Before fully starting into research and the design process, I completed a few tasks to help get me thinking about the project and what it could look like at the end.
Although I had already written my brief, I thought it would be useful to do a Frame Your Design Challenge to identify the areas I really wanted to focus on and make sure I was looking at the right areas. This was useful as it allowed me to condense down a lot of the ideas from my brief around the people and areas to look at, but also allowed me to broaden my ideas around solutions so that I would be more open to discovering new ideas when researching.
Another exercise I did was to create a light brand and visual for what could potentially become of the project. This helped me to think about what my outcome could look like visually and explore aspects of branding. While I might change a lot of this later, it’s just useful to have this sort of future vision to keep in mind when working.
Both of these were really useful at getting me some momentum to start the project properly with.