As soon as your team has been created, you should get together and choose one of these briefs as a starting point for your project. You will then need quickly to develop your ideas about your design in response to this.

Tips

  • Each mini-brief has slightly different requirements: make sure you’re sticking to the one you’ve been assigned.
  • Research the specific organisation/area/topic you pick and consider reaching out to relevant parties with questions. You’ll find it much easier to develop a strong idea.
  • It’s never too early to conduct user research. Ask non-leading questions to determine what people want and, later on, if your solution is effective.
  • Don’t replicate an existing web service, think about how you can offer something useful and new. The mini-briefs are designed to encourage you to think more broadly about how data and web technologies can be implemented.

INCLUSION

Develop a method of gathering and displaying demographic data in an inclusive and identity positive way.

Pick an organisation that works with people from a broad range of backgrounds – this can be social, political, (sub)cultural, commercial, etc. Your goal is to create a tool to gather and display information about their users in a way that doesn’t alienate anyone. The means of collecting the data is as important as how you present it.

How can you capture and present user data that celebrates the many and varied characteristics of the people that engage with this organisation? What questions will you ask, and how? What methods will you use to store, query, display and compare this data?

Examples:

EDUCATION

Develop a method of exploring an archive or collection in a way that enhances understanding and encourages learning.

Pick an organisation with links to education such as a library, museum, school, wildlife reserve, journal, etc. Your goal is to create an interactive learning tool for the organisation. Your target audience will be a specific group of users within the organisation’s demographic (eg, children attending a wildlife reserve, design students accessing the university library).

What learning-based questions might your target audience ask this organisation? How can you categorise these? How will you enable them to ask questions, then present them with insightful results that inspire them to explore further?

Examples:

SCIENCE

Develop a method of displaying a dataset in an approachable, insightful way.

Pick a dataset containing scientific data. This could relate to climate or environment, the cosmos, Earth sciences, population dynamics, etc. Your goal is to create an immersive, interactive visualisation that allows users to search and compare data in an intuitive way and share their results. While this could have broad applications (educational, commercial, etc) it should work as a standalone, self-contained creative piece.

What are the key trends, changes over time, comparisons and implications in the data? How might people query the data to gain insights? How can you represent the data visually in a way that is clearly accessible to the layperson?

Example datasets: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets

Examples:

COMMUNITY

Develop a method of gathering and displaying data relating to a local community.

Pick a small location which is frequented by people. This could be the building or street you live in, an office block, a shopping precinct, a park or public space, a university campus, etc. Your goal is to create an interactive map detailing how the space is used and by whom. You can draw on interviews, oral histories, photographs, archival maps, etc.

What are the primary and secondary purposes of this area? What do people want from it and how could it be improved? How has it changed over time? How do these insights relate to each other and how can they be used to improve the community experience?

Examples:

ARTS

Develop a method of collecting and displaying works of art based on theme.

Pick an artform (or set of related artforms) such as painting, music, sculpture, literature, poetry, etc. Your goal is to create a community of artists and fans that encourages deeper connection with the artform through the exploration of themes. The themes should be integral, informing the structure and means of interaction on some level.

Which themes will you choose to focus on (emotions, politics, history, psychology, race…) or will you let your users determine them? How can you collect and categorise relevant artworks? How can users access and engage with the art in meaningful ways? Will you focus on established artists and fans, or try and grow the artform’s popularity?

Examples: