought a way of expanding the idea to be more than just basically giving the water purification tablets, I could maybe set a goal of selling how ever many number of t shirts which then will mean a clean water pump will be installed into a community somewhere that needs it the most. This could be like a recurring goal, so say it was 100, then for every 100 sold, this happens. I need to research into sort of like how much it costs to build these, and other things such as what country is this problem the worst and so on.
Visuals
Although these are not any visuals that I will be using for the brief, when I got into bed after coming up with the idea and writing out my rationale (link to this is at the bottom of this post), I literally couldn't sleep as I was still thinking about the idea and possible ways to tackle it. I ended up bringing my notebook and pen into bed with me and start to just sketch down some stuff that was going through my head at the time for what I could possibly do.
Even though I wont necessarily use these, I can still look back to see like the initial idea to the brief sort of thing.
I also started to try and come up with possible names for the movement, as this will be my starting point for where I will now take this brief. I want to have something that is obvious once you realise what it stands for, but maybe not when you first read it. When I was going this I tried combining different words together to make just one word to represent it. What I came up with was:
- WATEE
- TEER
- WATOP
- CLTEE
- WATEAN
- CLOTTER
- PURITEE
- ODAT
For the Wednesdays studio workshop to follow I was required to write out my rationale for the brief, this can be seen by clicking here.
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