Deciding on a Topic for a Four-Week Project – Workshop Challenge: Part 2
Introduction
The second part of the workshop challenge was to choose one of the ideas we came up with earlier this week, expand on it and explain further on what our intentions are for the project that we will work on in the upcoming four weeks. Below you will find my response for this week’s challenge.
The Final Idea
TITLE: Noticing the Ignored
IDEA: As Malta is always becoming more urbanised and multinational, a lot of its rural beauty is getting lost to high-rise buildings and wide multi-level motorways. How can I show people, in particular expats and tourists, show the real beauty of the Maltese Islands.
AIM, OBJECTIVE AND CRITICAL CONTEXT: To promote parts of Malta that are often unnoticed or ignored. The aim is to find a specific characteristic, landmark (or even an interesting area) that showcases a particular town or area.
AUDIENCE: Expats – young and middle aged. Tourists, Collectors, People interested in local history.
ANTICIPATED FINAL OUTCOME: The outcome is to be a visual piece for each town. At the same time, I want this visual piece to be such that It can be carried around, collected or put to good use. Following up on the idea from the first module, the concept was to create a collection of stamps.
Further Notes on the idea of Stamps…
I like the idea of a stamp is because of the size. Yes, it is small, however, that makes it more likely for people to purchase it. As cool as poster are, unless you have room of hanging it on a wall at home or office, it is very likely to just be placed in a folder and put in storage. I am considering speaking to Maltapost and see if such a project can actually be created as a set of real postage stamp. Should this not work, the designs can still be recreated in different media – sticker stamps, prints or postcards (although they are more of a collectors’ item these days).
UPDATE [01/10/2020]:
Following up on this idea and discussing this with my tutor during the tutorials, whilst he said that the project is pretty solid, he suggested that I should beef up the question that is the basis of my research. Essentially my project lacked a specific context. So before the sketching and the bits and bobs, i did some ‘out-loud thinking’ (I was actually writing down my thoughts) to untangle what was in my head.
Once again, Simon Sinek and his Golden Circle saved the day. I have mentioned this in previous modules. It is a very useful exercise to put your project into simple words indeed. Prior to this, I did a sort of… “self-interview” and started asking myself questions about this project just to get my thoughts out. Following up on this I started writing down questions that ultimately make up the final question. After a few mind boggling hours I came up with this:
How is urbanisation impacting the reputation of Malta? And how is this impacting foreigners visiting the country?
The thesis version is would be: The Impact of Urbanisation on Malta’s Reputation in Relation to Tourism and Expatriation.
