Category: IDES244

My group, MAKe Studio, consisting of Kat, Amanda and I were tasked to create a campaign for The North Vancouver Fire Department (NVFD). While the fire safety and prevention programs the NVFD has held for young elementary school students and seniors have always been a success, they have had trouble reaching students aged 16-25. A huge amount of fires are not seen from this demographic but when they do happen, the effects are devastating. The main causes of fires from this age group are kitchen accidents and fireworks. With students moving out to live on their own, they may not be used to proper kitchen safety procedures which may lead to fires. Our solution was to create a character that would resonate with these students and gain sympathy. We were inspired by the Knoll Sidekicks commercial and a character from Howl’s Moving Castle, Calcifer, a sentient flame.

The three of us sketched out potential character designs and eventually settled on my design of our flame mascot, whom we decided to name Freddy. (The initial idea was to call him Feu-reddy, a play on words with the french word for fire [feu]). A popular art medium these days is clay, with artists using the medium in design to give it a contrasting, popped-out 3D look. Bold, bright, cute designs and illustrations are trendy nowadays. Combining those trends with having a cute mascot would be popular with this age group since they grew up watching cartoons, anime and reading comics. 

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We created posters, with the call to action being: “Don’t Leave Freddy Alone” lest he gets out of control. The wording on the poster imitates the way teenagers and young adults talk so that it is fun to read and is relatable for our demographic. These posters would be placed in areas frequented by students like public transit stops and libraries.

We also created animated posts for Instagram stories since it is one of the most popular social media apps for this target group. It is now more common to see health, safety, and other informational resources are being posted on Instagram these days since the format makes information digestible and is easily accessible since many already have the app.

We also created stickers of Freddy to be given out since they would be fun to collect while acting as a reminder when people see them. 

While the entire team worked collectively to put together our creative brief, the initial proposal presentation, sketches, mindmaps and ideate, I put together Freddy and additional design elements out of clay, created the final presentation slides and final PDF. I would give myself a 8/10 for what I did, as I’m quite proud of how Freddy turned out. Kat, Amanda and I worked really well together- we had great chemistry! We came up with great ideas and were able to communicate with each other with ease. I would rate our teamwork 10/10 and would DEFINITELY work with them again!

My partner (Amanda) and I started this project with many ideas. We knew we wanted our target demographic to be students since we could relate to them the most and hoped we could resonate with them. We started a mindmap which led us to consider many possible topics that we could do. 

One of which was land acknowledgments. I remember seeing this Facebook post years ago and I have been thinking about it since, so I thought that it would be interesting to do a campaign inspired by it. 

We pinned down a call to action that would fit our topic and chose #62. We felt that if we called for a more inclusive and non-colonized education about Indigenous people, their land and culture, more people would see why land acknowledgments don’t do much and instead put their energy into advocating for things like returning Indigenous land or giving compensation. Perhaps taxing non-Indigenous people and organizations who own Indigenous lands and putting that money back into Indigenous communities- there are many options to consider!

We chose to do a guerilla campaign as well as incorporating an interactive element. The general premise of our idea was to alter something to make it unusable and frustrate those who cannot use it to allude to how Indigenous people felt about the slow progress when it came to returning land or fulfilling the 94 Calls to Action. 

To do this, I made the signs that would have the message and call to action while Amanda went out to campus to take pictures of the signs on things around the school like vending machines and tables. She would then go home to edit out parts of the pictures. Due to lighting issues and other unforeseen circumstances, we had to photoshop the signs to make them more visible in the images, which took a while.

All three guerilla displays have a similar message, so I’ll talk about one. For the bench, we photoshopped the seat out. The bench plaque, which looks normal from far has a message that says it simply acknowledges the fact that this bench was once usable, but is simply not anymore, with no other statement on when it would be repaired or simply kept like that forever, which would prove to be inconvenient and even upsetting for people who used that bench previously.  The call to action, which is below the plaque, mentions Indigenous issues, to which the reader might then realize that this display is an analogy for that.

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On the bench and the other guerilla ads, we included a Snapcode for people to scan using Snapchat. We discovered that our target demographic, students, likely already have Snapchat downloaded on their phones since it is one of the most used apps by students. Snapchat has a scanning function that we decided to utilize to give information in a quick and digestible way.

I am proud of what we have done. We had a clear idea and executed it to the best of our abilities. If we had more resources to do this campaign again we would find a way to control the environment we worked in so that we would not run into any lighting issues. 

For this project, I would like to highlight the usage of land acknowledgements and how it begins to seem like an empty gesture if no further discussions are being held about them. Since the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission had been released, more and more places started to adopt the practice of acknowledging the land they are gathered on, but many Indigenous people have felt that this has become more of a performative gesture that alleviates guilt. There are concerns that hearing such statements about the land they are on might simply become background noise and just another thing to check off on the list in the spirit of reconciliation. Saying them makes it feel like activism, but has no consequences from saying them. To some, land acknowledgements feel like a eulogy, recognizing that Indigenous people once lived on the land, until they didn’t, and now it’s “ours”, which makes them seem like a part of the past. Although land acknowledgements may seem like a good way to start a conversation about reconciliation, it simply isn’t enough anymore.

I would like to communicate this to students from K-12, as they have they are more willing to learn and in turn educate other people such as their peers and people in their household and beyond. Implementing new curriculums about Indigenous land and history in school will help bring their history into conversation or at least a deeper awareness and understanding with younger people. If schools are able to teach their students to care about the state of their planet in the wake of climate change, encourage them to go to climate rallies in the city, and show them ways to act sustainably,  they certainly have the ability and means to be able to teach them to care and understand the history of Indigenous people and the land that they live on (since Aboriginal people have always lived in the interest of the well-being of the land long before talk of climate change came around).

I’ll be working with Amanda for this project.

PUBLISHED JANUARY 24, 2021 (11:18AM)

LINKS:

https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2020/01/09/why-land-acknowledgments-arent-worth-much-opinion

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-has-indigenous-land-acknowledgment-at-public-gatherings-become-an/

https://etfofnmi.ca/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/Going-Beyond-A-Land-Acknowledgement-FINAL-VERSION.pdf

A guide to Indigenous land acknowledgment

Land acknowledgements are a good first step, but there’s a lot more work to be done

https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5yxbd/indigenous-artists-tell-us-what-they-think-about-land-acknowledgements