As a group we struggled initially to come up with any ideas we thought to be relevant or that we all agreed on. We brainstormed the main words and ideas associated with 10,000 steps. Some of these were
- Health
- Lifestyle
- Exercise
- Walking
- Activity
- Motivation
- Heart
- Pedometer
- Challenge
- Daily
- Routine
I felt that the 10,000 steps subject was quite limiting in the fact it has to revolve around this theory of walking 10,000 steps in a day improved health. The term 10,000 steps couldn't really be related to another subject which I felt inhibited creativity on the possibilities as a group we could work with.
After doing some research on the existing websites and resources based around the 10,000 steps we found that most of the responses were relatively generic. They all used a pretty safe approach to try to encourage people to walk more every day, as a group we decided that if we took a much harder approach we could make the subject more interesting in terms of engaging with the target audience. A lot of the websites we looked at were pretty bland and boring, so we felt by creating something new and unique it would generate a better response.
As a group we decided that it might be a good idea to experiment with the other end of the scale and try to create some kind of propaganda material to effectively force people to walk 10,000 steps a day, in the style of old proper gander posters you would see in Russia or Germany. The idea would be to 'infect' the nation with a new set of laws enforcing people to walk 10,000 steps a day. Essentially the laws would spread like a virus through a broad range of distribution methods.
We had a group crit with Amber and Simon who gave us some ideas to gives us a chance to rethink our initial idea of a proper gander style project. We both felt that doing the project in this style wouldn't necessarily help promote it and we wouldn't have been able to record our outcome very effectively. We started to reconsider our ideas and we came up with instead of forcing people to walk 10,000 steps a day we wanted to actively encourage people. We felt the existing methods we had seen in our initial research we relatively bland and didn't work particularly well, so we decided as a concept that instead of just encouraging people we tie it in with something else so the focus isn't just on the 10,000 steps. For example we created a route that took roughly 10,000 steps through leeds going past points of interest.
After the crit some of our new ideas included
1 - A treasure hunt around Leeds
2 - A route through Leeds which covered the average distance encouraging people to walk their 10000 steps.
3 - Using the Otley run route to attract students attention and create an association with walking and something they already know and love.
4 - Infographic-based posters, publication or handout for students.
5 - An information pack informing students about the benefits of walking 10000 steps.
We planned to get a pedometer to mesure to amount of steps we did on a daily basis because we felt it was it important that we knew what sort of thing we were working with, an idea that we talked about was wearing a pedometer out at a club or a night out to see how many steps you would generally make. I felt that dancing in a club would count up a lot of steps and thought that this could be a possibility we could explore.
We also looked at the Otley run which is a well known pub crawl around leeds, coupling out project with something like this would instantly gain some initial interest in the cause. We felt this was an effective way to target students around Leeds and gain some attention by having the route running along side the run. The problem we found by using the Otley run was that it didn't quite match the intended 5 or so miles it took to achieve 10,000 steps, and the fact that we were trying to promote a healthy lifestyle and it was pretty counter intuitive to suggest going out and getting fucked was a good way to improve a healthy lifestyle.
We were asked to create a brief that was specifically tailored to our ideas which gave us a better understanding of what we wanted to get out of the project.
Eventually we decided on a light hearted approach to target students around Leeds and encourage them to do some more daily exercise, we wanted to make walking 10,00 steps effortless so in our research we looked at different daily activities that could potentially make up the 10,000 steps. through our research we came to the conclusion that walking 10,000 steps in a day was that much and we probably walked something close to that in a day anyway, the fact was though we needed to raise awareness of it.
When producing our project which included posters, a information pack and social network groups and pages. We allocated everyone in the group a job to produce a poster and a page in the information pack. The subjects for the posters were
- Psychological Health
- Physical Health
- Money
- Distances
- Exploring You City
- Different Routes to Consider
I got the Psychological health poster to create, we had discussed producing info graphics for each poster which was the only obvious option but nothing had been set colour or style wise. I produced the first poster and everyone seemed to be happy with it so all the other followed the same style and agreed on colour scheme. When researching the psychological effects of walking I was surprised to find the effects walking has had on some peoples lives. I read stories about people suffering from severe depression or anxiety who liked to walk 30 minutes a day to help them relax. To everyone else though you find walking is a great way to think about things and clear your head. I felt these points were very relevant when putting together the text side of my poster.
For the infographic image I had a few ideas in my head that I experimented with more on paper, I started by looking at some existing inforgraphics, I decided I wanted to display a head and have the points coming from it if possible from the corresponding area of the brain that is effected.
This last inforgraphic was the basis on my design, I wanted to go with something really simple yet informative and still make it look interesting.
This was the final poster we as a group decided on the colour scheme was decided just by group vote, I personally preferred the green version but all the other infographics and booklets were being designed to the same colours and we felt the blue and orangey colour worked best on the stock we were using. We had a limit on the colours we were allowed to use which included 2 and the colour of the stock.
A booklet was designed and this included 8 different locations that would be set out on a map which covered the distance of roughly 10,000 steps, about 5 miles. the locations we picked were -
The Dry Dock
Hyde Park
Millenium Square
The Corn Exchange
Leeds Market
The Town Hall
The Canal
Leeds Trinity Shopping Centre
The route would help encourage people to walk a relatively short distance and at the same time discover parts of Leeds that are points of interest.
All the posters everyone in the group created were also downsized and used in the lanyard booklet we produced thats use was to assist people around the city.
The last page is a set of stickers we created for people to walk around leeds and stick them on land marks where they had been so we would be able to determine if the route was working and if people were taking an interest.
To determine if initially our project was a success we had set up a Twitter and Facebook page which we were monitoring for activity, we would post information about routs and facts about walking on the page to try and gain some interest.
I felt as a group we worked well, we all knew what we had to do and got on with it, our final outcomes for the posters we made looked good together and corresponded well with what we were communicating.
