Prevent: Day 2

Following our first day of research and divergent thinking, we started the second day moving on to ideas generation, beginning to work on our designs within our groups. Our aim was to come up with a message that we wanted to convey through the campaign, leaving the visuals of the design until later. We came to the decision that the best, and hopefully most effective message we could convey would be about communication and conversation. We wanted to encourage more communication between students and tutors about the subject of radicalisation, treating it as something that can, and should be spoken about rather than something to avoid. This can result in some people feeling like missing pieces of a puzzle, which can be a major factor in radicalisation.

In our group we generated a number of different ideas and experimented with different ways to convey our message, refining our thoughts down to a few design concepts:

1 – a fairly light hearted, uplifting poster to help encourage people to actually talk about the subject rather than avoiding it, using bright colours and simple shapes.

2 – a design portraying a vulnerable young person surrounded by tall, ominous silhouettes to show how easily people can be affected and swayed by those around them.

3 – a simple design with using the slogan “Not all shapes are the same, but all shapes have their place” as a metaphor to say that although not all people are the same, everyone has a place in the world and does not need to feel as though they don’t belong.

4 – using the Tree of Life to guide people on the idea of treating others how you want to be treated and building an understanding of others’ opinions, as well as respecting them.

5 – using the imagery of figures calling a vulnerable individual to jump to their side, making students understand that just because someone tells you to do something, you don’t necessarily have to do it.

6 – building on the idea that you have to get to the core of the issue to understand conflict with people. We used the metaphor of an apple to demonstrate this.

After lots of discussion we took a vote and decided to take forward our third idea of using shapes as a metaphor for the people we are aiming our design at. We decided to develop this further of changing the shapes to be the world, made up with a puzzle to show that each puzzle piece has a place in the world.

We took this idea and developed it further, experimenting with slogans, type and how we would turn the earth into a puzzle to portray our idea. As a way of taking our idea further than being simply a poster, we decided to experiment with more ideas about formats we could use, coming up with the concept of making a large 3D sculpture of the earth that could be placed outside of the college for example. This could then have an animation of the puzzle piece-earth projected around it, showing the pieces all slotting in to place on the earth as a more involved, exciting way to portray our idea.

Of course we understood that our sculpture concept was very unlikely, and so we simplified it down and decided that it could instead be a flat animation, showing the same thing, that could be played on screens around college or on the large screen outside reception, accompanied by some text to give some context to the animation.

Our final poster would be the world as a puzzle with a few jigsaw pieces hanging out, giving us the understanding that the world can be solved with teamwork and communication, and to show that everyone in the world has a place and can always feel like they belong.

Prevent: Day 1

Prevent is a government run campaign with the aim of preventing radicalisation across the country, and preventing terrorism as a whole. Above is the primary poster that is used by the government and is posted around West Kent College, aimed at the students here.

As we have learnt upon starting this year, the pressure on preventing radicalisation has dramatically increased and it is now mandatory that teachers have training on the subject and that students are aware of this. As design students, we were presented with a surprise brief in relation to this. West Kent College are aware that the poster is poorly designed and is not as impacting as it should be. And so we were tasked, in year groups, to redesign the prevent campaign in a way we thought would be much more successful, with the winning year groups design being used throughout the college.

We started the day with a divergent thinking task looking at images of objects like an engagement ring or an ice skate, and spending a short amount of time thinking up as many improvements to each as we could. This was a quick task to get us into a more creative, open state of mind, before which we moved on to looking at the prevent poster itself.

Rather than thinking of immediate improvements for this poster, we used a method proposed by Edward De Bona called PMI (Plus, Minus, Interesting), in which we had to pick out points that we thought were good, things we would take away, and points of interest in the design.

Plus: I thought the slogan was quite clever, and could have been very successful if it were executed better.

Minus: The first thing I would have taken away was the colour; I think it is quite a sickly green and does not have any strong connection to the message of the poster. I also don’t really like the style of the illustration. Personally I am not keen on the idea of the pill in the first place as I don’t think it is very clearly related to the message, but I think if that is the concept then it could have been executed better, with stronger imagery.

Interesting: Even though I did not like the illustration style, I thought the idea of using an illustration was quite interesting. I also found the thought behind the concept quite interesting, as the aim seems to be to prevent radicalisation before it even starts to happen, hence the ‘Prevent’ campaign.

Following this, we moved on to work on another divergent thinking task, in which we had to come up with as many ideas as we could for methods of non-violent, non-aggressive protest. For this task to be successful we were to think creatively and be as imaginative as possible, even if it was unlikely and unusual. Some of our ideas included marches, sit ins, themed social media profile pictures, demonstrations and public art.

Our final task for the day was to research into radicalisation and how teachers are educated about it by completing the governments online education programme. This offered advice and tasks, getting you to think about how radicalisation works and the little things that might be signs of someone being radicalised.

I did think throughout this process that, almost all of the little signs of radicalisation could be, and more likely would be, signs of other, more common issues such as depression, anxiety or home life issues. However as I worked through the programme I found that it did address this and explain that, whilst these signs (like distance from friendships, short tempers or mood swings) can be due to radicalisation, it more often than not wouldn’t be as these other issues are far more common.