Studio Brief 4 - Communicate - Proposal and Timeline

While researching the problems with keeping fish as pets, and using my own prior experience of having fish as pets, there is one standout problem that I have identified, ammonia poisoning. 

Ammonia poisoning occurs when the filter fails to purify the water to the extent it should do, which mainly happens because too many fish are added at once in the 18-24 month period after the tank has been set up. This happens because the filter is only as good as the amount of good bacteria living inside of it. The filter removes the toxins put into the water via fish faecaes, and if the bacteria isn’t built up in strong enough numbers to deal with the extra faecaes that comes with extra fish, the filter will fail and the toxins will build up to a poisonous level, killing the fish.

Clearly if you know about ammonia poisoning then it’s a very avoidable problem, so when setting up a fish tank, more mature people will have looked into the problems and difficulties, and will know not to add too many fish too quickly. Younger or more immature people will not appreciate this however, and may, as I did, get a bit too enthusiastic about buying new fish. For this reason my target audience will be younger people keeping fish as pets. I appreciate that this is quite a niche audience, but this is the audience that needs the help, as if their fish are dieing consistently, they’re not only facing disappointment consistently, but they’re wasting money that most younger people don’t have.

In my experience of both owning fish and working in a fish shop, I think the most valuable thing to know when setting up a new tank is the direct consequences of adding too many fish (being fish death), rather than being told the ammonia level will rise, because like I mentioned earlier, this means nothing to most people. Of course no-one wants to tell someone that their pets will die and it’s their (the owner) fault, and so the threat of a rise in ammonia level doesn’t put people off. To avoid personally telling people their fish will die, my plan is to tell them via posters, flyers and handouts.

Posters to be displayed in fish shops

Flyers to be left around in fish shops

Handouts to be put in bags when a customer makes a purchase in a fish shop

Obviously the most successful way to reach the target audience is to display things in the place that brings together the audience, which is the fish shops, hence why all three of the things I plan to produce are to be put in fish shops.

People already try to explain why not to put too many fish in their tank at once, which doesn’t work, so my aim will be a mixture of educating and convincing, which isn’t really as strange a combination as I thought it to be, because generally educating someone about something is done by giving them facts, which in turn convinces them that it’s true, so the two sort of go hand in hand.

Obviously this is not something that will be the easiest of things to assess weather it’s working or not, so a way around this is the handouts. I intend to leave space on the handouts for the cashier to write down how many fish were bought, and the date they were bought on. The idea behind this is that when the person returns to the shop they’re asked to show their handout and if their last purchase was less than two weeks ago they can’t buy any fish. That said, people tend not to keep little handouts they’re given, so I’d have to design it so that it’s something the person would want to keep hold of rather than throw away. In my mind this isn’t too much of an extra consideration though, because you’d want to design things that were visually appealing anyway in order to make the audience want to interact with the poster/flyer/handout.

In order for it to be appropriate to the audience, I won’t be focusing at all on the science of ammonia poisoning, but more on the consequence of death it brings. But at the same time I don’t want to make a poster that says “If you buy too many fish they die” in big bold letters, so the tone will have to be delicate, yet clear enough for a younger audience to understand it. 

Focussing more on the maturity of the audience rather than the age (although the two are more than arguably linked), I hope to attract the eyer of the audience by using eye-catching pictures of the more recognisable and popular aquarium fish, but I will use the layout of the images to draw the eye to some sort of diagram or message.

Timeline for the week.

Monday

• Discuss my idea in the 'crit'.
• Blog and proposed changes to my idea.
• Continue working on brief 3.

Tuesday

• Complete brief 3 along with design boards and blog.
• Start initial research and designs for brief 4.

Wednesday and Thursday

• Start and finish designing.
• Produce design boards and blog about the brief.

Friday

• Final crit.