Study Task 05 - Practice Based Research Workshop - OUGD401

This session was for a greater exploration of the techniques, process and essentially the journey needed to make a successful argument. 

To fully understand your hypothesis and what you are trying to communicate, you must first decode you're chosen area of research and identify ways in which they are executed in order to make full sense of what you are communicating/designing.

Technique, Content and Communication.
As technology is the widely regarded as the pinnacle of consumerist behaviour, looking into how the products are branded, advertised and perceived in order to create such a movement in today's society will give me a healthy insight on how to execute my practical work. Using Apple as a main focal point, with their increasingly minimal and simplistic strategy, which uses the product from an industrial design standpoint to create desire and want for the product in question. Take the newly released Apple Watch for example, it uses a rather cleverly thought strategy which takes advantage of status and wealth by having a 'base' model for under £400 and another using materials such as gold with a price tag of over £10000 with the exact same internals. In other words, letting the 'product speak for itself' which is closely reflected in the advertising of the said product, which will be documented in a later post.

Research, Analysis, Exploration, Evaluation and Testing
As previously stated, researching into past and present design strategies within technology and how they have evolved will give me a good idea of how to best illustrate my chosen hypothesis. Explore the different theories of which design is interacting with the consumer and the behaviour in which it provokes. Well proven ideas such as semiotics and the less known psychological theories of graphic design. By not just limiting myself to one design strategy, it would be useful for me to look at as many companies as i possibly can and compare how they choose to represent their brand. Throughout my own design process, my practical work will be presented in a critique in order to gather relevant information on what I could improve, change and maintain the same. All of these processes will help me gain a better understanding of how technology is branded and why it is branded in such a way to attract all kinds of demographics.

Proposal
My practical body of work will be heavily based around the Apple Watch and what it represents. The question I will be answering through my design is, 'How does a brand effect the choices of a consumerist society?'. By analysing current strategies used by apple will give me a good grasp of how they want their products to be portrayed, and what it is that makes people want to purchase something they desire, through almost manipulation of the consumer purely by the branding and advertising strategies Apple uses. By using strong links to my written work I will use my findings from within the essay to continuously back up my practical work, not letting it better too much from the original hypothesis will allow me to look more in-dpeth of the problems that arose within my text.