UNIKA- First response to the new brief (I)

The brief:

We brainstormed the topic and many concerns came out for all of us. However, the main ones were:

1.) Unemployment
- Specifically graduate unemployment, the expectation that we will get a design-related job straight after graduating and how this may not be the case.
- Having to compete for employment
- What are the main causes? How do we plan to overcome it?

2.) Climate Change
- Consequences of climate change on a social and environmental level
- What causes it? Why is it controversial for some people?
- What can we do about it?

3.) Consumerism
- Concerns about our current materialistic culture.
- Why can this be a bad thing? - Reliance on material objects for happiness
- The idea of 'retail therapy' or 'the more things I have, the happier I will be'

With three main ideas, we decided to go a bit further with them to choose the one we are more concerned about.

Narrowing it down, we chose unemployment because it is an issue that could potentially affect not only to everyone in our group but also to all of those currently studying their degree now. Therefore, we decided to focus on graduate unemployment and looked at the problems that students could encounter and not only focused on our field but on all degrees and specializations.

As for starting point for the research, several graduates, both successful and unsuccessful in finding employment and in the design and non-design fields, were interviewed. Many of them found very difficult to find a job and most of them are not in their desired one.

The reason why we used interviews was because that could get us closer to the issue and have information from the first sources.

One example of the interviews with one of the graduates:

Name: male (the name is not shown to protect the interviewed identity)

Occupation: Employed

University: Bournemouth

Subject: Advertising and Communications

Age: 22

Graduated: 2011

•How long did it take until you found a job?   About 1 year

•How many jobs did you apply for?   Over 100

•What did you have to do when you applied?

For a lot of jobs such as Vodafone, I had to take a Maths test which was unrelated to the job. It was very it and even A-Level Maths students didn’t know most of the answers which made it impossible to pass. How can they hire someone who is good at Maths but not marketing?

•Are you happy with you job?

Not really. It’s not exactly what I wanted to do but they wanted me straight away. It’s a tough industry and they could have replace me.

•Do you feel equal to your co-workers?

No, they look at me like a boy and blame everything on me because I am young. They cannot accept that they have made mistakes. It’s easy to blame they young.

Here there are other comments from people interviewed, we also asked for advice so we could have some ideas for the solutions.

Other part of our research lead us to know statistics about unemployment rates of graduates in different fields:

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/dont-let-the-economy-pick-your-major-for-you/250992/

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/01/dont-let-the-economy-pick-your-major-for-you/250992/

Curiously we found out that our degree has one of the highest unemployment rate and is one of the lowest paid.

We also found out that:
 

More than one in three recent graduates are employed in a lower skilled job compared to one in four in 2001.

Recent graduates are more likely to work in a lower skilled job than ten years ago, according to the latest figures out today.

Medicine and science graduates had the highest median earnings at £21.29 per hour and those with an arts degree had the lowest median earnings at £12.06 - almost 21% lower than the average for all graduates.

A graduate aged 21 has the same chance of being unemployed as a 16-year-old school leaver with one GCSE.

Job's market is changing - with more demand for graduates and skilled workers.

The weak economy might have inspired more students to start up their own businesses - with a steady upward entrepreneurial trend in self-employment. This is now approaching 5% of university leavers - up from 3% in the middle of the last decade.

These facts gave us some ideas and lead us to do this useful mind-map with the information we needed to visualize in the final piece.

 

Our inspiration came after seeing different cacartoonists' works such Mike Luckovich, Tome Toles or Rob Rogers among other cartoonists...

Credit: Mike Luckovich
http://misterlax.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/a-smart-move-in-bad-times/

Credit: Source: Rob Rogers, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 2003
http://donaldearlcollins.com/2010/06/14/not-finding-work/

Credit: Tom Toles

                                   http://www.tradersnarrative.com/surprise-us-2980.html

The style that we decided to work with was cartoons because they are easy to understand by everyone as people can relate it, being a bit comical makes it even more catchy and what is more, this way it does not take attention away from the message.

Our aim is to make people more aware of the high rate of unemployment (which is 7.8 in September according to the National statistics). Also get the graduates to stand at.

This video from the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) gave us some ideas of how to show the problem and possible solution in an attractive way.

RSA Animate: Dan Pink
http://www.cognitivemedia.co.uk/digital/rsa-animate-dan-pink-drive.html

This is a full panoramic view of one example of the RSA Animate (made by Cognitive Media).

What the company Cognitive Media does here, gave us the idea of doing not only the print for the project but also a video animation where showing the problem plus the solution in a different form, always using our own style of drawing.

First sketches of what we think of the problem:

Building very hard a future but not getting anywhere.

What after graduating?

The hope of a future of success.

Trying to get something... anything!

IDEAS FOR FINAL OUTCOME

These two last examples show with more detail what we would like to explain at the end.

We could collect together all of the quotes from the interviews that we have done and separate them into three categories:

1. People about to graduate soon or recently graduated from university.

2. Unemployed or in a temporary job / job they are not happy with.

3.Employed and in a job they are happy with for the present.

Find a visual metaphor that would 'fit' with these categories. For example: 
 

 If we chose to male an image like this:

The 'island' in the background could represent the security of being in full time education, blank boxes could contain quotes about our concerns for the future. Use quotes from the first category.

The 'water' in the middle could represent the gap some of us could experience between graduation and employment. The blank boxes would describe in detail people's personal experiences with unemployment / unsatisfactory jobs. Use quotes from the second category.

The 'island' in the foreground would represent the security of finally being in a position of permanent employment. This part would be the section of the poster where viewers could read in detail the experiences of the people who have 'made it' in their area. They would read the advice and experiences of the quotes in this part of the poster and create their own solutions. Use quotes from employed graduates.

If we did this the actual graphic would have room for more illustrations of individual graduates and their quotes.





 Another possible way of showing this could be:

 The left 'cliff' could represent people in the first category (starting out on their journey into the 'real world'). The illustrations in this half could have quotes from the interviews we have taken from other recent / soon to be graduates.

The middle section - showing quotes from unemployed graduates in speech bubbles as they 'cross the bridge' - use quotes that mention obstacles, problems along the way, anxieties, frustrations, advice from people who have been through this.

We could also add the the middle section - show people struggling to 'hang on' - use quotes from people who have been discouraged.

Also show the journey made by people who have had a relatively easy time finding employment - they could be shown in the graphic with jet-packs / planes / quotes explaining why they easily found employment - viewers could take these quotes as advice.

The right 'cliff' would have some final quotes in speech clouds: advice from the interviewees and an encouraging message.




The next example shows a mix of the previous ideas, setting the steps from the beginning (the problem), the work towards the solution (alternatives) and the final step which is the solution itself.

The next step is organize all the ideas and look for the solution of the problem to put them then, altogether in order to make the panoramic view of the whole content.