5.1 Writing a rationale

The purpose of this exercise was to revisit the briefs in 5.0 Client brief analysis, choose one and write a rationale outlining my intended approach.

Key words from the brief:

• Go back to the briefs you read earlier.
• Think about how you might go about answering one of these briefs.
• Write a short rationale outlining your intended approach.
• Reflect on whether you found writing a rationale useful in structuring your creative thinking.

Context

I’ve chosen to write a rationale for Brief 2 – Create your vision of future communications (Orange (now EE)) which is the most open of the three briefs. The rationale will reflect the fact that at this point there has been no engagement with the client and there are alot of open questions.

After one or more client meetings the rationale would be updated, in fact it should be seen as a ‘living’ document that gets updated as more information becomes available and the actual needs of the client become clear.

The overall creative process I would follow is:

This piece of work is part of the ‘Understand the problem‘ phase.

More detail about my creative process can be found in 5.3 What’s your working process.

Vision of future communications – rationale

A summary of the client brief

What does the client want?

A summary of client requirements taken from the brief:

• Create for us your vision of communications in three to five years time.
• Two approaches:

1. 1. You could create something tangible, relating to products and physical technology. Something that talks about technology.
   2. Something emotional that shows how you think people will feel about communications, and the way that they can communicate with those around them.

Why does the client want it?

• The brief does not make this clear.
• Assume that this links back to the overall corporate vision: “to simplify things in a world of confusing new technology”.
• This is something to clarify at the initial customer briefing.

Who’s it for?

• All existing and potential customers

Research – The future of communications

The following mindmap was created whilst reading research papers and online articles.

Initial concepts

I created a further mindmap to organise my thinking into what I think are the core concepts and themes coming out of the research.

Key concepts and rationale

The following key concepts and rationale reflect the fact that the brief was very open and there are many unanswered questions that need input from the client.

The purpose of the rationale at this stage is to reflect back to the client my understanding of the problem, propose some high-level concepts and possible approaches so that these can be tested and iterated.

Key concept

Rapid rollout of 5G technology and networking will cause a revolution in smart devices, with AI and virtual reality becoming a mainstream reality. This will cause a new relationship between us and our increasingly intelligent devices as we move from Information Technology to Human Technology, with greater convergence between digital devices and our physical world.

Potential themes

Potential themes linked back to key concepts.

This is the rationale that I would use to generate discussion with the client, ideally in a workshop situation.

Reflections

Reflect on whether you found writing a rationale useful in structuring your creative thinking.

I would say a definite yes. For larger projects with open briefs I would use this process because not only does it help me clarify my thoughts and ideas, it also engages the client and helps them really understand what it is they want and why.