My role:
Research
Ideation
Service design
Pitching
Context
During my studies at Hyper Island we collaborated with Creative Shift, a sub-organisation of University of the Arts London dedicated to supporting students from minoritised backgrounds with launching successful careers in the creative industry. Creative Shift’s target audience covered not only different ethnic backgrounds but also people with various disabilities and caring responsibilities as well as those without strong support networks.
Creative Shift offers various activities to help these students gain relevant experiences as well as to build their professional network and open doors for their future careers. They are however struggling with reaching many target audience members or it happens later than would be optimal.
Brief
Design a product or service that fosters community-building among students from underrepresented backgrounds in a hybrid world as well as ensure a better outreach including a communication strategy and campaign.
Problems
During the research phase we discovered a variety of problems:
- Creative Shift struggled with finding target audience members
- They had very limited resources: a small team with limited budget
- They didn’t have their own event space and the university’s six campuses were far apart
- University’s sustanability policies prohibited print advertising
- Creative Shift was very hidden on the university’s website
- Two different names were connected to them which created a lot of confusion
- Students appreciated their activities but felt that they need more support afterwords to keep the newly built relationships growing
- Online relationships didn’t translate well to offline
- Students had different needs but didn’t want to be split into even narrower groups
- Students had limited free time due to curricular activities, work and family obligations
Solution – Claim Your Space
Although there was a variety of issues, we decided to focus on:
- Building awareness of the benefits of diversity, inclusion and equity among general public
- Help more target audience members become aware of the benefits of joining Creative Shift.
Our solution consists of physical and digital elements, improving accessibility and reach:
- Mobile exhibition unit covered with student art traveling between colleges
- Social media campaign inviting everyone to claim their space
- Promotion online and offline for campus events
Benefits of the exhibition bus
Exhibition bus solves several problems that the Creative Shift wants to tackle:
- Draw attention and reach more students on all campuses due to improved accessibility
- Offer a chance for creative students to promote their work to a broad city audience
- Allow creative students to network with each other and industry professionals
- Improve awareness of the value of diversity, inclusion and equity among university and city audience
The exhibition bus would be covered in mesh LED screens displaying student art. It would visit regularly all six UAL campuses and attract attention across London with its unique look.
As a serious attention grabber it would offer creative students an effective way to showcase their work in the real world and attract interest. The student artists would get to network with other students as well as industry professionals during campus events.
Hopefully the bus would also make people seeing it want to find out more about it resulting in increased awareness of the DEI topics.
Even more importantly the exhibition bus would invite all creative students to claim their space on the bus and in the industry with the help of Creative Shift. The staff members would travel with the bus to meet students where they are at and it would provide them an opportunity to introduce and promote their goals and activities to their potential target audience members as well as raise awareness of the issues that minoritised students face among the whole student body.
Claim Your Space campaign
The campaign uses:
- Organic social media
- University website
- Screens on campus
We wanted to use digital channels only for promotion to meet the university’s sustainability goals. All channels would promote the Claim Your Space campaign and the young artists whose work is displayed as well as the campus bus events to ensure high attendance.
We also proposed advertising on specific spots on campuses where the bus would park but locations would also be advertised on the website to improve event awareness and attendance.
In additional to reaching student body we hoped to initiate necessary discussions among the creative industry professionals and raise awareness about the value of diversity, equity and inclusion.
Future suggestions
Full size event bus
As Creative Shift was lacking its own event space, a solution for it could be a full size event bus instead of the van as we suggested initially Equipped with audio-visual equipment they could host hybrid events and remove even more barriers by providing materials when needed for specific projects. That bus events could take place on the go or in different locations and they could broadcast the events to those who cannot be there in person or would rather watch a recording, making it highly accessible. The main value of event bus would be offering more options to spend time together with other students and industry professionals, building relationships that last and boosting careers.
LinkedIn community
As the client wanted to focus on community building, I suggested also starting a LinkedIn group of their own as currently they only had a LinkedIn business page. This would be a low hanging fruit, enabling students to continue nurturing relationships as well as supporting each other on their creative journey. Creative Shift could help facilitate the conversations there as well as use that channel to promote future activities in order to increase the return rate and foster community building.