Community Engagement-Design Campaign
Project: Community Engagement Design Campaign
Role: Designer
Description: I designed a poster for a design competition held by the UBC Centre for Community Engaged Learning (CCEL) and community organizations in Burnaby. This project aimed to promote advocacy for local community issues and foster a sense of unity and support among community members.
Key Responsibilities and Achievements:
Conceptualization and Planning: Developed the concept for the poster, emphasizing the message that regardless of one's background, the Burnaby community stands together and supports each other, particularly in facing the challenges of COVID-19.
Creative Design: Utilized Adobe Creative Suite to create a visually impactful poster that communicated the core messages of unity and resilience. Ensured the design was engaging and resonated with the target audience.
Stakeholder Collaboration: Worked closely with CCEL and community organizations to align the design with their goals and requirements. Incorporated feedback to refine and enhance the final design.
Advocacy and Impact: The poster aimed to raise awareness about local community issues and promote a sense of solidarity and mutual support among community members. It highlighted the collective effort to overcome the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Key Achievements:
Successfully created a poster that effectively communicated the messages of community support and resilience, receiving positive feedback from the competition organizers.
Demonstrated strong creative and collaborative skills by working with multiple stakeholders to ensure the design met the intended goals and had a meaningful impact.
To find my design topic, I used NVIVO to analyze the data collected from Twitter and Facebook. Specifically, I harvested the tweets and Facebook posts (using the hashtags #BurnabyCommunity and #Cityofburnaby) using a tool called NCapture. I then used NVivo to find out useful data for my analysis. I also conducted informal user studies on those who live in the Burnaby area. After harvesting the data, I found a significant number of Tweets were geared towards community support. After interviewing people and some immigrants who live in Burnaby, I found they care about their businesses, education, and environment, but most importantly, how the community can collaborate and build a better society. As such, I brought all the elements mentioned above into my poster design (e.g., community support, collaboration, people with different backgrounds).
In the poster, the doves represent peace and the hands in the background represent the support we receive and give to each other. Five characters in the painting represent people from different backgrounds. I've mainly applied blue tone colors - as blue is a soothing color that can call to mind feelings of peace, security, and calmness (Morin, A., 2020), increase viewers' sense of security, and promote inclusion and respect. I've also used water texture, lights, and shadows to add details that arouse more feelings and interactions between the piece and its viewers.
The process of designing this poster was enjoyable. I found inspirations and insights from my collected social media and interview data.