I’m sat here looking at the cover of the 2018 Directory Patrick gave me last week for answering the question ‘what happened to the dolphins?’ with ‘they said so long and thanks for all the fish’. The random madness of the a4 pages shown below seems fitting as a starting point for this week’s reflection.   

During Patrick’s class, he got us to look at a painting by Frida Kahlo and told us to write down what we saw. I started very literally: I see a head, she’s looking left, her hair is tied, she’s in water, there’s a tree in the background etc… Others in the class went far more ‘right brain’ and said they saw ‘escape’, ‘home’, and ‘loss’. It made me feel like an accountant, tallying up all the little elements, ordering them into a nice little digestible row. However, turns out the whole right brain left brain stuff isn’t as solid as we thought and we’re all a delightful mixture thankfully using all of our brain most of the time. Looking at this front cover, the cross overs between conversations, google searches and general chaotic creativity that’s been going on inside SCA the past couple of weeks is uncanny – minus the place being on fire. Rather than fight against it, I’m going to stick with my little breakdown of an image and draw the direct parallels between this front cover and my time at SCA so far, like a dysfunctional Where’s Wally.

A couple of weeks ago now, we tackled a week of one day briefs, which felt like brain gymnastics. One of the days, we attempted to sell electric cars (1), for this I played around with the idea of using a VR headset to allow in-store test drives (2) but ended up doing something silly about Foie Gras instead. 

Last week we were shown many many campaigns and learnt about the terrifying country called Trash Isles, the 25th smallest country in the world, which has Dame Judi Dench as its queen (3). 

During the first week we designed water bottles reminding us of our ‘North Star’, I wanted to remind myself to rebel so I wrapped the bottle in tape saying ‘do not drink’ – a true rebel (4).

One morning, Marc asked us how we would hide a battleship, I thought I was being clever by saying ‘make it a submarine’ (5, 6 & 7). The actual answer is dazzle camouflage which is crazy beautiful. 

We made TikToks (8), some more sticky than others. 

We then jumped into our first week long NPD brief. My partner and I were given the task of ‘shaking up’ the world of cereals – a thrilling place. Working with one partner for the first time we stayed up late, trying the competition, shaking boxes, making instruments. We had a great time. When researching cereals, we learnt grains used to be used as currency and played around with the idea of making a bitcoin cereal (9). 

We also wondered if we could link bad news stories to our boxes, like they used to do on milk, so we made a few mock ups of Trump and Kim which we later abandoned, deciding they would be too off-putting to face over cereal (10).

I don’t have one for the huge robot dogs or the laser beam lady but have you seen Boston Dynamics’ eery ‘Do you love me?’  advert of their robots dancing (11)?

Overall, I think Uri’s quote ‘the world is a fucking mess’ would be a great strap line as well as just a general reminder. Somehow, SCA seems to be thriving in the chaos and I’m happy to be learning how. Thanks for the book Patrick! 

@mills_millsel