Cheat Chat: A Welcome Party
Conceptual Poster Campaign
Project Description
In SIAT's Design Communication and Collaboration course, my team was tasked with informing first-year students of the dangers of plagiarism by means of a poster campaign. I proposed that the team personalize the campaign to communicate the stories of the members. As the group had primarily Asian heritage as a commonality, with four of five being international students, we decided to campaign for an informative welcoming party for first-year Chinese international students in SIAT. This was done to combat the shared feeling of disconnect amongst Chinese first-year students based on the experience of the team who had just recently moved to Canada.
Role
Team
User Researcher,
Graphic Designer
Yuqingqing (Allison) M., Ivan L.,
Lixin (Lily) L., Ningxuan (Mika) Z.
Timeline
Tools
5 weeks
Photoshop, Illustrator
Ideation Process
As the team initially formed, ideation was first prompted with the question, "Why isn't SFU's Code of Academic Honesty and Good Conduct enough?" After analyzing SFU's academic code, we have narrowed our findings to three primary reasons why it fails to inform students effectively and succinctly of such conduct: unfamiliarity, inaccessibility, and readability. With familiarity, we find that students may be aware of a general academic standard to be followed at the university but unaware of the specifics due to infrequent exposure, typically only through orientations or syllabi. With inaccessibility, we found it to be unclear where students can retrieve this information on campus, while online the website is cluttered with a multitude of links, easily confusing for newcomers. Such tedious processes easily disincentivizes students from actively pursuing SFU's academic policies. Finally, the policies lack readability, being a large wall of text and abstract in explanation. There is also an absence of examples and tutorials on the page which could have aided students further.
We decided to investigate further through the perspective of a current SFU student and a newcomer. We found several commonalities behind the roots of plagiarism such as unawareness of SFU's Code of Academic Honesty and Good Conduct, indifference to such policies, overconfidence, and ignorance. One reason stood out to us in particular, belonging mainly with newcomers and international students: cultural differences.
Brainstorming
After researching a multitude of academic articles and reflecting on our group's primarily Asian heritage and experiences we found stark contrasts in Asian and Western societies. Based on the idea of Eastern collectivism versus Western individualism, we saw a clear connection between why there could be a culture shock for international students. Being a team composed of primarily Chinese international students, we decided to pursue this further, having personal connections, experiences and a curiosity for the adapting of cultures.
We initially decided to create a series of posters with various snippets of guidelines from SFU's academic policy, but found trouble almost immediately. This route would have resulted with the same problems as the SFU website, being a large wall of text, uninspired, and not engaging to new students. With this, we decided on creating a series of posters to promote a short cartoon to address plagiarism in a more interesting an engaging way. We've decided to prototype a variety of poster mockups, some featuring cartoon characters and taking influence from traditional movie poster conventions such as title cards and striking imagery.
Initial Poster Mockups - Short Cartoon Concept
Similar to the previous idea, we found promoting a short film to be lacking, being uninspired and targeting too general of an audience. Despite the use of flags, there is not much to definitively attract international students. The cartoon could be narrated in specific languages or subtitled, but we felt that it would not invoke much of a lasting impact on newcomers. As a result, we took our findings back to our initial ideation stages, reflecting more on our heritage and experiences as international and Asian-Canadian students and what we could personally bring to the project.
A common experience that we shared was a feeling of disconnect and loneliness coming to a new school and country, not having a familiar group of people to belong to. This was particularly a hard experience for most of the members due to the drastic contrast in culture, being used to a more collectivist society as we researched earlier. With this, we decided on going forth with a welcome party-like experience for first year SIAT Chinese international students, to bring a sense of familiarity with these students while integrating an informative workshop aimed towards combatting plagiarism. Targeting our event to SIAT Chinese international students, we wanted to increase a sense of community within this demographic which in turn follows common SIAT practices, relying heavily on group projects and networking amongst students.
Initial Poster Mockups - Welcome Party Concept
The team began developing concepts by creating lower-fidelity sketches to communicate our early ideations for hierarchy and placement in a timely yet disposable manner. Subsequently, the typeface and color palette of my drafts found itself to be the most appealing to my teammates. The choice of a legible san-serif typeface, paired with vibrant and harmonious colours were used to communicate the poster in the least intrusive way. Using a combination of Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator, I helped lead my team in formulating the poster campaign, making sure a consistent graphic style was consistent amongst each poster.
We presented our ideas as a proposal to the course instructor, teaching assistant, and various special guests from SFU's design department. The poster campaign turned out fairly well, earning the team an A- in an otherwise difficult course. We received praise for our attention to bridging culture gaps and building community in SIAT, while also having strong visuals.
Reflection
Overall, this project was a great experience in understanding our target demographic and figuring out how narrowing down an audience can help us focus and articulate our message better. The group truly got into the mindset of our audience, drawing parallels from personal experience, which allowed us to deliver a truly genuine project. Furthermore, the team's roles were split in such a way that allowed for members to work towards their strengths while others covering for weaknesses. An example of this is how a member with weaker design skills aided the member in charge of designing the presentation slides by providing details of the campaign and giving input for what areas to better emphasize. For future consideration, it would help to explicitly discuss the status of our project and what concepts we want to go forward with. Since we switched our project concept a number of times, there were a few instances where members would deliver mockups for concepts that the majority of the team had already decided against.