In the final few weeks of this module, the sole focus of seminars has been a combination of planning, group critique and finally the presentation of our interventions and digital practice.
My intervention of choice is a digital campaign bringing awareness to the recent spiking epidemic across the entirety of the UK, but in this instance I shall be focusing on London nightclubs and bars in particular because they are the closest to us in location and are most likely to potentially affect us all first hand.
The reason behind my choosing this particular issue for my intervention stems from my own personal experiences in nightclubs and bars in London. I once thought that I had perhaps been spiked a few years ago, and I still do not know to this day whether I was, but the experience itself and the lack of control stays with you emotionally and therefore encourages me to pursue the issue in a situation like this. Another key reason I chose this topic is because of the recent events where young people, often university students, are spiked by injection which in a way is an even easier method for people wanting to spike someone because they can do it secretly without anyone seeing. There’s even recently been a spiking at a bar in Greenwich, where I live, which just shows how close to home the issue is and that intense pressure needs to be put on nightclub and bar owners to up their safety measures and find solutions to this problem that they hold a lot of responsibility to prevent.
The document below shows my first plan for the campaign including my aims, research methods, choice of medium, relevant theories and other sources. With this plan, I presented my ideas to the class for group crit.
The response to my topic and choice of digital practice, which was a website containing some design work, was positive. The idea was understood to be very topical and relevant in our current media sphere, it was also expressed that the digital practice fit the brief and integration of physical and digital activism.
The image below shows some of the notes taken in this session. I then also began to formulate the questions that would be used in my survey and as part of my primary research.
Throughout these early planning stage, I stuck with my original ideas because they were already quite solidified regarding audience, area and intentions. However, I wanted to make sure that my physical practice, i.e. posters, would act as an easily-accessible link between modalities. Posters are traditionally meant to exist in a physical reality as well as a virtual one, of course I still wanted this to be the case. Nonetheless, because the module is about digital activism, I thought the use of QR codes, which connect audiences to the campaign website, would be an appropriate link.
Campaign poster 1
These weeks of production were extremely helpful, receiving feedback from classmates and my lecturer helped me to feel confident in my ideas and practice which, hopefully, in turn was reflected through the project.